Long-term trends in wildfire damages in California
Hanna Buechi A , Paige Weber B , Sarah Heard C , Dick Cameron C and Andrew J. Plantinga A D EA Environmental Markets Lab, 4528 Bren Hall, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA 93106.
B Department of Economics, Gardner Hall CB 3305, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA 27599.
C The Nature Conservancy, 201 Mission Street #4, San Francisco, CA, USA 94105.
D Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, 3424 Bren Hall, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA 93106.
E Corresponding author. Email: plantinga@bren.ucsb.edu
International Journal of Wildland Fire 30(10) 757-762 https://doi.org/10.1071/WF21024
Submitted: 18 February 2021 Accepted: 19 July 2021 Published: 20 August 2021
Abstract
In 2017 and 2018, wildfires in California burned millions of hectares and caused billions of dollars in structure damages. This paper puts these recent fires in a long-term historical context by assembling four decades of data on wildfires in California. We combine administrative data of structure loss due to wildfire with economic data on replacement costs and spatial data on fire locations and sizes. We find that over the period 1979–2018, wildfires in California have been getting larger and that the trend is accelerating. This same trend is seen in the wildland–urban interface. As well, total structure damage from wildfires has grown steadily during the past four decades. Our conclusion is that the recent California fires are not an anomaly, but rather part of a trend towards larger and increasingly destructive wildfires.
Keywords: California, economics, historical data, spatial analysis, structure damage, temporal trends, wildfire, wildland urban interface.
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