PULLMAN, Wash. — A model developed by Washington State University researchers could someday help communities determine how best to motivate homeowners to prepare their properties for possible wildfires.
The WSU researchers developed formulas that communities could someday use to find optimal subsidies to incentivize people in wildfire-prone communities to protect their properties through actions such as clearing vegetation or upgrading roofing materials. The work was published in the journal, Expert Systems with Applications.
Increasing wildfires across the U.S. in recent years, along with growing numbers of people who live close to those wildfire-prone areas, mean that homeowners need to prepare. Their efforts are crucial to reducing risks, especially in communities that border forestland.
A few states, such as California and Oregon, have launched subsidy programs in recent years to encourage homeowners to prepare their structures or manage vegetation for fire weather. However, the programs' effectiveness varies. People often drag their feet on preparing their properties for wildfire season because of the costs involved, or they wait for their neighbors to act, which protects their home without their work or money. In the social sciences, this behavior is known as "free riding," and it results in a reduction in preparedness for the whole community.
"Cost is often one of the biggest barriers when thinking about the wildfire mitigation," said Zhu-Jun Wang, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and first author of the paper. "Even people who understand the danger in the local community may still be hesitant about the mitigation because of the cost."
The team's multidisciplinary project applied game theory, which uses mathematical models to analyze players and their strategies, to analyze how the different parties, such as government agencies and homeowners, might interact with each other to get optimal results and better preparedness.
In the theoretical study, the researchers found that once a subsidy reaches a certain threshold, people will act. Once subsidies are sufficient to encourage broad participation, further increases in government subsidy may produce diminishing gains relative to the additional public spending required.
"If the subsidy provided by the government is enough, and larger than a certain threshold, then the homeowner will change their decisions," said Wang.
The researchers also found that getting a group of people involved and participating in subsidies early on is helpful in getting overall participation.
"The number of homeowners who take action at the beginning can significantly influence what happens later," said Wang. "If only a few people participate, wildfire prevention efforts may slowly disappear – other homeowners may see little reason to act, and the community remains unprepared, but if enough households take action early, others may follow, and wildfire protection can become more common throughout the community."
The project required the researchers to look beyond traditional engineering approaches, expanding to study topics such as human behavior, game theory, and government policy.
"We have to look at this wildfire risk and resilience problem as a multidisciplinary problem," said Ji Yun Lee, an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering who led the project. "Just using engineering solutions may not be able to solve this kind of issue. Only when we combine different perspectives together can we provide a truly effective solution for wildfire resilience."
The researchers aim to incorporate the game-theoretic models and other information they collected from homeowner surveys and interviews with local government officials to develop a simulation of individual homeowners' decision-making processes and their interactions with their neighbors. They hope to develop an agent-based simulation platform in which local community leaders can test their policies and mitigation programs and come up with a solution for wildfire resilience.
The work was funded by Lee's National Science Foundation CAREER award.
