CEF.UP – WiP Seminar/Webinar

Tuesday – November 21^st, 2023 at 1:00 p.m. | Room 305 | Online

“Efficiency of Resource Allocation in the Suppression of European Wildfires”

Zheng Hou – Cef.up

Abstract:

“In recent years, particularly 2022, heavy losses of property, injuries and deaths have been caused by wildfires in many European countries. Increasing wildfires exert pressure to balance cost, benefits and risks of wildfire management. Wildfire studies are less developed in Europe compared to the US. Several groups of factors have to be considered in wildfire suppression decisions: loss, expenditure, allocation of resources, environmental and socio-economic parameters. Previous studies on wildfire suppression usually apply simple econometrical models to address the relationship between only two among the factors above. To establish a framework to systematically assess efficiency in wildfire suppression involving all the main factors, this project will construct a Stochastic Frontier model in the form of Cost-and-Loss Distance Function using cross-sectional data on European wildfires. The model measures whether wildfire suppression cases are efficient in minimizing cost and loss and whether environmental and socio-economic parameters contribute to such efficiency. Fire managers often face trade-offs between environmental/property losses and expenditure spent on fire suppression with constraints on resources (machines, crews, etc.) available at hand. The research outcome will provide a reference to improve this decision process by helping identify where more resource is needed and justifying budget increase since there are locations where potentially require more resource for wildfire suppression. Finally, this project will contribute to efficiency improvement in wildfire suppression, and thus help achieve SDGs 3, 11, 13 and 15.”