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This article presents the current state-of-practice with respect to quantifying the total cost to retrofit an existing building. In particular, we combine quantitative, qualitative, and heuristic data to provide a taxonomy for understanding the direct and indirect costs associated with seismic risk mitigation. Much of the literature to date has focused on estimating structural retrofit costs, the costs of retrofitting the structural elements of a building. In contrast, there is very little research or data on the remaining cost components of the total cost. We propose using structural cost as the foundation for approximating the remaining cost components and the total cost itself. To validate our findings, we compare the proposed approximations with actual cost estimates developed by engineering professionals.

Beds are a prevalent combustible in fatal fires in the United States effective 1 July 2007, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission promulgated a standard to severely reduce the heat release rate and the early heat output from mattresses and foundations when ignited by a flaming ignition source. This study estimates the Standard’s success over its first decade using fire incidence, US population, and mattress sales data. The technique mitigates the influence of some exogenous factors that might have changed during this decade. The Standard is accomplishing its purpose, preventing approximately 65 fatalities (out of an estimated 95 fatalities in 2002–2005) from bed fires annually during 2015–2016, although not all pre-Standard mattresses had yet been replaced. Compared to residential upholstered furniture fires, which were not affected by the Standard, the numbers of bed fires decreased by 12%, injuries by 34%, and deaths by 82% between 2005–2006 and 2015–2016. Per bed fire, injuries decreased by 25% and fatalities decreased by 67%, indicating that the severity of bed fires is being reduced.

This article presents a methodology for estimating seismic retrofit costs from historical data. In particular, historical retrofit-cost data from Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) 156 is used to build a generalized linear model (GLM) to predict retrofit costs as a function of building characteristics. While not as accurate as an engineering professional’s estimate, this methodology is easy to apply to generate quick estimates and is especially useful for decision makers with large building portfolios. Moreover, the predictive modeling approach provides a measure of uncertainty in terms of prediction error. The article uses prediction error to compare different modeling choices, including the choice of distribution for costs. Finally, the proposed retrofit-cost model is implemented to estimate the cost to retrofit a portfolio of federal buildings. The application illustrates how the choice of distribution affects cost estimates.

This study evaluated the hypothesis that urban-tree planting increases neighborhood gentrification in Portland, Oregon. We defined gentrification as an increase in the median sales price of single-family homes in a Census tract compared to other tracts in the city after accounting for differences in the housing stock such as house size and number of bathrooms. We used tree-planting data from the non-profit Friends of Trees, who have planted 57,985 yard and street trees in Portland (1990–2019). We estimated a mixed model of gentrification (30 years and 141 tracts) including random intercepts at the tract level and a first-order auto-regressive residual structure. Tract-level house prices and tree planting may be codetermined. Therefore, to address potential endogeneity of tree planting in statistical modeling, we lagged the number of trees planted by at least one year. We found that the number of trees planted in a tract was significantly associated with a higher tract-level median sales price, although it took at least six years for this relationship to emerge. Specifically, each tree was associated with a $131 (95% CI: $53-$210; p-value=0.001) increase in tract-level median sales price six years after planting. The magnitude of the association between the number of trees planted and median sales price generally increased as the time lag lengthened. After twelve years, each tree was associated with a $265 (95% CI: $151-$379; p-value

This guide presents techniques for evaluating manufacturing investments from the perspective of environmentally sustainable manufacturing by pairing economic methods of investment analysis with environmental aspect of manufacturing, including manufacturing processes. The methods are based on ASTM E3200 and, although the focus is on manufacturing, they can be applied under other circumstances (e.g., construction industry investments, agriculture, or mining). The economic techniques include net present value, internal rate of return, payback period, and hurdle rate. The guide also includes sensitivity analyses with a focus on Monte Carlo techniques. The methods presented can be used by manufacturers, regardless of size or complexity, to make environmentally sustainable decisions, including but not limited to whether to embark on an investment, discontinue a manufacturing line, invest or re-invest in a new project or factory.

