Challenges of Accommodating Non-Market Values in Evaluation of Wildfire Suppression in the United States

Presently, implementing the 2001 Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy, which requires fire management priorities to be set on the basis of maximising the market and non-market values to be conserved or enhanced, is extremely challenging because those charged with implementing the policy have limited information about the value that society places on non-market resources at risk. This paper considers the problem of accommodating non-market values affected by wildfire in social benefit-cost analysis. There are substantial gaps in scientific understanding about how the spatial and temporal provision of non-market values are affected by wildfire, and considerable challenges in evaluating social welfare change arising from specific wildfire events. This presents serious impediments to adapting price-based decision-support tools, such as the National Fire Management Analysis System, to meaningfully incorporate non-market values. An alternative decision-support framework is proposed that measures departure from the historic range and variability of ecological conditions for those non-market values that are particularly resistant to price-based analysis.