Burning Down the House: How Exposure to Wildfire Affects Support for Wildfire Mitigation Policies

• In Event: Crisis and Change: How Environmental Shocks Reshape Policy, Labor, and Land

Abstract

In many parts of the Western U.S., wildfire patterns are changing – driven not only by climate change, but also by the “grassification” that occurs when formerly fire-resistant landscapes are invaded by non-native, flammable grass species. Changing wildfire regimes are particularly acute in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, where wildfires have become increasingly common, costing millions of dollars in fire suppression and prompting widespread evacuations. Paradoxically, however, the state has been reluctant to invest in policies and programs to address the primary driver of increased wildfires: the grassification of the Sonoran Desert. A growing literature suggests that disasters can act as “focusing events” to prompt new attention and support for disaster mitigation policies. But we know little about the temporal or geographic limitations of “focusing events” as potential drivers of policy change.

In this paper, we ask two questions: first, does wildfire exposure affect citizens’ willingness to support wildfire mitigation policies, and second, do these effects persist over space and time? Our study analyzes data from two rounds of survey experiments. The first survey experiment (n=499) was conducted among Pima County, Arizona residents in 2021, shortly after a serious fire that burned for over six weeks and prompted hundreds of evacuations. That survey used a choice experiment to assess how different policy design features would affect citizens’ willingness to vote “yes” on a series of hypothetical referenda to fund wildfire mitigation programs, and assessed whether personal experiences with evacuation affected their policy preferences. In 2025, we repeated the original survey with a larger sample (N~700) to assess whether effects diminished over time. In 2025, we also introduced a priming experiment, in which some survey takers were presented with information about the recent fires in Lahaina, Hawaii, explaining that those fires were fueled by invasive grasses that are spreading throughout Arizona. Our preliminary results suggest that 1) wildfire exposure acts as a “focusing event,” increasing overall support for wildfire mitigation policies; 2) that these effects decrease over time as memory of the original fire fades; and 3) that geographically distant disasters can act as “focusing events” if there is a credible threat that similar disasters can occur close to home.

Author

• Elizabeth Baldwin, University of Arizona
  Presenting Author