Economic Tools to Design Efficient Integrated Wildfire Fighting Management Strategies

In spite of the increasing efforts on behalf of the administrations to meliorate qualitatively the prevention and combat measures undertaken, the wildfire scenario in Mediterranean regions has been worsen and one fears that the situation will be aggravated. Within a backdrop scenario of resource scarcity, huge budget constraints, and other public choices with equivalent priority to that of wildfires prevention and combat, new management wildfire strategies seem to be necessary, to get efficient answers to the increasing complexity of economic and technical Mediterranean forest fires requirements. In this paper, one wants to contribute to clarify how economic tools can we used to improve wildfire management in order to decrease fire risk, within a context of economic scarcity and increasing forest fire risk. We will describe how traditional microeconomic theory of the producer along with linear programming techniques, GIS based data, and computer simulator programs, enables technicians to get the answers to some of the more important questions that rise all along the wildfire process management, and particularly the wildfire combat management.