Federal and state officials have spent the past five years rapidly ramping up efforts to reduce the hundreds of thousands of acres that are prone to fires, reduce the number of human-caused fires and fortify millions of homes against flames, heat and coal.
On Friday, those officials unveiled a draft plan to unify the work and turn dozens of projects and funding into a long-term strategy — as the state expects to lose hundreds of millions of dollars in its annual wildfire prevention budget in the coming years and the Trump administration seeks to cut the US Forest Service’s budget.
The new plan “will enable us to grow, be smarter, and be faster,” said Patrick Wright, director of the California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force, a joint effort between the state and federal governments that created the draft plan. “We’ve built that capacity, we’ve built that science, we’ve built that network … Now, we’re ready to take everything to the next level.”
Under the new framework, officials hope to increase green cover over a wide area from about 750,000 acres a year to as much as 1.2 million acres a year, create “aggressive” plans to reduce fires and get millions of Californians to comply with the new landscape requirements.
Right now, the Task Force is playing catch-up. More than a century of inappropriate land management and development practices have left the state vulnerable to frequent and dangerous fires that threaten to destroy communities and the environment.
In California’s forested areas, where historically there have been frequent, low-level wildfires, state and federal governments have worked hard to suppress all fires. That policy was largely motivated by the belief that fire harms “virgin wilderness,” and the perceived need to protect valuable trees for logging. Without regular fires to destroy the forest floor, California’s forest has grown five to six times.
Now, when a fire starts, it has enough fuel to kill a large part of the forest. What grows later after that is often shrubland, not forest.
Meanwhile, native shrublands like those around Los Angeles have experienced a fire every 30 to 130 years. But as people migrated to the plains, they brought with them the power of fire. Electrical equipment, unattended campfires, cigarette butts and burning materials have increased fire duration.
Now, some areas in the Santa Monica Mountains experience a fire every five to eight years – more often than not for native vegetation to recover. If not, the invasive grass is independent.
In 2021 — following a devastating fire season and mounting scientific evidence that land management and construction practices are partly to blame — Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state legislature are reviving a forest management task force to focus on the wildfire problem.
That same year, the Task Force released its first five-year plan to address the problem. Friday’s edition is the first update of that edition.
The new plan is more ambitious, but California will likely have to do it with less money than it has had in recent years.
The state is losing two important sources of funding. Officials recently changed the system that charges polluters, which analysts estimate will lead to a $200 million cut in California’s annual fire prevention budget. Meanwhile, the state is quickly using up a $1.5-billion pot from a voter-approved climate bond, leaving little to come in the coming years.
On the federal side, the Trump administration proposed, for the second year in a row, dramatically scaling back the budget of the Forest Service, which oversees and funds much of the work in California. Last year, the administration proposed a 65% budget cut, which Congress strongly rejected. This year, the administration proposes to reduce it by 75%.
Wright, however, is confident that the state can make significant progress in the coming years.
The Task Force hopes to prioritize the most vulnerable areas in the state and find outside sources of funding, including utilities looking to reduce their chances of starting fires, CalTrans looking to reduce fire starts on roads and companies willing to buy wood removed by forest reduction projects.
Wright also expects that doing this work will decrease over time. After a dangerously dense forest has been cleared by hand and heavy machinery, it’s much safer to come back a few years later with prescribed fire, which is much cheaper.
“The science is clear that we can achieve our goals with fewer acres and fewer dollars if we prioritize better than we have,” he said.
