Long-term trends in wildfire damages in California

Abstract

In 2017 and 2018, wildfires in California burned millions of hectares and caused billions of dollars in structure damages. This paper puts these recent fires in a long-term historical context by assembling four decades of data on wildfires in California. We combine administrative data of structure loss due to wildfire with economic data on replacement costs and spatial data on fire locations and sizes. We find that over the period 1979–2018, wildfires in California have been getting larger and that the trend is accelerating. This same trend is seen in the wildland–urban interface. As well, total structure damage from wildfires has grown steadily during the past four decades. Our conclusion is that the recent California fires are not an anomaly, but rather part of a trend towards larger and increasingly destructive wildfires.