The goal of this report is to provide small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) stakeholders (e.g., owners and managers) who took part in the NIST Business Survey: COVID-19 Impact and Recovery survey1 between July 8 and August 8, 2020 with a summary of self-reported data. This survey was the initial phase of a longitudinal research effort on SME Complex Event Resilience (CER) undertaken by the Applied Economics Office (AEO) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

ObjectiveThis study proposes and evaluates the theory that people who are susceptible to injury in residential fires are not susceptible to death in residential fires and vice versa. It is proposed that the population vulnerable to death in residential fires can be proxied by ‘frailty’, which is measured as age–gender adjusted fatality rates due to natural causes.MethodsThis study uses an ecological approach and controls for exposure to estimate the vulnerability of different population groups to death and injury in residential fires. It allows fatalities and injuries to be estimated by different models.ResultsFrailty explains fire-related death in adults while not explaining injuries, which is consistent with the idea that deaths and injuries affect disjoint populations.ConclusionsDeaths and injuries in fire are drawn from different populations. People who are susceptible to dying in fires are unlikely to be injured in fires, and the people who are susceptible to injury are unlikely to die in fires.

Research to date has not examined how the impacts of arrests manifest across space and time in environmental crimes. We evaluate whether arrests reduce or merely spatiotemporally displace intentional illegal outdoor firesetting. Using municipality-level daily wildfire count data from Galicia, Spain, from 1999 to 2014, we develop daily spatiotemporal ignition count models of agricultural, non-agricultural and total intentional illegal wildfires as functions of spatiotemporally lagged arrests, the election cycle, seasonal and day indicators, meteorological factors and socioeconomic variables. We find evidence that arrests reduce future intentional illegal fires across space in subsequent time periods. This research was partly funded by Project ECO2017–89274-R MINECO/AEI/FEDER, UE SI

The wildland–urban interface (WUI) is defined in terms of housing density and proximity to wildlands, yet its relevance seems to be only in conjunction with wildland fire threats. The objective of this paper is to (1) identify the WUI areas threatened from wildfire during the 2000’s and (2) quantify the values that were threatened. We use 1 km fire detection data generated using MODIS satellite imagery over a 10-year period combined with population densities to identify threatened areas of the WUI. We then use data on structures, structure content, and population to identify the people and property threatened from identified fires within the WUI. We find that 6.3 % of the U.S. population (17.5 million) resided within these areas and that 2.1 % of the population lived in WUI areas where more than one fire has occurred. However, we find that only a third of the affected population was threatened during daytime hours, as most leave the threatened portion of the WUI during peak ignition hours. The threatened area comprised 4.1 % of the coterminous USA and 44.9 % of the WUI. Within these areas were 7.8 million residential, commercial, industrial, governmental, religious, and educational structures, with a building and building content value estimated at $1.9 trillion. Overall, 7.3 % of residential structures in the USA were found within the WUI with wildfire activity; however, for some states, this number was as high as 25.4 %.

Municipal fire departments responded to approximately 53,000 intentionally-set fires annually from 2003 to 2007, according to National Fire Protection Association figures. A disproportionate amount of these fires occur in spatio-temporal clusters, making them predictable and, perhaps, preventable. The objective of this research is to evaluate how the aggregation of data across space and target types (residential, non-residential, vehicle, outdoor and other) affects daily arson forecast accuracy for several target types of arson, and the ability to leverage information quantifying the autoregressive nature of intentional firesetting. To do this, we estimate, for the city of Detroit, Michigan, competing statistical models that differ in their ability to recognize potential temporal autoregressivity in the daily count of arson fires. Spatial units vary from Census tracts, police precincts, to citywide. We find that (1) the out-of-sample performance of prospective hotspot models for arson cannot usefully exploit the autoregressive properties of arson at fine spatial scales, even though autoregression is significant in-sample, hinting at a possible bias-variance tradeoff; (2) aggregation of arson across reported targets can yield a model that differs from by-target models; (3) spatial aggregation of data tends to increase forecast accuracy of arson due partly to the ability to account for temporally dynamic firesetting; and (4) arson forecast models that recognize temporal autoregression can be used to forecast daily arson fire activity at the Citywide scale in Detroit. These results suggest a tradeoff between the collection of high resolution spatial data and the use of more sophisticated modeling techniques that explicitly account for temporal correlation.

