Reducing California Homeowners' Wildfire Risk on Their Property and in Their Community: Willingness to Pay Results of a Choice Experiment

This study estimated California (CA) homeowner's willingness to pay (WTP) for two broad types of fuel reduction programs using a choice experiment mail survey. The survey revealed statistically significant and economically meaningful heterogeneity of the preferences of CA homeowners regarding two wildfire risk reduction programs: (a) Public Wildlife Prevention Program Methods such as Prescribed Burning and Mechanical Treatment in their community;

(b) Private Wildfire Prevention Activities Program on their own property. Given this heterogeneity we used a latent class choice model to estimate separate WTP's for the Private Program and Public Program. A two-class latent class model was estimated to explain the heterogeneity by segmenting homeowners into two groups based on three variables (history of reducing risk of wildfires, education level, and questions on whether they would pay higher property taxes for any public wildfire prevention activities. The model results classify homeowners into two groups: those belonging to Class 2, a group that are willing to pay about 3480 for Private Wildfire Prevention around their home, and about 3580 in additional taxes for Public Wildfire Prevention in their community; and Class 1, those who generally oppose taxes and do not implement activities to reduce fire risk on their own properties. However, Class 1 homeowners living in high fire risk communities would pay about $1470 for the Private Program. The information from the study may help fire managers allocate their limited resources to fund public and private actions based on the predominant type of homeowners in each community and the community's fire risk setting.