Increasingly destructive wildfires are a major issue in our region. Whether they lead people to move away is not well understood, but new research offers some insights.
The number of structures burned is one of the key metrics used to evaluate a wildfire’s destructiveness, but the vast majority of wildfires destroy none at all. Among those that do, the losses are concentrated among a relatively small number of fires. Researchers looked at two decades of incidents and found that California’s 2018 Camp Fire alone accounted for over 17% of structures – nearly 19,000 – lost during that period.
Jack DeWaard, an author of the study published in Nature Communications and scientific director of social and behavioral science research at the Population Council, said that out-migration is most likely in the wake of such major incidents.
“The most extreme weather disasters are really the ones that cause the most extreme damage to property and structures, and that is really the mechanism that is driving out-migration in those extreme cases, like the Camp Fire,” he said.
DeWaard and his coauthors focused their analysis on the top 10% most destructive incidents. Those on the less destructive side – where 14 to 257 structures were burned – “caused almost no significant changes to out-migration probability,” the study reads. Little impact was also seen on decisions to move to communities in the wake of wildfires.
“The lack of migratory effects among events with lower levels of structure loss and during any disaster or post-disaster time period means that, absent high levels of structure loss, we did not observe population-level migration changes that would indicate wildfires spurred changing residential preferences or capabilities and, subsequently, migration decisions,” the paper continued.
While rare, the impacts of such incidents can be serious. DeWaard pointed to Chico, Calif., where many displaced by the Camp Fire moved. He said vacancy rates dropped and rents and home prices rose, adding a further challenge for the inferno’s many victims.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Colorado and KANW in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
