US Wildfire Prevention Returned $3.73 Per $1: UK Policy Has No Equivalent

A peer-reviewed analysis of 285 Western US wildfires from 2017 to 2023 has put a cost-benefit figure on prescribed burns and forest thinning: $3.73 of avoided damages per $1 invested. The UK has no comparable study and is currently restricting the equivalent upland practice.

What the US study found

The research, published in Science on 7 May 2026, examined 285 wildfires across 11 Western states where burn perimeters intersected US Forest Service fuel-treatment areas.

Lead author Frederik Strabo (Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta; postdoctoral scholar at UC Davis at the time of the work) and colleagues attached economic and health values to the difference between treated and untreated outcomes.

The findings, converted to metric units and sterling:

• Approximately 2.45 million tonnes of avoided CO₂ emissions (2.7 million US tons).

• $2.8 billion in avoided damages (approximately £2.2 billion at $1 ≈ £0.79).

• Close to 60 premature deaths averted.

• More than 22,680 tonnes of avoided fine particulate (PM) pollution (25,000 US tons).

• About 61,500 hectares of avoided burn area (152,000 acres).

• $3.73 of expected benefit per $1 invested in fuel treatments.

The US Forest Service has separately reported that wildfires generate around 83% more fine particulate matter than prescribed burns over the same area.

Under its 2022 Wildfire Crisis Strategy, the agency has committed to treating roughly 20.2 million hectares (50 million acres), close to the combined area of England and Wales.

How the study was built

The researchers took US Forest Service records of where forests had been treated and matched them with satellite maps showing where fires later burned.

They then used computer models to estimate how each fire would have behaved - how it would have spread, how much smoke it would have produced and how much damage it would have caused - if no treatment had been done.

They then put a dollar figure on the gap between what actually happened and what the models said would have happened without treatment, using established methods for valuing health effects of smoke and the cost of fire damage in the US.

With 285 fires across 11 states over six years, this is the biggest study of its kind published to date.

John Battles, professor of forestry and sustainability at UC Berkeley and an advisor to the California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force, who was not involved in the work, told Inside Climate News:

"It's not a half-baked conclusion. There's really strong statistics behind their methodology."

Why prevention is underused

The authors' own assessment of the policy environment is direct:

"These treatments remain underutilized, in part because public pressure and risk aversion skew wildfire management resources toward fire suppression rather than prevention."

Suppression is visible: engines, helicopters, uniformed crews on the news. Prevention is invisible until the fire that did not happen does not make the news. That asymmetry is recognisable on both sides of the Atlantic.

What it means for UK uplands

Despite vegetation, climate and policy frameworks differing, the underlying principles remain the same.

Fuel load is the variable that policy can act on

Rotational heather burning clears built-up vegetation in controlled conditions. The more vegetation left standing, the more fuel any future wildfire has to burn, so cutting back what is there now caps how bad a later fire can get. This is the same thinking behind US fuel treatments. Where the practice is restricted, vegetation builds up.

The English regulatory direction is restrictive, and unmeasured

Since 2021, prescribed burning has been restricted on deep peat within designated European sites; the 2025 Amendment lowered the threshold from 40cm to 30cm and widened coverage to all Less Favoured Areas.

The cost-benefit case for this trajectory has not been published. No UK study has costed what prescribed burning prevents, or what restricting it permits.

Rewetting is not a substitute for fuel management

Raising the water table reduces the probability of peat-layer ignition and smouldering combustion. It does not remove the surface fuel above the water table.

The Danes Moss fire of March 2026 made the point in a UK setting: roughly 2,500 square metres of surface vegetation burned on the largest lowland raised bog in Cheshire, a fundamentally wet site. Caught early, the fire did not reach the underlying peat. Caught late, it would have.

Air quality cuts both ways

Smoke from prescribed burns is real, measurable and properly regulated. Smoke from uncontrolled wildfires is, by the US Forest Service's own figures, around 83% higher in fine particulate per unit area. The communities downwind of the 2018 Saddleworth Moor wildfire have lived the comparison.

Why this matters

UK upland policy is being made without the evidence base the Strabo study represents. There is no equivalent national cost-benefit analysis of prescribed burning. There is no national accounting of what restricting it costs. The default assumption - that restriction is the cautious option - is itself an unevidenced one.

The Strabo methodology is replicable. Met Office records, Defra wildfire incident data, NHS air-quality exposure data and managed-moorland datasets exist. A UK study built on the same template is overdue and entirely feasible. The choice for policymakers is whether they want the numbers before the next major upland fire, or after it.