A new study looked at six states, including Alaska, and found that the actual costs of fighting wildfires are often obscured. The study’s author says that can be a problem when governments are deciding how much to spend on mitigation.
from the PEW Charitable Trusts examined six state governments to determine how they’re paying that toll. They found that the actual cost of fires was often obscured — in Alaska, for example, the state routinely underfunds wildfire costs up front, only to pay them off later.
Study author Peter Muller explains that this is possible because Alaska uses a unique after-the-fact budgeting option called “ratification.”This is an interesting process that was specific to Alaska. Alaska allows their emergency agencies, their forestry agency, to spend above their appropriated amounts for wildfire spending. And then they send a request for ratification of that to the legislature that gets approved, sometimes a year or two after the money has actually been spent.
If you do mitigation activities, what you’re hopefully doing is making it so the next fire is a small, manageable fire and not a giant, out of control, catastrophic fire. Putting a dollar amount on the number of catastrophic fires that didn’t happen is going to be an inherent challenge. We didn’t hear anyone who had done a great job of putting a specific dollar amount.
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