Crowdfunding or crowdsourcing time: Exploring the willingness of private citizens to help prevent forest fires

In Europe, southern countries like Portugal lose extensive forest areas to wildfires every year. Public investment in forest conservation and wildfire prevention is crucial, and public support is necessary. In this study, we explore the adequacy of two citizen engagement mechanisms to help in the prevention of wildfires. We design a preference elicitation survey to study preferences for forests and voluntary contributions towards a fire prevention programme, either through voluntary monetary contributions (crowdfunding the prevention expenses) or by contributing with time (crowdsourcing the execution of prevention tasks). We posit that individuals who value forests and forest fire prevention may be willing to contribute directly in either way.

We observe that the elicited willingness to participate in either form is high and that while some individual characteristics have an impact on elicited amounts, forest-related variables have no explanatory power. Additionally, respondents who prefer time contributions contribute relatively more time than those who prefer money contributions, who in turn contribute relatively more monetarily, which suggests that using targeted mechanisms for public involvement can optimise overall contributions to forest fire prevention. Furthermore, when comparing time and monetary contributions, as well as accounting for the cost of labour in Portugal, a crowdsourcing campaign would raise more work time than would a crowdfunding campaign to cover the cost of hiring workers to perform these activities.