Prescribed fires as a climate change adaptation tool

Abstract

Climate change has been shown to increase wildfire risk, while prescribed burning is a potential management action that landowners can perform to adapt to such climate-driven changes in risk. This study builds off natural resource economic theory to illustrate how wildfire is jointly determined with privately optimal prescribed burn decisions by landowners. We use panel data on prescribed burn permits across the southeastern U.S. states to empirically estimate (i) how climate and previous large wildfire events affect prescribed burn decisions and (ii) how climate and prescribed burning affect the occurrence of large wildfires. Based on an instrumental variables identification strategy, our estimated simultaneous system finds that a hotter and drier climate will increase prescribed burning, with landowner adaptation to corresponding wildfire risk being a key mechanism. By 2050, we find that a hotter and drier future climate will increase the number of large wildfires from 27 per year under current conditions to 36 per year with climate change but no climate adaptation, and 29 large wildfires per year with both climate change and climate adaptation. This paper provides intuition and quantitative evidence regarding the interaction between climate, wildfire, and landowner management adaptation.