Restoring Native Colorado Vegetation Through Fire:
Does the Public Support This?
Pamela Kaval. Department of Economics, Waikato Management School, The University of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, New Zealand. Telephone: 011-(64 7)838-4045; Fax: 011-(64 7)838-4331;
e-mail: ;
John Loomis. Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523; e-mail:
Andrew Seidl. Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523; e-mail:
Abstract:
Fire exclusion in the Western U.S. during the majority of the 20th century has changed forest structure. Forests have become more susceptible to pest and disease outbreaks as well as widespread crown fires. It is believed that having prescribed fires may reduce chances of catastrophic fire and help to restore the native Colorado vegetation. Our investigation analyzed public support for this.
During the summer of 2001, survey data were collected from Colorado residents living near public lands (i.e., the wildland urban interface). These data include detailed information of respondent’s views towards wildfire management and willingness-to-pay for various fire management prescriptions such as fire prevention, fire suppression and prescribed burning.
Results indicate that Colorado residents living near public lands are aware that fire is a natural process in their area and are willing-to-pay an annual tax increase for fire management. Respondents’ willingness-to-pay values depended on bid amounts and home locations, but were also directly related to perceived fire danger and perceived fire intervals. If permitted to choose only one management prescription, a majority of respondents would select prescribed fires as the management prescription of choice for Colorado forests.
Key Words:
Prescribed burning, controlled burning, wildfire, contingent valuation, survey analysis, public involvement, stakeholders, wildland urban interface, wildfire management.
Introduction
While Colorado studies in different areas and different vegetation types yield different fire information, there are a few general characterizations that can be made. Several of the Colorado forests types, such as ponderosa pine, have been extremely altered by Euro-American land uses such as livestock grazing, fire suppression, road construction, predator control, exotic species introductions and logging. This has resulted in a dense midstory of mixed conifer trees. These dense midstories provide the ladder fuels for crown fires to establish. Human wildland urban interface communities are vulnerable to these destructive crown fires and as the population of people in these areas increases, so does the risk to homes (Allen et al., 2000; Covington and Moore, 1994; Swetnam, 1999; Veblen et al., 2000). Therefore, the question becomes how to manage these areas.
Recently, public opinion has become part of the decision criteria for federal land management, more specifically since the National Forest Management Act and the National Environmental Policy Act require active participation of the public in management decisions (USDA Forest Service 2000; National Environmental Policy Act 1969). Since public opinion of fire management is important, this paper will focus on how the public perceives that wildfires should be managed, more specifically, the public that lives within a few miles of public lands that bear the risk of landscape fires damaging their property.
There have been several studies completed on wildfire management and public perceptions. Fried et al. (1995) studied people living within a forested area of jack pine in Crawford County, Michigan, an area that frequently experiences wildfire. Fried asked respondents if they would be willing-to-pay to reduce wildfire danger to their homes by creating a defensible space.[1] Therefore, willingness-to-pay (WTP) represented the cost of creating a defensible space. The purpose of this study was to account for non-market value damages as these represent a large proportion of wildfire damage. These non-market damages include loss of photographs, pets, and scenic views. Their results showed that people in Crawford County, Michigan preferred to create their own defensible space rather than pay taxes to reduce wildfire risk (Fried et al. 1995).
Higgason (2002) studied survey responses of people living in the wildland urban interface of Colorado. While she did not analyze monetary values, she did analyze preferences for fire management techniques focusing on the process communities use to adopt wildfire mitigation programs. Higgason discovered that 48%-78% of respondents believed that a wildfire would threaten their neighborhood at their current location. Of these respondents, less than 47% believed that their home was prepared to survive a wildfire. Primary concerns of wildfire were loss of property, loss of life, and loss of visual appeal. While a large number of the respondents acknowledged that their home might be affected by wildfire, only 25-50% felt that prescribed fire should be used in their area (Higgason 2002).
An Arizona study done in 2002 in the wake of the state’s largest fire, the Rodeo-Chedeski forest fire, found that 60% of respondents felt that small trees and brush should be thinned around the forest communities, 87% of respondents supported prescribed burn methods to help prevent wildfire by cleaning out underbrush, and 76% of respondents believed old growth trees should be saved (Behavior Research Center 2002).
In our study, Colorado residents living within the wildland urban interface were surveyed to find out how they feel about various fire management prescriptions that may aid in restoring Colorado forest natural ecosystem health. We asked them how they felt, but we also asked them about their WTP for various fire management practices (e.g., prescribed fire, fire suppression and fire prevention). Our hypothesis was that WTP would be higher if the perceived fire danger was high and the perceived fire frequency increased.
Survey Data
Two of the authors, Kaval and Loomis, created a survey booklet entitled “Managing Fires on Public Lands: What Do You Think?” The survey was initially developed and then modified in a series of focus groups in Colorado and California. The survey was then pretested. The final version of the survey included eight pages of questions and two color pictures that were inserted into the survey for use with some of the questions. The first picture was of a high intensity burn one year after fire in a Colorado ponderosa pine forest where all underbrush and standing trees were killed. This picture was simply entitled “Wildfire.” The second picture was of a low intensity burn one year after fire in a Colorado ponderosa pine forest where most underbrush was killed, however, standing trees were not. This picture was entitled “Prescribed Fire.” The forests in these two pictures were similar in stand density (trees per hectare) and tree size (d.b.h. - diameter at breast height). We chose these two pictures as we wanted to test people’s views of the most dramatic wildfire effect. Therefore, we felt that these two pictures would represent what we wanted to test, even though they do emphasize some of the negative visual effects of fire and not the ecology of the area.
