Abstract
Increasing wildfire threats and costs escalate the complexity of forest fire management challenges, which is grounded in complex interactions between ecological, social, economic, and policy factors. It is immersed in this difficult context that decision-makers must settle on an investment mix within a portfolio of available options, subject to limited funds and under great uncertainty. We model intra-annual fire management as a problem of multistage capacity investment in a portfolio of management resources, enabling fuel treatments and fire preparedness. We consider wildfires as the demand, with uncertainty in the severity of the fire season and in the occurrence, time, place, and severity of specific fires. We focus our analysis on the influence of changes in the volatility of wildfires and in the costs of escaped wildfires, on the postponement of capacity investment along the year, on the optimal budget, and on the investment mix. Using a hypothetical test landscape, we verify that the value of postponement increases significantly for scenarios of increased uncertainty (higher volatility) and higher escape costs, as also does the optimal budget (although not proportionally to the changes in the escape costs). Additionally, the suppression/prevention budget ratio is highly sensitive to changes in escape costs, while it remains mostly insensitive to changes in volatility. Furthermore, we show the policy implications of these findings at operational (e.g., spatial solutions) and strategic levels (e.g., climate change). Exploring the impact of increasing escape costs in the optimal investment mix, we identified in our instances four qualitative system stages, which can be related to specific socioecological contexts and used as the basis for policy (re)design. In addition to questioning some popular myths, our results highlight the value of fuel treatments and the contextual nature of the optimal portfolio mix.
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Notes
For example, in June 17, 2017, five escaped fires that later became one large fire in the center of Portugal caused 64 deaths and more than 250 injuries. With a total burnt area of about 46,000 ha (e.g., “Pedrogão Grande”, one of the seven severely affected municipalities, had its forest reduced by 82%); the fire destroyed over 491 houses and jeopardized 49 companies, causing estimated losses of €497MM (CCDRC 2017).
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Acknowledgements
This research is financed by the ERDF—European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalization—COMPETE 2020 Programme within projects « POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006961 » and « FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-013071 » , by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia as part of projects « UID/EEA/50014/2013 » and « FIRE-ENGINE—Flexible Design of Forest Fire Management Systems/MIT/FSE/0064/2009 » , and by The Navigator Company. FCT has also supported the research performed by Abílio Pereira Pacheco (Grant SFRH/BD/92602/2013). We would like to thank the suggestions about the framing of this paper we receive from Marc McDill, in the informal dialogs we had at INFORMS and in Lisbon (2013), at IFORS (2014), and in Porto (2015). The interaction with James Minas (INFORMS 2013) and David Martell (INFORMS 2013, IFORS 2014) and the comments about our findings of Sándor F. Tóth (Lisbon 2013), Tiago M. Oliveira (2011–2014) and Paulo Mateus (2012–2017) were also valuable. Indeed, we are grateful and in debt to all of them, Marc McDill (Penn State University), Tiago M. Oliveira (The Navigator Company, ISA), Paulo Mateus (ICNF), Sándor F. Tóth (University of Washington), James Minas (RMIT, SUNY New Paltz), and David Martell (University of Toronto).
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Pacheco, A.P., Claro, J. Operational flexibility in forest fire prevention and suppression: a spatially explicit intra-annual optimization analysis, considering prevention, (pre)suppression, and escape costs. Eur J Forest Res 137, 895–916 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10342-018-1147-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10342-018-1147-7