A recent study has discovered that the 2018 California wildfire season resulted in a loss of nearly $150 million in damages.
In the 2018 California wildfire season, more than 8,500 separate fires burned 1.9 million acres, killing over 100 people, making it the deadliest and most destructive in any year in California history.
In Santa Clarita, the Woolsey, Charlie, Stone and Pico fires burned on several sides of the valley.
The Woolsey Fire, one of the largest in Southern California history at the time, burned over 96,000 acres, destroyed 1,600 structures and is reported to have killed three people.
The study, titled “Economic footprint of California wildfires in 2018” was published in the journal Nature Sustainability. For the purpose of the study, researchers at the University of California, Irvine, Tsinghua University, China and other institutions used a combination of “physical, epidemiological and economic paradigm to gather a more comprehensive cognizance of the aftermath of the blazes,” officials said.
According to the study, the blazes not only decimated millions of acres, but wildfire damages in 2018 totalled $148.5 billion, or roughly 1.5% of California’s annual gross domestic product (GDP), adding up to an estimated 0.7% of the United States’ total 2018 GDP as the impact of fires stretched beyond the Golden State’s borders.
Policy-makers and insurance companies and media focus largely on loss of life and direct ruin of physical infrastructure when assessing damage from California’s wildfires, said Steve Davis, study co-author and professor of Earth system science at Irvine’s University of California, in a press release.
However, Davis noted that while those factors are important, they alone are not the whole picture of the impact that wildfires have on the state of California. The team of researchers attempted to take a more holistic approach by including various other factors, such as the disruption of supply chains and the ill effects on the health of those living far away.
The total damages tallied that the damages broke down into 19% direct capital impact (burned structures and homes) at $27.7 billion, 22% from the health effects caused by widespread air pollution due to smoke at $32.2 billion, and 59%, $88.6 billion, was in indirect losses caused by the upset of economic supply chains, which includes handicaps to transportation and labour, according to the study.
Researchers noted that the majority of economic impacts related to California wildfires often affect industry sectors and locations separated from the fires, as 31% of total fiscal losses in 2018 were outside of California.
The authors of the study reportedly aim for lawmakers to take the study to help regulate the amount of resources required for fire prevention decisions and future land management.
The ongoing 2020 wildfire season in the Golden State has burned nearly 4.4 million acres so far, over twice the area burned in 2018. It accounts for more than 4% of the total area of the state and a record in the modern era.
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