Pricing the Fuel Break — A Farm-Level Cost-Benefit Case for Prescribed Burning in the Western Cape's Langeberg Mountains

The Langeberg mountain range in South Africa's Western Cape is covered in fire-dependent fynbos vegetation, managed partly by private landowners and partly by the provincial conservation agency CapeNature; excluding fire lets fuel accumulate and raises the risk of the uncontrollable, high-intensity wildfires that periodically hit the region.
Gracia Muyima, T.E. Kleynhans and W.J. De Lange (Stellenbosch University, 2025) surveyed landowners and ran a financial cost-benefit analysis comparing the costs of conducting prescribed burns against the private and wildfire-suppression-cost savings they generate; they conclude the potential benefits 'far exceeded' the costs. The same study identifies the main barrier to scaling the practice: South Africa's National Veld and Forest Fire Act No. 101 of 1998 places full financial liability for an escaped fire on the landowner who set it, and the researchers found 69% of surveyed farmers avoid prescribed burning for this reason even where they accept its ecological and economic case.
The underlying research has not yet appeared in a peer-reviewed journal and its published abstract does not disclose an explicit benefit-cost ratio or treated-hectare figures, so C-NAPSE treats its fire-resilience evidence as indicative rather than robust, and treats fynbos's well-documented biodiversity and water dependence on fire as background context rather than an outcome measured by this specific study.

Read the full analysis: https://agris.fao.org/search/en/providers/124740/records/68b6e428eb7e014a2d453789