Where Fire Kills Most: Risk Maps Reveal Budget Gaps in South Korea

Fire remains one of the most stubborn threats to modern urban life, and the money governments spend fighting it is finite. A new study from South Korea now offers one of the most detailed attempts yet to answer a deceptively simple question: is disaster safety money going where the risk actually is? By combining seven years of national fire statistics with regional budget records and a formal cost–benefit framework, researchers have built a policy-oriented method for deciding which regions deserve more investment, which need to spend differently, and how much economic return those adjustments could generate. The work, published in the journal Heliyon, analyzes fifteen administrative regions of South Korea between 2015 and 2021 and focuses on house fires, the single most damaging category of fire in the country.

The scale of the problem is considerable. According to the International Association of Fire and Rescue Services, more than eight million fire incidents occur worldwide each year, killing more than 120,000 people, and the global cost of fire damage is estimated at roughly one percent of world gross domestic product. South Korea’s own record is sobering: between 2012 and 2021, the country averaged 41,571 fire accidents annually, producing 2,243 casualties, including 310 deaths, and about 560 billion South Korean won in property damage each year. Residential fires accounted for roughly 26 percent of incidents but up to 46 percent of all casualties, which is why the research team, led by Bo-Young Heo of the National Disaster Management Research Institute collaboration network, concentrated its risk analysis on fires in houses and apartment buildings.

Previous studies of residential fires have largely concentrated on identifying the factors that predict fire outbreaks or on evaluating prevention programs. What has been missing, the authors argue, is a systematic link between measured regional risk and the actual allocation of firefighting budgets. A firefighting budget, they note, is effectively the numerical expression of a municipality’s fire policy, revealing whether spending flows toward physical investments such as stations, equipment, and information systems, or toward the personnel and administrative costs of maintaining the fire service itself. Because budgets cannot grow indefinitely, indiscriminate expansion is economically inefficient; what is needed instead is evidence about where each additional unit of spending produces the greatest reduction in harm.

The methodological core of the study is a matrix analysis that plots risk factors against reduction factors. For each of the fifteen regions, the researchers calculated the average annual number of deaths from house fires, the average annual property damage, and the population-standardized firefighting budget over the 2015 to 2021 period. Regions were then classified by comparing these values against the group means. Ten regions, about two-thirds of the sample, fell into the low-risk group, while five regions, one-third, were classified as high-risk. The high-risk group contained two distinct types: regions suffering heavy casualties and property losses despite relatively low firefighting budgets, and regions with heavy losses even though their budgets were comparatively large. Each type demands a different policy response, and the framework is designed to distinguish them.

The raw numbers behind this classification are striking. The average annual death toll across the fifteen regions was 10.8, but the deadliest region, designated Area 9, recorded 38.7 fatalities per year, nearly four times the average, while the safest recorded just 1.4. Property damage averaged about 3.68 billion won annually across regions, yet Area 9 alone accounted for 41 percent of all recorded damage, with losses peaking at 54.5 billion won in a single year. Areas 1 and 9 together contributed 40.3 percent of all house-fire fatalities in the dataset. Trend analysis added a forward-looking dimension: eight of the fifteen regions showed rising death trends and eleven showed rising property-damage trends, with five regions deteriorating on both measures simultaneously, suggesting that roughly a third of the country’s residential fire burden is concentrated in places where risk is still growing.

For the high-risk regions that already spent heavily, the study examined not the size of the budget but its composition. Korean public budgeting divides fire spending into policy project costs, which cover infrastructure, equipment, technology development, and fire information systems, and administrative operating expenses, which largely consist of personnel costs. Comparing the two high-risk regions with large budgets against the low-risk group revealed a consistent structural imbalance. The high-risk regions devoted an average of only 28.7 percent of their fire budgets to policy projects, compared with 34.4 percent in the low-risk group, a gap of 5.7 percentage points that persisted across every year of the study period. One region spent just 28.4 percent on projects, 6.0 points below the low-risk benchmark, while another spent 29.0 percent, 5.4 points below. In other words, money was flowing to maintaining organizations rather than to the preventive and physical investments most directly associated with reducing damage.

For the high-risk regions with comparatively small budgets, the analysis pointed instead toward expansion. Using the average population-standardized firefighting budget of the low-risk group as a benchmark, set at 11.2, the researchers calculated how far the three underfunded high-risk regions lagged behind. The results were substantial: one region would need a 34.8 percent budget increase to reach the benchmark, another would need 53.0 percent, and a third would need 30.8 percent. These are not marginal adjustments but major reallocations of fiscal priority, and the study is explicit that they should be implemented gradually, within the constraints of Korea’s local finance system, by prioritizing adjustable policy-project expenditures such as fire-prevention inspections, upgrades to aging safety facilities, equipment enhancement, emergency training, and risk-information systems rather than cutting statutory personnel obligations.

The economic case for these adjustments was tested with a formal cost–benefit analysis modeled on the Korean government’s guidelines for Natural Disaster Risk Improvement District projects. The framework discounts costs and benefits over an eighty-year horizon at a 5.5 percent discount rate, values loss of life using fire damage death insurance compensation standards, and treats the reduction in expected fatalities and property damage as the benefit of the proposed budget increase. Regional adjustment factors, derived from the ratio of high-risk to low-risk group averages, were set at 3.6012 for population-based fatality adjustments and 5.1148 for property-damage adjustments. Before adjustment, the benefit–cost ratios for the three underfunded regions stood at 12.69, 41.44, and 7.54. After the proposed increases, the ratios rose to 23.65, 95.01, and 13.78 respectively, indicating that every additional won invested in these high-risk regions is projected to return substantially more in avoided losses than the existing allocation.

From these findings the researchers distilled a decision system that other local governments could adopt. Regions with high fatalities and low budgets should receive additional investment to build suppression and response capacity. Regions with high fatalities despite large budgets should undergo an appropriateness review and shift the composition of spending toward prevention, including early detection systems, fire-resistant retrofitting, risk inspections, public education, and community-based prevention programs. Regions where both damage and budgets are low may achieve the best value by maintaining current investment while strengthening preventive management. The authors also recommend performance-based monitoring that ties budget execution to measurable outcomes such as casualties, property damage, response times, initial suppression performance, inspection coverage, and prevention-project execution rates, supported by Korea’s existing national fire statistics infrastructure.

The study is candid about its limits. It uses aggregated provincial-level data over a limited seven-year window, which may conceal differences among individual municipalities, and it excludes variables such as population density, building age, industrial structure, socioeconomic conditions, and emergency-response capacity. A small number of catastrophic fire events, which the researchers deliberately retained after verification against original records, may inflate regional averages, though excluding them would risk underestimating the low-frequency, high-impact risks that budgets exist to cover. The policy-project spending ratio is presented as a normative indicator rather than a proven causal driver of risk reduction. Even so, the framework represents a meaningful shift in how fire safety budgets might be debated: away from across-the-board increases and toward a risk-informed, evidence-based allocation in which the regions where fires kill and destroy the most finally receive the priority their numbers demand.

Subject of Research: Risk-based budget adjustment for regional fire safety using matrix risk assessment and cost–benefit analysis in South Korea

Article Title: Budget adjustment analysis of disaster safety budgets using regional risk assessment and cost–benefit analysis: A study of fire in South Korea

Article References: Budget adjustment analysis of disaster safety budgets using regional risk assessment and cost–benefit analysis: A study of fire in South Korea. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: fire safety, disaster budget, risk assessment, cost–benefit analysis, South Korea, residential fires, local government finance, firefighting, budget allocation, prevention policy, matrix analysis, public investment