Wildfire smoke and outdoor recreation welfare losses

Wildfire smoke has surged across the western United States, and this paper quantifies the per-trip welfare loss when campers confront smoky conditions. Using millions of campground reservations merged with day-by-day satellite smoke plumes and PM data, the authors estimate that smoke reduces welfare by $107 per person per trip, with larger losses when smoke persists for consecutive days.  From a back-of-the-envelope scaling, they infer that ~21.5 million outdoor recreation visits in the West are affected annually, implying aggregate welfare losses of about $2.3 billion per year purely on the recreation side—separate from health costs.  Although many smoke studies emphasize morbidity and mortality, this one zeroes in on revealed-preference behavior at high frequency, exploiting sequential decision-making as campers cancel, rebook, or stick with reservations as smoke forecasts evolve, which helps isolate causality in a way rarely possible with coarser data.  Importantly, the $107 estimate is per person, so party size and trip length compound damages quickly; it also varies with consecutive-day exposure, indicating nonlinear disutility as air quality remains poor.

Methodologically, the study deploys a novel control-function approach to capture evolving information and sequential choice, then links those structural decisions to satellite-based smoke and pollution metrics at the site-day level.  The identification gains power from tens of millions of administrative reservations covering multiple states and seasons, allowing them to detect how campers reallocate across sites and dates when smoke intrudes.  The welfare measures are based on standard discrete-choice valuation, but the key novelty is high-frequency exposure information, which captures the fact that smoke impacts are episodic and often abrupt, unlike the relatively smoother variation in annual PM averages.  The results imply that short-run recreation damages alone—again, ~$2.3 billion/year—are already material for public-lands management and visitor communication strategies, even before accounting for medical spending, lost productivity, or longer-run changes in park demand.

Contextually, this article sits alongside a growing literature showing that wildfire smoke now accounts for up to half of PM in some western locales, amplifying the urgency of smoke-specific preparedness and messaging on public lands.  The authors’ results also dovetail with evidence that recent fire seasons have been hotter, longer, and more severe, which suggests that $107 per-person trip losses may be a floor in extreme years.  Policymakers considering campground closure thresholds, reservation refund policies, or smoke-forecast integration into recreation apps can use the per-trip metric as a transparent, transferable input for cost-benefit analysis.  For example, the paper’s consecutive-day effect implies higher returns to rapid response (e.g., targeted closures or fee waivers) once forecasts indicate multi-day smoke. 

Jacob Gellman, Margaret Walls, and Matthew Wibbenmeyer. “Welfare Losses from Wildfire Smoke: Evidence from Daily Outdoor Recreation Data.” Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 132 (March 2025). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0095069625000506