Paying attention and paying the costs: wildfires in the American West

Preliminary estimates suggest that the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires could be the costliest disaster in U.S. history to date when accounting for both direct and indirect losses. As personal experience with climate disasters increases, we might expect growing support for climate change mitigation and relief to create a window of opportunity for measures to address climate change. However, experiencing the impacts of climate change also highlights one’s own vulnerability. People who have been affected by extreme weather may become more concerned about the issue but remain unwilling to spend on mitigation and relief for others. Instead, they may allocate their resources towards protecting their own homes and lives. To test these hypotheses, we conducted a survey during the 2021–2022 fire season. We targeted respondents in six states with high wildfire exposure in the Western continental United States and merged the survey data with geolocated fire data. We find that wildfire experience, identified by self-reports or physical proximity of respondents’ homes to geolocated fires, is associated with an increase in belief about climate change among Republicans. However, we also find that physical proximity to a nearby fire does not predict greater willingness to spend on mitigation or relief; instead, it is associated with costly personal adaptation to protect one’s own home from future fire risk. In contrast, we find that self-reported fire impacts are associated with greater willingness to spend on mitigation, relief, and personal adaptation. Our study highlights differences between perceptual and physical measures of hazard exposure.