Prescribed burning and localized human health: A stochastic bioeconomic model for wildfire mitigation

In this paper, we examine the localized smoke health trade-off associated with prescribed burning as a wildfire mitigation policy. Prescribed burning is frequently justified on the basis that it generates less smoke than the wildfires it helps to mitigate; however, research on this topic remains limited, largely due to challenges in obtaining suitable data. This analysis addresses this gap by presenting the first bioeconomic-health model of prescribed burning that incorporates a stochastic wildfire component, with a focus on four distinct forest types distributed across the continental United States. The analysis focuses on localized smoke-related health impacts for a representative community located downwind of a treated hectare, allowing us to isolate the immediate smoke-related health costs of prescribed burning and compare them with the expected reductions in future wildfire smoke-related health impacts from that same hectare. Under the model assumptions, the results indicate that the localized smoke-related mortality damages associated with prescribed burning exceed the expected reductions in future wildfire smoke-related mortality damages on a per-hectare, per-100,000 population basis, with substantial variation across forest types. These results address an important externality associated with prescribed burning in that nearby communities in the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) may repeatedly experience smoke exposure from prescribed fires, while many additional benefits of prescribed burning, including reductions in wildfire spread, property losses, and ecosystem damages, may accrue over larger spatial scales or to populations outside the treated area.