Wendong Zhang, Ph.D., Assistant Professor and Extension Economist in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, will present the EEEP Seminar Series, “When Nature Turns Hazy: How Wildfire Smoke Affects Outdoor Recreation” on April 17, 2024.
Abstract: Leveraging the SafeGraph cellphone foot traffic data on recreational visits to 130k sites nationwide, we quantify the extent of avoidance behavior in outdoor recreation in response to wildfire smokes from 2018-2019. By exploring the year-over-year variation in smoke exposure and compare the visits with smoke days to visits without smoke days, our results show that wildfire smoke exposure is negatively associated with recreational visits and dwell times: a one standard deviation increase in weekly smoke exposure results in a 5.52% decrease in weekly visits and total dwell times. We also show that visibility reduction and public information about smoke are the underlying mechanisms of the smoke-recreation relationship. A stronger impact of wildfire smoke on recreational visits is noticeable during the early morning and late night, while there is minimal evidence of spatial substitution. Finally, a back-of-envelope calculation suggests recreational costs arising from the recent wildfire incidents in 2018-2019 are approximately $2.9 billion, which emphasizes the importance of considering social costs incurred in distant locations when formulating strategies for disaster mitigation and response.
Speaker Bio: Wendong Zhang is an assistant professor and extension economist in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management. His research seeks to better understand the interplay between agriculture and the environment, farmland market, and Chinese agriculture. Wendong is currently faculty affiliate at Cornell Center for China Economic Research (CICER), faculty fellow at Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, and was selected as 2023-2025 Fellow at Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) in Germany. Zhang is an associate editor of American Journal of Agricultural Economics as well as the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation. He received his PhD in agricultural, environmental and development economics from the Ohio State University in 2015, and he also holds a BSc in environmental science from Fudan University in China. Prior to Cornell, he was an associate professor in the department of economics at Iowa State University, where he is currently a faculty collaborator at the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development.