“So the business impacts of natural disasters are huge,” she said.
Lawson spoke to a crowd of about 150 people taking part in the 2025 Montana Outdoor Recreation Summit held at The Northern Hotel over three days.
Headwaters Economics is a Montana-based nonprofit that has focused much of its research on diversifying rural economies and offering tips to manage growth, while also providing practical solutions and tools to deal with a variety of issues.
Montana knows
The impacts of flooding and wildfires are all too common in Montana.
After such disasters, about a quarter of businesses never reopen, a study by the Congressional Research Service found. Of those businesses that remain, another 40% close within the first year.
“So these impacts are not just immediate, they’re long term, and they can stick in communities,” Lawson said.
19 counties tied to recreation
In Montana, the economies of 19 counties meet the definition of being dependent on recreation, based on a metric developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service.
“When we overlay wildfire risk, every single one of those is in the top 80 or higher percentile for wildfire risk,” Lawson said. “When we look at flooding, 15 out of the 19, so about three quarters of those counties are facing high flooding risk.
“So in Montana , we’re even more exposed to have higher risk.”
Not just tourism
Lawson said too often, conversations about the outdoor recreation economy start and stop at tourism, but that ignores many other factors. Tourists may visit an area and decide to relocate there because of access to the environment, including parks and trails. For similar reasons, retirees may select a community to move to.
Businesses may tout outdoor opportunities when recruiting employees. Outdoor-related businesses and entrepreneurs may choose to be based in a community close to recreational opportunities.
When more people move to towns and cities to pursue their favorite pastime, tax revenue increases.
So when an outdoor disaster hits, such as when Gardiner temporarily lost its connection to Yellowstone National Park during the 2022 flood, loss of tourism was just one of the first ramifications.
“Overnight, they lost 92% of their resort tax revenue, and so that’s funding essential services in the community,” Lawson said.
The impacts of wildfires and floods go beyond the immediate impact, Lawson noted. In the case of Gardiner, the community also temporarily lost its water supply.
“But then it has this longer-term ripple effect,” Lawson said. “All of a sudden, local government had to do a lot more to respond and to clean up with a lot less money.”
This matters because in 2023, Montana’s economy received a $3.4 billion boost just from outdoor recreation, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
“Just for context, this figure is bigger than agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting combined,” Lawson said. “It’s bigger than transportation, so like trucking and those kinds of services. It’s bigger than warehousing. It’s bigger than information, which includes publishing and software development.”
Outdoor rec superpowers
After apologizing for “bludgeoning” the crowd with such statistics, Lawson moved to the more hopeful and helpful side of her talk.
She credited outdoor recreation professionals with being creative problem solvers able to connect people — including land managers, community leaders, outdoor advocates and natural resource managers — to have hard conversations regarding difficult topics.
As an example, she pointed to the community of Glendive, which was pursuing construction of a levee along the Yellowstone River to protect it from winter ice jams that can lead to flooding.
“But folks who are working on this have had a hard time getting people involved, getting people engaged with the project and to talk about it,” Lawson said.
Her theory, with apologies to engineers in the room, is that infrastructure is boring.
“But you know what’s not boring? Outdoor recreation,” she said.
So the community hatched the idea to build a trail atop the levee that would help connect the community and Makoshika State Park.
“They started getting more folks involved. They started getting people’s attention. This also turned into an outdoor rec project.”
So now, in addition to protecting property and lives, the project has become an economic development project that also provides access to different sources of funding.
BUILDING IN RESILENCE
Lawson said outdoor recreation planners can also help build trails that are resilient to flooding and wildfire, providing an example from Northern California where mountain bikers were connecting former timber towns with a network of trails.
To make the routes more resilient, the trail builders are considering where firefighters may build a dozer line to halt a fire’s advance. They’ve also thought about building trails that can double as fire breaks.
Another example is the community of Big Sky where the Chamber of Commerce is partnering with the local fire department to produce publications for hotel rooms and rentals providing information about evacuation in case of a wildland fire.
In Lahaina, Hawaii, where 102 people died in a wind-driven wildfire in 2023, visitors are now charged a fee that funds fire mitigation.
Park County, in Montana, received a Forest Service grant to rewrite its community wildfire protection plan.
Another tool is Headwaters Economics’ “Neighborhoods at Risk” tool available on the nonprofit’s website.
“It allows you to enter the name of any community, county, tribal area in the U.S. and serves up the people who are at risk in the community, and overlays that with different metrics of climate exposure, so whether that is extreme heat, extreme wildfire,” Lawson explained.
A CALL TO ACTION
Lawson closed her presentation recognizing that many people downplay the possibilities of disasters occurring. Landowners build their homes in floodplains along rivers or in dense forests far from any fire station, preferring to see the area for its beauty and solitude rather than as locations where disasters like fires and floods may occur.
Many people also believe that after something like a 100-year flood, they don’t have to worry. Then a 500-year flood hits.
“Building that outdoor recreation economy that helps to improve a community’s resilience, it takes planning and attention,” Lawson said.
“I encourage you to be part of the solution in your community.”
Lawson’s full report on “Future-proofing the outdoor recreation economy” can be found on the Headwaters Economics’ website at headwaterseconomics.org/outdoor-recreation/future-proofing-the-outdoor-recreation-economy/.
© 2025 the Billings Gazette (Billings, Mont.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