Survey participants were contacted randomly by phone during the Summer of 2001 and asked to participate in a phone/mail/phone survey. After all contacts were made, respondent information was collected from 99 people in twelve Colorado wildland urban interface towns: Leadville, Twin Lakes, Nederland, Rollinsville, Estes Park, the Masonville area (which includes Masonville, Bellevue, and rural Fort Collins), Red Feather Lakes, Dinosaur, Creede, and Pagosa Springs. Of the 361 homes that were called, 246 homes had no response; either an answering machine picked up or no one picked up. In all, 115 people were contacted. Of the people contacted, 103 agreed to do the survey, while 12 did not. Of the 103 that agreed to complete the survey, 99 people followed through. Therefore, the response rate of those contacted was 86% and the response rate of those contacted that said they would complete the survey was 96%.
Methods: Contingent Valuation
The research conducted in this study used the contingent valuation method (CVM). Contingent valuation is a technique that can be used to assess the value of non-market goods. It is a stated preference method and is traditionally conducted with surveys asking respondents “What is your maximum WTP to have a particular program put into effect?” The collected information can then be aggregated to estimate public WTP.
The contingent valuation WTP questions for this study focused on three programs: fire suppression, fire prevention and prescribed burning. The WTP questions are asked as dichotomous choices—would you pay $X each year, yes or no, where $X varies across the sample. The responses to these dichotomous choice WTP questions were analyzed using a logistic regression model. The logistic regression model is appropriate when the dependent variable represents a qualitative response such as yes or no.
For our model, the dependent variable is yt which represents whether the respondents would pay their $X, where “0” = if they would not and “1” = if they would.
Three WTP questions were asked of respondents. The initial question defined fire prevention as a process where the underbrush and some standing trees are removed to thin the forest in order to reduce the chances of a large fire. While we realized that there are other terms that can be used to define this process, this is the one that was used in the survey and therefore will be the way we define this term throughout the rest of this paper. Once fire prevention was defined, respondents were asked:
If fire prevention would reduce the frequency of a wildfire (they were referred to look at Photo #1) in the area where you live to half as often as it does now, would you pay an increase of (designated dollar amount) a year more in taxes for fire prevention each year? (Circle One) Yes No
If no, please tell us why ______
The second WTP question followed the same format, except that it described fire suppression. In this survey, fire suppression was defined as “having larger fire crews on standby and having more fire crews closer to fire prone areas of forests.” The third question described prescribed fire and then asked the respondent if they were WTP for that particular fire management technique. Prescribed fires were defined as controlled burns in which fires are “set purposely in a designated area to accomplish one or more specific objectives such as removal of underbrush and dead wood to reduce available fire fuel, reduce the number of wildfires, and/ or reduced wildfire intensity. There are rare instances where prescribed fires may get out of control, however most of the time there are no problems.” Each survey had one designated dollar amount for all three questions. For example, if the designated dollar amount was $30 for fire prevention, it was also $30 for fire suppression and prescribed fire. Dollar amounts in the surveys ranged from $5 through $1500 (Kaval 2004).
Results
Our contingent valuation questions asked respondents whether they would be WTP for prescribed fires, fire suppression and fire suppression. Our results indicate that approximately 66% of the respondents would pay for prescribed fires and fire suppression, while 60% of the respondents would pay for fire prevention (Table 1).
% WTPPrescribed Fire / 66%
Fire Suppression / 66%
Fire Prevention / 60%
Table 1: Percentage of Respondents Willing-to-Pay for
Various Fire Management Prescriptions
We typically expect more respondents to be WTP at the lower bid amounts than at the higher bid amounts. We find this to be the overall pattern of the bid amounts; however, our results are not completely consistent according to expectations (Figure 1). At the lower bid amount of $5, all respondents would pay; a 100% yes response. According to expectations, at the next bids of $10, $30, and $55 we see progressively fewer of the respondents saying they are WTP for prescribed fires. Between the bid amounts of $105 and $250, we see a fluctuating pattern: at $105, 71% say yes for prescribed fires and fire prevention, at $150, 75% say yes for fire prevention. The next bid amount is $250 and their yes responses are between 50% and 63%. But then surprisingly enough, at $400, between 75% and 88% of the respondents are WTP. This is almost as high of a yes percentage as the $10 and $30 bid amounts. Some of this fluctuation may be due to the small sample sizes at each bid amount, which yields a large variance on the percentages. After $400, we expected people not to pay anymore for fire management, but this was not the case. At $1000, 20% - 40% of the people were still WTP and at $1500, 14% were still WTP.
This information tells us that fire management is an important priority in some people’s lives. People that live near forests are WTP for fire management. Their homes and property are very valuable to them and even at high annual tax rates of $1000 and $1500; some respondents are still WTP.
Figure 1: Willingness-to-Pay for fire Prescriptions by Bid Amount
When analyzing the WTP questions by location, we also get interesting results (Figure 2). Here, we see that location has a significant impact on the percent WTP. Those respondents located in the Red Feather Lakes area, an area that has experienced several small wildfires in the recent past, had a high yes response of 72.73% - 81.82%. In the Masonville Area, an area that experienced a large wildfire the year previous to the study (the Bobcat-Gulch Fire) had yes responses of 56.52% - 78.26% with the highest responses for prescribed fires. The lowest yes percentage was 20% for prescribed fires for the Leadville and Twin Lakes area. Leadville and Twin Lakes are both towns at high elevations and naturally experience a smaller number of wildfires than lower elevation areas. All other locations had yes responses for prescribed fires ranging from 60% through 68.75%. Our results show us that respondents living near public lands are, on average, in favor of paying for prescribed fires. Residents of most areas are also WTP for fire prevention and fire suppression.