Julie Le Gallo (CASAER & L’Institut Agro Dijon), joint with Matthieu Stigler (U. Genève)
The 2022 forest fire in Landes and Gironde was France’s second largest forest fire in the past two centuries. Despite its extensive coverage, the fire had no direct casualties, and few structures were destroyed. The Landes’s fire was a near-miss event: its consequences could have been much more catastrophic. In 1949, the same region was subject to the largest and most deadly forest fire on record in France. We investigate whether a salient but near-miss extreme climatic event acts as a catalyst for adaptation strategies. We assemble a rich set of data to investigate households’ intentions and actual internal migration decisions. We also link migration outcomes with housing market outcomes. We find evidence of an intention gap, i.e., a difference between intended and actual migrations, and these intentions are mostly supply-side driven. In particular, we observe an increase in listings in the impacted regions, but no strong effect on incoming and outgoing migrations. We also observe a small increase in transactions and an increase in the supply of short-term rentals. Overall, our results suggest that the secondary home housing market was the most impacted, and there are important barriers to internal migrations.