LSU Civil & Environmental Engineering Professor Studying Funding Models for Wildfire Prevention

September 23, 2024

BATON ROUGE, LA – Much like hurricane season in Louisiana, California deals with its own annual period of climate catastrophe during wildfire season, which typically runs from May or June until October or November. Restoration efforts can reduce the risk of wildfires, but restoration costs are high and often prohibit the landscape-scale restoration efforts needed for risk reduction.

LSU Civil and Environmental Engineering Assistant Professor Matthew Brand is working to address this by analyzing the expected impacts from restoration on runoff, erosion, and management costs borne by the Riverside County Flood Control District in Riverside, Calif. The ultimate goal of the project is to demonstrate the value of upstream restoration activities—activities that reduce the risk of wildfire within a watershed—to flood control districts, eventually leading to a Forest Resilience Bond (FRB) for the region.

Developed by Blue Forest in partnership with the World Resources Institute, USDA Forest Service, and the National Forest Foundation, the FRB deploys private capital to finance forest restoration projects to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire. Understanding the value of upstream restoration activities is critical for FRB success in the Cleveland National Forest.

“Upstream restoration activities…can include things such as removing smaller, flammable brush; controlled burns which remove small brush and debris without burning larger trees; and, what will likely be the largest in our case, creating armored corridors in high-risk locations,” Brand said. “Armoring involves removing flammable material from within a certain buffer distance from the road. There is a major road that many people use in the Cleveland National Forest (Ortega Highway), which is a hotspot for human-caused ignition sources from cars, cigarettes, etc.

“The wildfire destroys the vegetation which was stabilizing the soil, and then when it rains, it causes mass hillslope failure and other types of erosion, which results in debris flows and rapid infilling of debris basins and flood control channels, greatly increasing flood risks.”

Working alongside Brand on this project are the science team from non-profit Blue Forest, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist Phil Saksa and Director of Science Strategy Tessa Maurer; Ariane Jong-Levinger, a postdoctoral scholar at Chapman University; Luke Mangney, a graduate student in Brand’s lab; Riverside County Flood District; and the Cleveland National Forest.

“[Dr. Jong-Levinger’s] work looked at how wildfires increase the likelihood of floods by increasing post-fire erosion and, thus, sediment accumulation in flood infrastructure, such as debris basins and flood channels,” Brand said. “She developed a model that captures interactions between wildfires, precipitation, and infrastructure design and maintenance to estimate flood risk due to infrastructure overtopping.

“This project will tie together my Ph.D. work on quantifying dredging costs and financing of upstream interventions with Environmental Impact Bonds (EIBs) with the fire-flood risk model of Dr. Jong-Levinger to quantify the likelihood that fire management in the Cleveland National Forest upstream could pay for itself through reduced dredging costs and flood risks downstream in Riverside County.”

Mangney, a California native now pursuing his graduate education at LSU, has witnessed up close the damage wildfires have caused to his state and region and is eager to be part of the solution through his efforts here.

“My work will be primarily focused on incorporating costs into Dr. Jong-Levinger’s existing model,” he said. “Having witnessed firsthand the growing prevalence of wildfires in California, I’m excited to contribute to a project that aims to mitigate fire risk in Riverside County. It’s a chance to positively impact my friends and family back in California."

Regarding Louisiana, Brand believes the work being done on this project is transferable, as sediment management and its funding sediment pose challenges everywhere. For instance, the lessons learned across the country in California can be applied to future wetland restoration projects and their funding.

“Specific to Louisiana, I’m hoping to develop an Environmental Impact Bond for wetland restoration for the purposes of flood-risk reduction and carbon sequestration, and I believe that the scale at which the EIBs allow us to do restoration can result in better outcomes for ecosystem health and co-benefits compared with more traditional grant funding sources and doing restoration in a piecemeal manner,” Brant said.

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Contact: Joshua Duplechain
Director of Communications
225-578-5706
josh@lsu.edu