Country : Canada
Assignment Task
 


Masters Student
The environmental, social, and economic impacts of wildfire are increasing in British Columbia. A century of fire suppression, forest management and land use have significantly altered forest composition and configuration resulting in landscape-scale changes to forest fuel loads. Combined with climate change, forest conditions and land use have accelerated changes to fire regimes resulting in increased fire activity and severity, which will significantly test the resilience of communities in British Columbia. Efforts to match increasing wildfire activity with suppression efforts have either failed, resulting in significant loss of property and livelihoods, or become so costly that alternative solutions are required. The 2017 fire season – the largest on record in British Columbia – had an estimated $568 million in associated fire suppression costs with some 65,000 people evacuated.
Socio-economic Impacts Assessment:
Historic and Prospective The socioeconomic impacts of the recently dominant approach to wildfire management will be assessed by collecting data from a variety of local government, provincial and federal agencies. The student will develop a catalog of potential impacts, and then develop a strategy for identifying and collecting the data necessary to quantify these impacts. The impacts are expected to include direct fire suppression costs, loss of timber value, reduction in quality of recreational sites, costs of evacuations and interruptions of economic activities, etc. Living with wildfire means adopting a different approach to our interaction with fire and the landscape. The historic analysis will form a basis for projecting how those costs might change under alternative management approaches. These alternatives might include proscribed burns, fuel load management, and changes to the rules governing subdivision and development in interface zones. The student may also have the opportunity to assist with the development of a survey instrument that will be used to measure public perceptions of the trade-offs involved in different wildfire management approaches. Public perceptions and consequently political acceptability of alternative management approaches do not necessarily reflect cost effectiveness, and addressing perceptual issues begins by understanding what the perceptions are.
Purpose of the CBA.
Clearly describe the project to be considered and the market and government failures.
Specify Alternatives.
Clearly describe the counterfactual against which it will be compared.
Decide whose costs benefits count
Justify your chosen standing. Explain who should be included and why, and if there are groups that are excluded that a reader might question, explain why they are not included.
Identity and categorize costs and benefits.
Come up with a list of costs and benefits that will differ between the counterfactual and the project.  This will be informed in consultation with the literature.
Predict the impacts quantitatively over the life of the project.
Describe the distribution over time of the impacts you have described in the previous item.  Likely informed by the same literature and/or conversations. Discuss the indicators you will use to measure the impacts.
Monetize.
With reference to literature on previous work, describe how values can be attached to the identified costs and benefits.
Discount costs and benefits to obtain present values.
Discuss how to select an appropriate discount rate for this project.
Compute Net Present Value
A paragraph or two describing what a net present value is and how it is calculated.
Conduct Sensitivity Analysis
Describe how a sensitivity analysis would be conducted and why a particular approach (e.g., varying key parameters, Monte Carlo, etc.) would be preferred.
Make Recommendation
A paragraph or two describing how results of an analysis like this would be used to make a recommendation, and how that recommendation might need to be qualified.
Identify monetary values (a number of these will be ‘non-market’ values) for the indicators.  Literature review.
Identify studies that have used spatial methods for measuring benefits and/or conducting cost-benefit analysis.
Identify what types of fire risk management/mitigation measures are being done, using records of expenditures being made on such projects in BC, and possibly in other nearby jurisdictions.
Sensitivity analysis focusing on different discount rates and different weightings across impacts.
Differences in discount rate reflect willingness to trade off current costs for future benefits.
Differences in weighting across impacts shows what risk management strategies are most attractive when the values of certain stakeholders dominate, and allow exploration of different ways of ‘balancing’ values of these stakeholders.

 

 


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  • Uploaded By : Roman
  • Posted on : July 31st, 2019
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