Wildfire suppression expenditures sharply increased from $528.5 million in 1985 (in 2015 dollars) to $2.1 billion in 2015 while the size of area burned has more than tripled (from 2.8 to 10.1 million acres) during the same time period (National Interagency Fire Center [NIFC] 2015, USDA Forest Service 2015). The proportion of the Forest Service’s annual budget allocated to wildfire suppression has increased from 16% in 1995 to 52% in 2015 and is projected to increase to 67% of the budget by 2025 (USDA Forest Service 2015). Landscape-scale restoration and fuels-reduction treatments are now widely accepted management practices that are known to significantly decrease the risks and costs associated with wildland fire suppression (ERI 2013). However, the increased proportion of the Forest Service’s budget going towards wildland fire expenditures has detracted from all non-fire programs and hindered the Forest Service’s ability to implement more forest restoration and wildfire risk reduction treatments (Figure 1). While acres restored by the Forest Service has improved in the southwest, the cost of treatment has been a major barrier to achieving a much broader area impacted. Included in the cost of treatment are the planning, preparation, administration, mechanical thinning and prescribed burning costs, which can total from $1,321 to $3,195 (in 2015 dollars) per acre (Selig et al. 2010, Huang et al. 2013). Without a forest products industry to utilize the large quantities of non-merchantable woody biomass planned to be removed from the mostly public lands (Nicholls 2014), policymakers and planners are unlikely to accomplish the targets set forth in their planning documents (i.e. Environmental Impact Statements). There is therefore a need to increase forest industry capacity in order to reduce fuel loads in concert with ecological restoration and to utilize wood products removed during restoration treatments. Yet, development of a more robust local forest products industry is hindered by the need for substantial upfront investments, depressed timber markets in the West (Keegan et al. 2006, Jones et al. 2010, Bagdon et al. 2016), and lack of a social license to harvest timber in the Southwest (Selig et al. 2010, 4FRI Stakeholders Group 2011, Nicholls 2014). This paper presents a review of the types of economic benefits that arise from fuels-reduction treatments in the southwestern U.S. to inform policy discussions about the economic impacts and benefits of the treatments.