More smoke today for less smoke tomorrow? We need to better understand the public health benefits and costs of prescribed fire
Benjamin A. Jones
A * , Shana McDermott B , Patricia A. Champ C and Robert P. Berrens A
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations
A Department of Economics, University of New Mexico, 1 University of New Mexico, MSC 05 3060, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA.
B Department of Economics, Trinity University, One Trinity Place, San Antonio, TX 78212, USA.
C USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, Fort Collins, CO 80526, USA.
* Correspondence to: bajones@unm.edu
International Journal of Wildland Fire 31(10) 918-926 https://doi.org/10.1071/WF22025
Submitted: 3 March 2022 Accepted: 7 August 2022 Published: 2 September 2022
© 2022 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing on behalf of IAWF. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND)
Abstract
Rapidly scaling up the use of prescribed fire is being promoted as an important pathway for reducing the growing damages of wildfire events in the United States, including limiting the health impacts from smoke emissions. However, we do not currently have the science needed to understand how the health impacts associated with prescribed fire smoke in the present compare to wildfire smoke exposure in the future. In particular, we lack an understanding of how the potential long-term public health benefits of prescribed fire on future wildfire smoke and health impacts compare to prescribed fire’s short-term effects on human health. Answering the question ‘How do we learn to sustainably coexist with wildfire?’ requires a new research agenda investigating the magnitudes and distribution of the health benefits and costs associated with prescribed burning. We suggest three areas for a new research agenda: (1) improved understanding of the health costs of prescribed fire; (2) quantification of the expected health benefits of prescribed fire through possible decreased future wildfire smoke emissions; and (3) better knowledge on the distributional impacts of prescribed fire smoke. We conclude that we need to first learn to sustainably coexist with prescribed fire in order to sustainably coexist with wildfire.
Keywords: benefits of prescribed fire, benefits-costs, human health, knowledge gaps, prescribed fire, public acceptability, smoke, wildfire, wildfire management.
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