U.S. CRAFTS $50 BILLION PLAN TO STAVE OFF WILDFIRES

Money will expand efforts to thin forests near communities

The Biden administration said Tuesday it will significantly expand efforts to stave off catastrophic wildfires that have torched areas of the U.S. West by more aggressively thinning forests around “hot spots” where nature and neighborhoods collide.

As climate change heats up and dries out states in the West, administration officials said they have crafted a $50 billion plan to more than double the use of controlled fires and logging to reduce trees and other vegetation that serves as tinder in the most at-risk areas. Only some of the work has funding so far.

Projects will begin this year, and the plan will focus on regions where out-of-control blazes have wiped out neighborhoods and sometimes entire communities — including California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, the east side of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, and portions of Arizona, Oregon and Washington state.

Homes keep getting built in fire-prone areas, even as conditions that stoke blazes get worse.

“You’re going to have forest fires. The question is how catastrophic do those fires have to be,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told The Associated Press in an interview. “The time to act is now if we want to ultimately over time change the trajectory of these fires.”

Specific projects weren’t immediately released, and it’s not clear who would pay for the full scope of work envisioned across almost 80,000 square miles — an area almost as large as Idaho. Much of that area is controlled by states, tribes or is privately owned.

Reaching that goal would require an estimated $20 billion over 10 years for work on national forests and $30 billion for work on other federal, state, tribal and private lands, said Vilsack spokesperson Kate Waters.

Vilsack acknowledged that the new effort will also require a “paradigm shift” within the U.S. Forest Service, from an agency devoted to stamping out fires, into one that uses what some Native Americans call “good fire” on forests and rangeland to prevent even larger blazes.

Forest Service planning documents indicate the work will focus on “hot spots” that make up only 10 percent of the fire-prone areas across the U.S. but account for 80 percent of risk to communities because of their population densities and locations.

The recently-passed federal infrastructure bill put a down payment on the initiative — about $3 billion over five years that Vilsack said will get work going quickly.

Wildfire expert John Abatzoglou said lessening fire dangers on the amount of land envisioned under the administration’s plan is a “lofty goal” that represents even more acreage than burned over the past 10 years across the West.

But Abatzoglou, a University of California Merced engineering professor, said the focus on wildfire hazards closest to communities makes sense.

“Our scorecard for fire should be about lives saved rather than acres that didn’t burn,” he said.

Vilsack joined Forest Service Chief Randy Moore to announce the plan during an event in Phoenix where he defended its scope as realistic.

“We know from a scientific standpoint precisely where this action has to take place in many of these forests in order to protect communities, in order to protect people,” Vilsack said following the announcement at the Desert Botanical Garden, a popular showcase for cactuses, desert trees and other dryweather plants.