Building from considerable empirical research in the general business literature, this paper quantitatively explores the view that the benefits of information technologies manifest themselves through improvement in work processes. In turn, better work processes lead to increased project performance. Using an overall sample of 133 projects (missing data make specific correlation sample sizes smaller) from the Construction Industry Institute Benchmarking and Metrics database, this paper analyzes correlations between technology use and integration, best practices, and project performance measured with cost, schedule, and rework metrics. Data are also used to assess the complementary interaction between technology use, work processes as measured by best practices, and performance. The findings show that there are limited significant beneficial correlations between information technology use and performance, slightly more significant beneficial correlations between best practice use and performance, an...

Background: Several recent studies have identified a relationship between the natural environment and improved health outcomes. However, for practical reasons, most have been observational, cross-sectional studies. Purpose: A natural experiment, which provides stronger evidence of causality, was used to test whether a major change to the natural environment—the loss of 100 million trees to the emerald ash borer, an invasive forest pest— has influenced mortality related to cardiovascular and lower- respiratory diseases. Methods: Two fixed-effects regression models were used to estimate the relationship between emerald ash borer presence and county-level mortality from 1990 to 2007 in 15 U.S. states, while controlling for a wide range of demographic covariates. Data were collected from 1990 to 2007, and the analyses were conducted in 2011 and 2012. Results: There was an increase in mortality related to cardiovascular and lower-respiratory-tract illness in counties infested with the emerald ash borer. The magnitude of this effect was greater as infestation progressed and in counties with above-average median household income. Across the 15 states in the study area, the borer was associated with an additional 6113 deaths related to illness of the lower respiratory system, and 15,080 cardiovascular-related deaths. Conclusions: Results suggest that loss of trees to the emerald ash borer increased mortality related to cardiovascular and lower-respiratory-tract illness. This finding adds to the growing evidence that

Residential structure fires pose a significant risk to life and property. A major source of these fires is the ignition of upholstered furniture by cigarettes. It has long been established that cigarettes and other lighted tobacco products could ignite upholstered furniture and were a leading cause of fire deaths in residences. In recent years, states have adopted fire standard compliant cigarettes ('FSC cigarettes') that are made with a wrapping paper that contains regularly spaced bands, which increases the likelihood of self-extinguishment. This paper measures the effectiveness of FSC cigarettes on the number of residential fires involving upholstered furniture, and the resulting fatalities, injuries, and extent of flame spread, while accounting for the under-reporting of fire incidents. In total, four models were estimated using fire department data from 2002 to 2011. The results provide evidence that FSC cigarettes, on average, reduced the number of residential fires by 45 %, reduced fatalities by 23 %, and extent of flame spread by 27 % in 2011. No effect on injuries was found. Within each state, effectiveness is moderated by the number of smokers and their consumption patterns. In general, FSC cigarettes are more effective in places with a large smoking population who engage in heavier smoking. There is a very limited effect on the lightest of smokers, suggesting behavioral differences between heavy and light smokers that influence fire risk.

Residential fire sprinklers have long proven themselves as life-safety technologies to the fire service community. Yet, about 1% of all one- and two-family dwelling fires occur in homes protected by sprinklers. It has been argued that measured sprinkler performance has ignored factors confounding the relationship between sprinkler use and performance. In this analysis, sprinkler performance is measured by comparing 'like' structure fires, while conditioning on smoke detection technology and neighborhood housing and socioeconomic conditions, using propensity score matching. Results show that residential fire sprinklers protect occupant and firefighter health and safety, and are comparable to other life-safety technologies. Language: en

Each year, wildland fires threaten structures and occupants of the wildland-urban interface (WUI). Currently, wildfire ignition estimates largely exclude ignitions originating within municipal jurisdictions, which contain the majority of the US population. The objective of this article is to provide national estimates and trends of the WUI fire problem; in particular, we analyze the US Fire Administration's National Fire Incident Reporting System fire incident data from 2002 to 2006 reported by local municipal fire departments across the United States. We estimate that, on average, the burning of wildland fuels is associated with 116,971 fires annually. Each year, these fires are responsible for, on average, 15 civilian (nonfire service) fatalities, 88 civilian injuries, and $160 million in direct property losses. These damages include losses to 599 residential structures, 649 nonresidential structures, and 829 vehicles (per year). Based on the value of a statistical life ($8.75 million) and statistical injury ($189 thousand), we find that the economic value of fatalities and injuries averaged $148 million annually. Thus, the losses associated with fires occurring on municipal lands total on average $308 million annually over this time period.

