I can suggest, from personal experience that changing the way we pay for wildland fires on federal lands isn’t going to fix the problem.  The USFS’s sole goal is to grow its budget – putting out fires won’t do that!  One company gets in excess of 99.9% of all the wildland firefighting chemical business – except in California where it gets 100% of the wildland firefighting chemical business. The company that gets all of the business had the foresight to hire three very senior USFS employees. In the early 2000’s this company patented a formula for a new, safe “gum thickened” retardant. The patent was perfected in 2004 and months after the patent was perfected, magically the USFS changed the specification for retardant. The most amazing coincidence was that the new specification happened to match the patent that the company who hired the 3 USFS employees developed.  Retardant, the main chemical used to fight wildland fires, was not designed to extinguish fires (The National Interagency Fire Center's 2006 Wild land Fire Talking Points document, issued in March 2006, on Page 19, under the heading of RETARDANT, states in the first sentence: "Retardant does not put fires out") and has been responsible for a number of fish kills when the retardant was accidentally dumped into waterways. The use of retardant has been the subject of several federal lawsuits. In other words, this new safe gummed thickened retardant kills fish with the same ease the old retardant did.  The point is, if the USFS didn’t bend over backwards to protect its pet chemical manufacturer you would find that there are many chemicals that are more effective, safer and substantially cheaper.
Forest fires are burning bigger, faster and hotter than ever before, and the risk management approaches used to counter them can inform corporate strategy as well.