CA fire prevention at risk as feds pull back, funding dries up

By Bradley Franklin and Kyle Greenspan, especially for CalMatters

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The Altadena and Palisades fires that passed Southern California last year were just the latest in an escalating series of wildfires to scorch the state.

The damage is enormous: Californians have lost homes, community and — in some tragic cases — their lives. Wildfires are also driving up insurance premiums and threatening the state giant sequoias and the headwaters that provide most of California’s water supply.

This year threatens to be different above average fire season. As we’ve seen in recent years, fires can start quickly – even after wet winters. And if wildfires seem to be growing in size and scale, that’s because they are: The area of ​​land burned by severe wildfires in the Sierra Nevada has tripled since 1990, while annual wildfire damage has more than quadrupled over the same period.

Californians are understandably tired of this cycle. Decades of fire suppression have allowed vegetation to accumulate, increasing the risk of damage from high-severity wildfires. And now, a changing climate is intensifying the conditions that trigger severe wildfires.

The good news is that the state is committed to an unprecedented multi-agency effort to reduce the danger of severe wildfires on 1 million acres of wildlands each year. It’s an ambitious goal, led by a state-led task force, and one that matches the scale of the problem.

In a new reportThe Public Policy Institute of California analyzed data from the task force that coordinates and tracks these efforts. We found that progress toward the goal accelerated between 2021 and 2024, with an average of 591,000 acres being worked to reduce wildfire danger each year.

The task force recently released a five-year term action plan doubles down on the need to prioritize the riskiest landscapes with a call to “treat the worst first”. Our analysis shows that they are doing just that: 83% of treated forest and wildland areas—through thinning, prescribed burns, or other methods—were in areas with high potential for severe wildfires, in areas where communities and wildlands overlap, or both.

One of the task force’s greatest victories was how it helped accelerate the return of beneficial fire to California’s landscapes. For millennia, indigenous peoples have used low-intensity fire to manage the landscape. Beneficial fire almost doubled from 2021 to 2024, growing from about 100,000 to 200,000 acres per year.

this increase in cultural and prescribed burns represents an economical and ecological way to restore the health of forests and woodlands.

However, we are at a point where federal agencies are renegotiation of commitments to reduce the risk of forest fire. Changing federal policies and logging in forestry and its federal partners—which manage more than half of California’s forests—bring uncertainty about California’s ability to contain severe wildfires.

In addition, the state’s annual wildfire mitigation budget could drop by hundreds of millions as major funding sources dry up. Government officials recently voted to change a program that charges polluters for their emissionsresulting in $200 million less for wildfire mitigation each year.

Without dedicated funding, this critically important work – which touches on public health, housing, water supply and more – will not be done on the scale the state needs.

In our report, we identified ways in which the task force can further improve its efforts to protect landscapes and communities. For example, it should refine the tracking of the duration of these treatments and build the capacity of small, under-resourced partners to conduct and report wildfire reduction efforts on private lands that may not currently be captured.

Most importantly, this effort relies on a robust state and federal partnership that is already producing results. Preserving this cooperation must be a priority.

The risks are mounting, but the task force is making real progress. Now is not the time to lose momentum.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.