This paper investigated whether greater tree-canopy cover is associated with reduced risk of poor birth outcomes in Portland, Oregon. Residential addresses were geocoded and linked to classified-aerial imagery to calculate tree-canopy cover in 50, 100, and 200 m buffers around each home in our sample (n=5696). Detailed data on maternal characteristics and additional neighborhood variables were obtained from birth certificates and tax records. We found that a 10% increase in tree-canopy cover within 50 m of a house reduced the number of small for gestational age births by 1.42 per 1000 births (95% CI-0.11-2.72). Results suggest that the natural environment may affect pregnancy outcomes and should be evaluated in future research.

Few studies have estimated the effect of environmental amenities on the rental price of houses. We address this gap in the literature by quantifying the effect of urban trees on the rental price of single-family homes in Portland, Oregon, USA. We found that an additional tree on a house's lot increased monthly rent by $5.62, and a tree in the public right of way increased rent by $21.00. These results are consistent with a previous hedonic analysis of the effects of trees on the sales price of homes in Portland, which suggests that homeowners and renters place similar values on urban trees.

In criminology, it is well understood that indicators of urban decay, such as abandoned buildings littered with broken windows, provide criminals with signals identifying neighborhoods with lower crime detection and apprehension rates than better maintained neighborhoods. Whether it is the resident population’s sense of apathy, lack of civic pride, or fear of confrontation that causes criminals to perceive an easy mark, it nevertheless emboldens them to strike. Previous research of wildland arson hints that broken windows (e.g., areas of criminal activity) are partly responsible for arson outbreaks within the wildland–urban interface. We model the incidence of wildland and non-wildland arson ignitions in Michigan from 2001 to 2005 as a function of constructed Broken Windows indices. Our results suggest that crime prevention and urban revitalization programs may be as valuable as fire suppression, fuels management, and law enforcement in limiting incidence and the damage from both wildland and non-wildland arson.

We use a hedonic price model to simultaneously estimate the effects of street trees on the sales price and the time-on-market (TOM) of houses in Portland, Oregon. On average, street trees add $8870 to sales price and reduce TOM by 1.7 days. In addition, we found that the benefits of street trees spill over to neighboring houses. Because the provision and maintenance of street trees in Portland is the responsibility of adjacent property owners, our results suggest that if the provision of street trees is left solely to homeowners, then there will be too few street trees from a societal perspective.

We estimated the effect of shade trees on the summertime electricity use of 460 single-family homes in Sacramento, California. Results show that trees on the west and south sides of a house reduce summertime electricity use, whereas trees on the north side of a house increase summertime electricity use. The current level of tree cover on the west and south sides of houses in our sample reduced summertime electricity use by 185 kWh (5.2%), whereas north-side trees increased electricity use by 55 kWh (1.5%). Results also show that a London plane tree, planted on the west side of a house, can reduce carbon emissions from summertime electricity use by an average of 31% over 100 years.

A benefit–cost analysis is performed to measure the expected present value net benefits (PVNB) resulting from the installation of a residential fire sprinkler system in a newly constructed, single-family house. The benefits and costs associated with installation and use of a fire sprinkler system are compared across three prototypical single-family house types: colonial, townhouse, and ranch. Each of the house types varies by design, size, and fire sprinkler affordability. Six fire sprinkler system designs are evaluated: a multipurpose network system, three stand-alone systems, and two stand-alone systems equipped with a backflow preventer. The sprinkler designs vary by installation cost (materials and labor cost) and required annual maintenance, but all were designed to meet the NFPA 13D standard. The estimated benefits of fire sprinklers include reductions in the following: the risk of civilian fatalities and injuries, homeowner insurance premiums, uninsured direct property losses, and uninsured indirect costs. Results show that residential sprinkler systems not requiring expensive annual upkeep or maintenance are economical. The expected PVNB in 2005 dollars is estimated as $2,967 for the colonial-style house, $3,099 for the townhouse, and $4,166 for the ranch-style house, given installation of the lowest life-cycle cost sprinkler system in each of the house types. A sensitivity analysis that measures the variability of the results to changes in the modeling assumptions confirms the robustness of the baseline analysis.

