PROJECT REPORT 2000-30 Assessing the Economic Impacts of Natural Disturbance

The techniques used in this study consist of a simple statistical analysis to characterise the natural fire regime, and Monte Carlo simulations to examine the effects of the assumed fire regime on the precision of estimates of average burn rate and on forest age class distributions. [...] Although the forest industry in Alberta is small, both in terms of value added and employment, relative to the rest of the economy, it may have significant linkages with the rest of the economy. [...] The first two models, the synthetic conventional SAM (SCSAM) and the hybrid conventional SAM (HCSAM), are used to determine whether the hybrid regionalization approach is more appropriate than the purely synthetic approach for the development of the remaining models. [...] The model identifies the trade-offs between forest harvesting, wildlife habitat, and the degree of similarity between managed forest structure and the structural distribution generated by natural disturbance, and identifies shadow prices (in terms of net present value of timber production) for habitat area of each of the five species. [...] The “welfare measures” sector calculates the welfare of the hunters to assess the satisfaction with the hunting experience.