Study: Job growth fastest in the West where wildfire risk is the highest

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Between 1990 and 2020, the number of jobs in parts of the West with very high wildfire risk roughly doubled to 1.7 million. That's significantly faster than regional job growth in general.

"We find that job growth in very high wildfire hazard areas to be the greatest of all the job growth numbers from all wildfire hazard potential categories," said Emily Joiner, a researcher with the nonprofit think tank Resources for the Future. She's the lead author of a new paper that finds that "the higher the level of employment in high hazard areas, the more economically disruptive wildfires are when they occur."

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“Our findings suggest the need to better understand business and household location decisions and to identify policies that efficiently and equitably discourage further residential and commercial development in very high hazard areas,” the paper reads. “State and local policies, including infrastructure funding, economic development programs, and local land use regulations, guide commercial and residential development decisions.”

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