California is making progress on fire prevention. Federal retreat, shaky funding put it at risk

This opinion piece was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for its newsletters.

The Altadena and Palisades fires that swept through Southern California last year were just the latest in an escalating series of wildfires that have scorched the state.

The damage has been far-reaching: Californians have lost homes, community and — in some tragic cases — their lives. Wildfires are also raising insurance premiums and threatening the state’s giant sequoias and the headwater regions that provide most of California’s water supply. 

This year threatens to be another above-average fire season. As we’ve seen in recent years, fires can emerge quickly — even after wet winters. And if it feels like wildfires are increasing in size and scale, that’s because they are: The area of land burned in severe wildfires in the Sierra Nevada has tripled since 1990, while annual wildfire damages have more than quadrupled during that same period. 

Californians are understandably weary of this cycle. Decades of fire suppression have allowed vegetation to build up, increasing the risk of damages from high-severity wildfires. And now, a changing climate is intensifying the conditions that drive severe wildfire. 

The good news is that the state is engaged in an unprecedented multi-agency effort to reduce severe wildfire hazard on 1 million acres of wildlands each year. It’s an ambitious target, guided by a state-led task force, and one that meets the scale of the problem.

In a new report, the Public Policy Institute of California analyzed data from the task force that’s coordinating and tracking these efforts. We found the progress toward the goal accelerated between 2021 through 2024, with an average of 591,000 acres undergoing work to reduce wildfire hazard each year.  

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

One of the task force’s biggest wins was how it’s helped accelerate the return of beneficial fire to California’s landscapes. For a millennia, Native peoples used low-intensity fire to manage the landscape. Beneficial fire nearly doubled from 2021 to 2024, rising from about 100,000 to 200,000 acres per year.

This increase in cultural and prescribed burns represents an economical and environmentally sound way to restore forests and woodlands to health.

However, we are in a moment when federal agencies are reconsidering commitments to reduce wildfire hazard. Shifting federal policies and cuts at the Forest Service and its federal partners — which manage more than half of California’s forests — are introducing uncertainty about California’s ability to limit severe wildfire. 

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

Without dedicated funding, this crucially important work — which touches on public health, housing, water supply and more — will not occur at the scale the state needs.

In our report, we identified ways the task force can further enhance its efforts to protect landscapes and communities. For instance, it should refine its tracking of how long these treatments last and build the capacity of small and under-resourced partners to both conduct and report wildfire reduction efforts on private lands, which may not be captured right now.

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

Risks are rising, but the task force is making real progress. Now is not the time to lose momentum.

Bradley Franklin is a research fellow at the PPIC Water Policy Center. He is an agricultural and environmental economist who focuses on ways to inform the design and implementation of public policy in natural resource management.

Kyle Greenspan is a research associate with the PPIC Water Policy Center, where he focuses on topics ranging from groundwater to carbon sequestration.

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