Economic analysis of prescribed burning for wildfire management in Western Australia

Abstract

Wildfires can cause significant damage to ecosystems, life and property, and wildfire events that do not involve people and property are becoming rare. With the expansion of the rural– urban interface in Western Australia and elsewhere, objectives of life and property protection become more difficult to achieve. We applied the cost plus net value change (C+NVC) model to a synthetic landscape, representative of the northern jarrah forest of the south west of Western Australia. The most economically efficient level of prescribed burning corresponds to a strategy where 5% of the simulated landscape is prescribed-burned per year. Our results are sensitive to changes in the average cost per hectare of prescribed burning, the probabilities of fire occurrence, urban area values (in average dollars per hectare) and suppression costs.

Parent Publication

• Proceedings of the fourth international symposium on fire economics, planning, and policy: climate change and wildfires

Citation

Florec, Veronique; Pannell, David; Burton, Michael; Kelso, Joel; Mellor, Drew; Milne, George. 2013. Economic analysis of prescribed burning for wildfire management in Western Australia. In: González-Cabán, Armando, tech. coord. Proceedings of the fourth international symposium on fire economics, planning, and policy: climate change and wildfires. Gen. Tech. Rep. PSW-GTR-245 (English). Albany, CA: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station: 98-110.