This paper examines the effect wildfire mitigation has on broad-scale wildfire behavior. Each year, hundreds of million of dollars are spent on fire suppression and fuels management applications, yet little is known, quantitatively, of the returns to these programs in terms of their impact on wildfire extent and intensity. This is especially true when considering that wildfire management influences and reacts to several, often times confounding factors, including socioeconomic characteristics, values at risk, heterogeneous landscapes, and climate. Due to the endogenous nature of suppression effort and fuels management intensity and placement with wildfire behavior, traditional regression models may prove inadequate. Instead, I examine the applicability of propensity score matching (PSM) techniques in modeling wildfire. This research makes several significant contributions including: (1) applying techniques developed in labor economics and in epidemiology to evaluate the effects of natural resource policies on landscapes, rather than on individuals; (2) providing a better understanding of the relationship between wildfire mitigation strategies and their influence on broad-scale wildfire patterns; (3) quantifying the returns to suppression and fuels management on wildfire behavior.

Drought conditions in much of the West, increased residential development, and elevated fuels from a century of wildfire suppression have increased wildfire risk in the United States. In light of this increased risk, an innovative wildfire risk education program in Colorado Springs was examined, which rated the wildfire risk of 35,000 homes in the city’s wildlandurban interface. Evidence from home sales before and after the program’s implementation suggests that the program was successful at changing homebuyer’s attitudes toward wildfire risk, particularly preferences for flammable building materials.

In 2000, concerned about the risks of wildfires to local homes, the Colorado Springs Fire Department rated the wildfire risk of 35,000 housing parcels within the wildland-urban interface and made its findings available online. We examine the effectiveness of this rating project by comparing the relationship between home price and wildfire risk before and after the information was posted on the Web site. Before the information was available, home price and wildfire risk were positively correlated, whereas, afterwards, they were not.

We estimate a wildfire risk model with a new measure of wildfire output, intensity-weighted risk and use it in Monte Carlo simulations to estimate welfare changes from alternative prescribed burning policies. Using Volusia County, Florida as a case study, an annual prescribed burning rate of 13% of all forest lands maximizes net welfare; ignoring the effects on wildfire intensity may underestimate optimal rates of prescribed burning. Our estimated supply function for prescribed fire services is inelastic, suggesting that increasing contract prescribed fire services on public lands may produce rapidly escalating costs for private landowners and unintended distributional and “leakage” effects. Copyright 2007, Oxford University Press.

Our article considers the economic contributions of forest ecosystem services, using a case study from Flores, Indonesia, in which forest protection in upstream watersheds stabilize soil and hydrological flows in downstream farms. We focus on the demand for a weak complement to the ecosystem services—farm labor—and account for spatial dependence due to economic interactions, ecosystem processes, and data integration. The estimated models have theoretically expected properties across eight different specifications. We find strong evidence that forest ecosystem services provide economically substantive benefits to local people and that these services would be substantially undervalued if spatial dependence is ignored. Forests provide an array of ecosystem services by sequestering carbon, maintaining habitat and biodiversity, stabilizing hydrological flows, mitigating soil erosion, and improving microclimates. Deforestation and forest degradation can irreversibly and substantively impair these ecosystem functions. This raises the question of why society and governments would allow rapid or excessive deforestation. One reason is the failure to consider the full range of goods and services provided by the forests, particularly any latent and complex ecosystem services (Dasgupta). The economic contributions of forest ecosystem services are not well understood and rarely quantified. This article illustrates a method for estimating the value of watershed services from protected tropical forests in Flores, Indonesia. Specifically, we respond to three challenges posed in the literature. First, valuation studies have typically overlooked livelihood values of natural resources in developing countries, focusing largely on amenity values in developed countries (Deacon et al., Dasgupta). Second, a detailed consideration of the spatial aspects of ecosystems and ecological processes, such

Six Poisson autoregressive models of order p[PAR(p)] of daily wildland arson ignition counts are estimated for five locations in Florida (1994–2001). In addition, a fixed effects time-series Poisson model of annual arson counts is estimated for all Florida counties (1995–2001). PAR(p) model estimates reveal highly significant arson ignition autocorrelation, lasting up to eleven days, in addition to seasonality and links to law enforcement, wildland management, historical fire, and weather. The annual fixed effects model replicates many findings of the daily models but also detects the influence of wages and poverty on arson, in ways expected from theory. All findings support an economic model of crime. Copyright 2005, Oxford University Press.

