Mountain West News Bureau: “Job Growth Fastest in the West Where Wildfire Risk is the Highest”
Emily Joiner is quoted in this piece about a new RFF report on the threat wildfire poses to western US businesses.
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.”
