CONFRONTING THE WILDFIRE CRISIS
A Strategy for Protecting Communities and Improving Resilience in America’s Forests
A CALL FOR DECISIVE ACTION
Wildfires have been growing in size, duration, and destructivity over the past 20 years. Growing wildfire risk is due to accumulating fuels, a warming climate, and expanding development in the wildland-urban interface. The risk has reached crisis proportions in the West, calling for decisive action to protect people and communities and improve forest health and resilience. It will take a paradigm shift in land management across jurisdictional boundaries to reduce risk and restore fire-adapted landscapes. In response, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service is establishing a strategy for working with partners to dramatically increase fuels and forest health treatments by up to four times current treatment levels in the West.
CONFRONTING THE WILDFIRE CRISIS
Under this strategy, the Forest Service will work with partners to engineer a paradigm shift by focusing fuels and forest health treatments more strategically and at the scale of the problem, using the best available science as the guide. At the Forest Service, we now have the science and tools we need to size and place treatments in a way that will truly make a difference. We will focus on key “firesheds”—large forested landscapes and rangelands with a high likelihood that an ignition could expose homes, communities, and infrastructure to wildfire. Firesheds, typically about 250,000 acres in size, are mapped to match the scale of community exposure to wildfire.
A WILDFIRE CRISIS IN THE WEST
Over the last several decades, the growing wildfires in the West only gradually reached the crisis proportions we see today. At the Forest Service, we responded by working with other land managers and policymakers. Together, we are rethinking the Nation’s approaches to wildland fire management. We have made advances in collaboration, increased funding for work to reduce wildland fire risk, and aligned actions with partners across landownership boundaries. Although the scale of the work never matched the scale of wildfire risk, we created a collaborative structure that we can build on with our partners to reduce wildfire risk.
WHY ARE WE IN CRISIS?
Many western landscapes are at grave and growing risk of extreme wildfire impacts due to a combination of accumulating fuels, a warming climate, and expanding development in fire-prone landscapes. Past land use practices, drought, and an overemphasis on fire suppression are also contributing factors. Each factor alone elevates the risk, but the layering of each factor on the next has increased the risk exponentially, reaching the crisis proportions we see today.
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
Wildfires rampaged across the West in 2021, and not for the first time. In 2020, 2017, and 2015, more than 10 million acres—an area more than six times the size of Delaware—burned nationwide. Nearly a quarter of the contiguous United States is at moderate to very high risk from wildfire. Over half of that area is in the West. In the past 20 years, many States have had record wildfires, and fires in two Western States (Alaska and California) have exceeded 1 million acres in size. In 2020, Coloradans saw all three of their largest fires on record. Fires larger than 100,000 acres have become so common that the National Interagency Fire Center has stopped tracking them as exceptional events. “Fire seasons” have become whole fire years, with a yearround workforce for wildland fire suppression and year-round planning and fieldwork in performing postfire recovery and in preparing landscapes for future wildfires. In short, the Nation faces a growing wildfire crisis, especially in the West. This is a national emergency, and it calls for decisive action. In response, the Forest Service is proposing a comprehensive 10-year strategy for protecting communities and improving resilience in America’s forests.
WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT?
A degraded landscape needs treatment to restore forest health, much like an ailing patient needs treatment by a doctor. Land managers can increase forest resilience and minimize wildfire impacts through forest management activities based on sound science. The activities are called hazardous fuels treatments or fuels and forest health treatments because their purpose is to reduce dangerous fuel levels and restore forest health and resilience.
