Collective responsibility in wildfire mitigation: optimizing subsidies for enhancing community resilience

Wildfire poses an escalating threat to communities in the wildland-urban interface (WUI), where both government efforts and homeowner actions are critical for risk reduction.While actions such as home hardening, defensible space creation, and vegetation management are recognized as effective, homeowner adoption rates remain suboptimal.This highlights the need to better understand the drivers of homeowner mitigation behavior, the dynamic interactions with neighbors, and strategies to incentivize broader participation.Existing research largely examines individual decision-making in isolation, often neglecting the interdependence among homeowners inherent in wildfire mitigation as a collective action problem.Moreover, the role of government subsidies in promoting mitigation actions remains underexplored.This study develops a utilitybased model that captures homeowners' mitigation decisions by incorporating income, homeownership tenure, wildfire risk, mitigation costs and benefits, and neighbor behaviors.Using Nash equilibrium analysis, we examine how homeowner strategies evolve under different levels of government subsidy and assess the collective utility outcomes for the community.Our results demonstrate the existence of a critical subsidy threshold necessary for wildfire mitigation to become the dominant homeowner strategy and highlight the importance of early-stage interventions and personal risk framing to overcome free-riding behavior and coordination failures.These results also underscore the importance of dynamic, targeted subsidy policies to foster collaborative mitigation efforts and strengthen WUI community resilience.