Economic evaluation of research to improve the Canadian forest fire danger rating system

Use of UAV or remotely piloted aircraft and forward-looking infrared in forest, rural and wildland fire management: evaluation using simple economic analysis

“…NPV is the sum of the present value of future cash flows minus the purchase price, and/or management cost for a given scenario (Hyytiäinen and Haight 2010). The CBA approach broadly followed the framework as described by the New Zealand Treasury (The Treasury 2005) and Gould et al (2013), although for wildland fires, quantifying all of the benefits or reduced losses is impossible (Gould et al 2013). The available pre-suppression costs (i.e.…”

“…no thermal camera use). Variable suppression costs are a subset of those identified by Gould et al (2013), and are as follows:…”

“…As the input information was limited, a subjective probability distribution was chosen to approximate the economic costs. A triangular distribution model (following Gould et al 2013) was chosen as an approximation of the variables relating to the above scenarios. The following issues supported the choice of the triangular distribution model:…”

“…A cumulative probability curve (frequency distribution) is given in Fig. 1 (adapted from Gould et al 2013) showing how the Most likely value influences the shape of the distribution relative to the minimum and maximum values. The output of these (means and standard deviations) were then put through a Monte Carlo simulation approach, to give 10,000 values for use in the economic evaluation.…”

“…2. In terms of fire suppression costs, the status quo (scenario 1) had a wide distribution of values, hence initially the incorporation of 25 % RPA use was considered to have in approximately 27 % of cases a Gould et al (2013) reduction of the area burnt by at least approximately 5 %, at 50 % RPA use costs could be further reduced by 10.5 %, and at 100 % RPA use such cost could be further reduced by 7 %.…”