The damage caused by wildfires can be devastating, gutting structures and driving out people who live and work nearby. And researchers say the smoke from the annually recurring blazes also delivers economic damage to areas that were never touched by the flames.
Beyond the toll wildfire smoke can have on the health of those in affected areas, there are infrastructure and business costs, experts said.
Expenses paid by homeowners to improve or increase measures to protect their properties and the impact of smoke on livelihoods and budgets can be significant.
Wildfires that burned thousands of square miles throughout the U.S. West last year knocked out power, destroyed homes and buildings and forced evacuations.
Oregon and Colorado fires damaged or destroyed more than 10,000 buildings. Five of the six largest wildfires in California’s history occurred in 2020.
Accompanying the fires was smoke that left Western communities immersed in gray and orange haze that blotted the sky and caused normally hot midday temperatures to remain at cool nighttime levels in some areas.
Wildfire smoke plumes — and their economic impact — can travel far beyond the blazes, said Eric Zou, assistant professor of economics at the University of Oregon.
“When we think about health and labor market effects of wildfire, it is important to think beyond the areas in the immediate vicinity of the fires,” Zou said.
The European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service reported in September that smoke from western U.S. wildfires traveled nearly 5,000 miles to Britain and other parts of northern Europe.
Zou coauthored a paper with University of Illinois economists Mark Borgschulte and David Molitor on the economic effects of wildfires that was presented to an American Economic Association conference in 2020. Molitor said there is a quantifiable economic relationship to the amount of smoke reaching communities.
“We estimate that an additional day of smoke exposure reduces earnings by about 0.04 percent over two years,” Molitor said. “The effect is largest in the year of smoke exposure, but the effects may linger for up to two years post-exposure.”
Benjamin Jones, assistant professor of economics at the University of New Mexico, said researchers are only beginning to understand the extent to which wildfire smoke impacts local economies.
“It is certainly possible, perhaps even likely, that the economic effects of wildfire smoke exposure may persist for months or even years after a large smoke event,” he said.
Jones said smoke exposure damaging the health of workers can “affect job performance, labor market productivity and perhaps even wage earnings and retirement savings,” Jones said.
Prolonged and intense fires like those in the Pacific Northwest last year may affect people’s health “in such a significant way that there are longer-term impacts to local economies well after the wildfire that caused the smoke has been extinguished,” Jones said.
