In many regions of the world fire seasons have been lengthening, alongside increases in wildfire frequency and intensity. Climate change, shifts in land use, and the expansion of human settlements into fire-prone areas have transformed wildfires from largely localised hazards into systemic risks with cascading effects across ecosystems and economies. These developments have rendered many existing models, policies, and assumptions increasingly outdated, underscoring the urgent need for robust economic evidence to inform policy and private-sector decision making aligned with current and future wildfire conditions.
Wildfires and smoke pollution affect economies through multiple, interconnected channels. Beyond direct suppression costs and physical damages, wildfires disrupt production and supply chains, reduce labour productivity, influence tourism and recreation, and reshape migration and housing-market dynamics. Smoke exposure generates substantial public health burdens and impairs cognitive performance and labour market outcomes. These impacts occur within a context of rising public expenditures on prevention, suppression, and recovery, as well as rapidly evolving policy debates around insurance markets, land-use regulation, adaptation, and risk financing. Together, these dynamics highlight the need for empirical research that quantifies welfare consequences and evaluates the effectiveness of emerging policy responses.
Despite growing attention, many ecological and economic impacts of wildfires and smoke, particularly with regard to their persistence, remain under-studied, especially in regions that have not historically experienced large-scale wildfires but are now facing emerging risks. Cross-regional comparison can therefore support knowledge exchange between regions with long-standing fire experience and those facing emerging vulnerabilities, including across the Global North and South. At the same time, recent advances in data availability, remote sensing, and the use of AI-based technologies for monitoring, early warning, and suppression create new opportunities for applied research.
This Special Issue seeks contributions that advance empirical and policy-relevant understanding of wildfire impacts, as well as analyses that evaluate adaptation and management strategies aimed at reducing their welfare costs. We welcome applied research grounded in environmental, climate, and resource economics, including studies that use new data or innovative identification strategies to address this emerging challenge. Interdisciplinary work is encouraged where it strengthens economic insight into wildfire impacts and informs policy decisions.
For this Special Issue, we invite contributions on the economics of wildfires and smoke, spanning both impact assessment and policy evaluation, including:
- Labour productivity, sectoral employment shifts, and worker mobility
- Housing markets, mortgage risk, and migration and other behavioural responses to wildfire risk and exposure
- Natural capital and ecosystem service valuation, including impacts on biodiversity, recreation, and forest asset pricing
- Inequality, information access, and distributional impacts of exposure and monitoring technologies
- Public finance, insurance markets, and the fiscal consequences for local and regional governments
- Institutions, governance, and risk-sharing arrangements, including coordination across jurisdictions, public-private roles, and firm responses to wildfire risk
- Prevention, suppression, and adaptation strategies, including land-use planning, prescribed burning, indigenous fire stewardship, and advanced monitoring and management technologies
- Welfare losses from smoke exposure, including physical and mental health outcomes and associated human capital effects
Manuscript Submission Information:
All manuscripts must be submitted via the Environmental and Resource Economics online submission system. When submitting your paper through the journal website, please select submission to the Wildfires Special Issue. All manuscripts will undergo a rigorous peer-review process and we will aim to provide a decision within 6 weeks although this cannot be guaranteed. Articles will be published in the dedicated Collections page upon acceptance like regular submissions and will thus not have to wait for the entire special issue to be compiled.
The deadline for submissions is 30 September 2026.