The Applied Economics Office (AEO) of the Engineering Laboratory (EL) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed the Building Industry Reporting and Design for Sustainability (BIRDS) database, which estimates the sustainability (energy, economic, and environmental) performance for eleven commercial building prototypes designed to different energy efficiency levels. Analysis of the BIRDS database estimates both the average percentage change in energy consumption and the aggregate changes in energy consumption for one year’s worth of new construction for each U.S. state. Due to the limited publically-available new construction data, the estimates are calculated by giving equal weighting to all the cities in a state that are included in the BIRDS database. However, such an approach leads to underweighting the importance of cities with more new construction and overweighting cities with less new construction. The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of implementing a non-equal weighting approach on state-level energy consumption impacts of adopting a more restrictive state energy code. New construction floor area completion data for 2012 was obtained for each county in the United States to assist in increasing the accuracy of these impact estimates.

The absence of a comprehensive and accurate database on fire occurrence means that some proportion of wildfires is not reported. This paper examines wildfires reported in the National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) database and compares it with the satellite-based Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) fire detection data and the CAL FIRE Fire and Resource Assessment Program (FRAP) geodatabase to understand underreporting of wildland fires in the NFIRS system. The paper discusses a series of large wildland fires and uses a Generalised Linear Model to identify the conditions where large wildfires go unreported. This paper shows that the NFIRS database, which is the primary fire database in the US, significantly underreports wildland fires. Evidence from California suggests that 32% of fires within local jurisdictions detected via MODIS satellite were identified in the NFIRS database; thus, there could be a significant number of fires going unreported nationwide. Examining eight large fires in California, only 16% of the structures damaged or destroyed, as reported in CAL FIRE, were reported in NFIRS. Areas with underreporting tend to have a higher level of poverty, higher population density, higher level of people without vehicles, lower income and a higher level of single parents with children under 18, as well as a higher level of people under the age of 18.

Several recent studies have identified a relationship between the natural environment and improved health outcomes. However, for practical reasons, most have been observational, cross-sectional studies.A natural experiment, which provides stronger evidence of causality, was used to test whether a major change to the natural environment-the loss of 100 million trees to the emerald ash borer, an invasive forest pest-has influenced mortality related to cardiovascular and lower-respiratory diseases.Two fixed-effects regression models were used to estimate the relationship between emerald ash borer presence and county-level mortality from 1990 to 2007 in 15 U.S. states, while controlling for a wide range of demographic covariates. Data were collected from 1990 to 2007, and the analyses were conducted in 2011 and 2012.There was an increase in mortality related to cardiovascular and lower-respiratory-tract illness in counties infested with the emerald ash borer. The magnitude of this effect was greater as infestation progressed and in counties with above-average median household income. Across the 15 states in the study area, the borer was associated with an additional 6113 deaths related to illness of the lower respiratory system, and 15,080 cardiovascular-related deaths.Results suggest that loss of trees to the emerald ash borer increased mortality related to cardiovascular and lower-respiratory-tract illness. This finding adds to the growing evidence that the natural environment provides major public health benefits.

Public outreach and wildfire education activities have been shown to limit the number of unintentional human-caused ignitions (i.e., ‘accidental’ wildfires). Such activities include the airing of public service announcements, visiting with homeowners in at-risk areas, distributing informative brochures and flyers, hosting of public forums (with presentations), and facilitating community sponsored neighborhood hazard assessments. By limiting the number of ignitions, prevention entirely avoids costs and losses related to fire suppression (initial attack) and property damage. In this paper, we show that the benefits of wildfire prevention education activities carried out in the State of Florida, USA, far outweigh their costs. We also report how the return on wildfire prevention education investment in that State varies—i.e., the effectiveness of these programs varies—with many exogenous factors, including weather, season, and recent wildfire history and fuels management activities. To illustrate how this effectiveness variation could be exploited to increase returns to money spent on prevention, we explore the optimal timing of wildfire prevention activities. Optimal timing of wildfire prevention education spending is defined as the spending allocation over time that yields the lowest wildfire-induced cost plus net value change to society. We find that, for Florida, the optimal (monthly) timing of prevention activities can be forecasted by exploiting the relationships between prevention effectiveness and fire weather measures, which vary predictably within the year.