Cited by 46Forest Management and PolicyFire effects on ecosystemsDisaster Management and Resilience

A Risk-Based Approach to Wildland Fire Budgetary Planning

Thompson, Matthew P., Calkin, David E., Finney, Mark A., Gebert, Krista M., Hand, Michael S.·2013·Forest Science

Abstract

The financial impact of wildfire management within the USDA Forest Service challenges the ability of the agency to meet societal demands and maintain forest health. The extent of this financial crisis has been attributed to historical and continuing fire management practices, changing climatic conditions, and increasing human development in fire-prone areas, as well as the lack of financial accountability of fire managers and misaligned incentive structures. In this article, we focus on incentives related to cost containment. We review the literature on the incentive structure facing wildfire managers and describe how the incentive structure does not sufficiently reward cost containment. We then cover a range of possible approaches to promote cost containment, culminating in a novel solution premised on the application of actuarial principles to wildfire budgetary planning that we believe most closely aligns with the Forest Service's transition to risk-based management paradigms and that most comprehensively incentivizes containment across the spectrum of wildfire management activities. We illustrate through a proof of concept case study how risk-based performance measures would be calculated and compare our results with historic suppression expenditures. Preliminary results suggest that our simulation model performs well in a relative sense to identify high- and low-cost forests, and we detail modeling improvements to refine estimates. We then illustrate potential extension to an actuarial system, which would further incentivize appropriate risk management and cost containment across the fire management continuum. We address the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed approaches, including potential roadblocks to implementation, and conclude by summarizing our major findings and offer recommendations for future agency direction.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.5849/forsci.09-124

Cites

40 of 40 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

We couldn’t retrieve this paper’s full text, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • The existing incentive structure and budget process provides only weak feedback in terms of internalizing the impact of wildfire suppression spending on decision makers charged with managing wildland fires.

    “the existing incentive structure and budget process provides only weak feedback in terms of internalizing the impact of wildfire suppression spending on decision makers charged with managing wildland fires (Donovan and Brown 2005;Thompson et al. 2013).”

    From Negative consequences of positive feedbacks in US wildfire management (2015) · cites this paper as Thompson et al. 2013

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Thompson, M. P., Calkin, D. E., Finney, M. A., Gebert, K. M., & Hand, M. S.
Affiliations
  • US Forest Service (US)
  • Rocky Mountain Research Station (US)
Venue
Forest Science
Published
2013-02-16
Volume
59
Issue
1
Pages
63-77
ISSN
0015-749X (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2008601089
Cited by
46
References
40
Citations by year
2026: 2 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 1 · 2021: 1 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 3 · 2018: 5 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 2 · 2015: 4 · 2014: 6 · 2013: 5 · 2012: 3
FWCI
4.32
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
Forest Science (publishedVersion)
Funders
U.S. Forest Service
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Forest Management and Policy
  • Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Fire effects on ecosystems
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Disaster Management and Resilience
Keywords
wildfire management, risk-based management, budgeting, cost containment, incentive structures, actuarial risk assessment, USDA Forest Service, forest health, financial accountability

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review