New research shows that job growth in our region has been faster in areas with serious wildfire danger, a trend that raises the prospect of serious economic fallout from major blazes.
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.”
“Hazard mitigation and resilience planning isn't something that can just apply to residential communities, but is also something that business and industry needs to be concerned about, too,” she said.
“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.”
Greater Salt Lake, the Denver-Boulder corridor and northern Arizona, which had particularly high concentrations of jobs in wildfire-threatened areas, were among six regional hotspots identified.
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.
