A Bioeconomic Projection of Climate‐Induced Wildfire Risk in the Forest Sector

Abstract

Under the influence of climate change, wildfire regimes are expected to intensify and expand to new areas, increasing threats to natural and socioeconomic assets. We explore the environmental and economic implications for the forest sector of climate‐induced changes in wildfire regimes. To retain genericity while considering local determinants, we focus on the regional level and take Mediterranean France as an example. Coupling a bioeconomic forest sector model and a model of wildfire activity, we perform spatially explicit simulations under various levels of radiative forcing. By using a probabilistic framework, we also assess the propagation of several sources of uncertainty to the forest sector, considering both climate‐induced uncertainty and the intrinsic stochasticity of the fire process. By the end of the century, summer burned areas increase by up to 55%, causing moderate losses of merchantable timber and forest carbon stocks, with cascading impacts for industrial activities and climate mitigation in the forest sector. Implications for industries remain limited, but we observe price increases, especially for softwoods, as well as spatially differentiated changes in producer welfare. Inter‐annual fluctuations explain most of uncertainty in wildfire activity, but their impacts on the forest sector are quickly dampened. Over time, owing to the cumulative nature of wildfire impacts on forest resources, uncertainty related to climate warming, climate models’ response and stochasticity intrinsic to the wildfire phenomenon strongly increase in relative importance. Results reassert the need to consider multiple futures in prospective assessments, including uncertainty inherent to natural processes, often omitted in large‐scale economic assessments.

Global Warming Reshapes European Pyroregions

“…Other factors, such as the location, land cover, urban cover and topography controlled to some extent fire regimes across space. Future changes projected in the European pyrogeography agreed with other studies indicating that most of the future increases are expected in the most fire-affected areas today (Carnicer et al, 2022;Jones et al, 2022;Pimont et al, 2022;Riviere et al, 2022). Additionally, our findings indicated that regions with a great extent of fuel available to burn in the transition zones (40-45°N) were more likely to shift toward a more fire prone regime in a warmer and drier climate.…”

“…Statistical models linking climate and environmental conditions to fires have received much attention under the global warming context (Abatzoglou et al, 2021;Barbero et al, 2014;Pimont et al, 2021;Riviere et al, 2022;Turco et al, 2018Turco et al, , 2019. We sought here to develop individual statistical models for each fire-regime component to simulate historical and future fire activity in Europe.…”

Prospective impacts of windstorm risk on carbon sinks and the forestry sector: an integrated assessment with Monte Carlo simulations

“…It provides a systemic description of the forest sector, considers interactions between ecological and economic dynamics, and is well-suited to exploring alternative futures and performing policy analyses (Latta et al 2013, Riviere and Caurla 2020). It has previously been used to address bioenergy production (Caurla et al 2018), climate change impacts (Riviere et al 2022) and pest outbreaks (Petucco et al 2020), albeit without considering salvage.…”

“…While these models are often used to evaluate climate mitigation policies and project carbon budgets (Honkomp and Schier 2023), risks and uncertainties, including disturbances, have received limited attention (Chudy et al 2016). This is attributable to the models' deterministic nature, simplified representation of forest inventories, and focus on timber markets (Riviere et al 2022). Storms, in particular, have only been the focus of retrospective assessments (Caurla et al 2015, Henderson et al 2022.…”