(The Center Square) – California’s nonpartisan analysis office has outlined significant issues in historical wildfire policies, implicitly highlighting the state’s role in the devastating Southern California wildfires.
The state’s policies combined fire suppression with insufficient forest management and fuels reduction, leading to buildups of deadly tinder, according to the state-funded Legislative Analyst’s Office.
The LAO reported that while fires are burning less land than they used to, the fires have become “deadlier and more destructive.”
“Historically, significant parts of the state would burn annually, especially during the warm, dry months of the year. In the 1700s, for example, an estimated 4.5 million acres burned each year, on average,” wrote the Legislative Analyst’s Office in its report. “This is more than four times the average annual amount of acreage that has burned in recent decades, due in large part to the state’s focus on suppressing wildfires.”
“Many plant and tree species native to California adapted to these regular, low- and moderate-intensity wildfires,” continued the LAO. “These fires played an important role in keeping the state’s forests and landscapes healthy by periodically clearing underbrush and contributing to regrowth of native plant species.”
The LAO says high-severity fires, meanwhile, “often denude landscapes, leaving large areas with mostly charred remnants.”
The report says having more buildings in fire-prone areas, climate change, utility infrastructure and unhealthy forests play a significant role in worsening fires.
The LAO notes that even though utility equipment, such as power lines, are responsible for only 10% of wildfires overall, they are responsible for “at least eight out of 20 of the most destructive fires in California’s history.” Currently, power infrastructure is being investigated as the cause of the recent Eaton Fire, which destroyed nearly 10,000 structures in the Los Angeles area last month.
The report also emphasized the role of failures in forest management in the worsening fires.
“Much of the state’s forestlands are unhealthy, which means they tend to be dense with small trees and brush,” continued the LAO. “Healthy forests tend to have less severe wildfires that burn through the brush and may leave tree canopies intact. Many forestlands are in an unhealthy condition as a result of historical failure to implement logging best practices and years of suppressing naturally occurring wildfires.”
While the state’s resource management and fire prevention budget has increased from $140 million in the 2016-2017 fiscal year to $440 million in fiscal year 2024-2025, this spending pales in comparison to the wildfire response budget.
The report notes wildfire response has grown from $2.2 billion in fiscal year 2017-2018 to $4.2 billion for the 2024-2025 fiscal year, a figure that does not include supplemental funding for the January 2025 wildfires, which means the wildfire response budget for the current fiscal year will likely to be more than 10 times the fire prevention budget.
Other government reports have detailed how California has 15 million acres of forest at high risk for forest fires. However, as the LAO report says, most of California’s forests are owned by the federal government.
Due to federal regulations, smaller federal forest management projects such as prescribed burns take an average of 4.7 years to receive permitting, while federal prescribed burns that require environmental impact reports take an average of 7.2 years to secure permits — by which point an uncontrolled wildfire may have already violently reduced the area’s fire risk.
A new bipartisan bill that just passed the House of Representatives could significantly reduce federal permitting timelines for forest management projects. California has aimed to expand prescribed burns to treat up to 400,000 at-risk acres per year by 2025. The state has also streamlined environmental regulations to make it easier to conduct forest management.
However, even with these regulatory reforms and ambitious treatment goals, ongoing forest treatment rates are less than a third of the 4.5 million acres annually of naturally occurring lower-severity fires that once kept the state’s forests in order.