Federalstate initiative seeks to disrupt cycle of disaster
Collaboration: Deal earmarks $1 billion
As flames crackle across California, state and federal officials have launched a plan to disrupt the cycle of wildfires that regularly choke the region with smoke and have gotten more dangerous and destructive over the years.
Dozens of fires, sparked by unusually powerful lightning storms this month, have burned more than 800,000 acres from Santa Cruz in the south to Healdsburg in the north and over to the Point
Reyes coast. The latest catastrophe has prompted a renewed effort to halt the annual tableau of smoke and flames.
Gov. Gavin Newsom and the U.S. Forest Service announced a joint statefederal agreement this month to reduce wildfire risks on 1 million acres of forest every year. The bold plan will sink as much as $1 billion into fire preparedness in California by scaling up vegetation treatment to 1 million acres annually by 2025. It commits to establishing a 20year program of forest and vegetation management by 2021, including wildland and watershed restoration.
The plan, called Shared Stewardship of California’s Forest and Rangelands, is the first major attempt by the state and federal governments to jointly improve public safety on the 33 million acres of forested land in the state. It addresses many of the fire safety problems facing California, including a lack of funding, poor collaboration between agencies and the need to better protect vulnerable communities — issues that fire scientists and forest ecologists have long flagged.
The initiative, signed by Newsom and Forest Service Chief Victoria Christiansen, emphasizes sciencebased forestry and rangeland management that would both improve the ecosystem and make money.
“It’s a great idea. It’s ambitious, but I think that’s a good thing,” said Scott Stephens, professor of fire science and the chairman of the division of ecosystem science at UC Berkeley. “It goes to the question of how do you change the fundamentals of fire safety — where do we live, how do we prepare for fire and take precautions.”
The plan is an effort to prevent the kinds of enormous fires that in 2017 and 2018 killed 135 people and destroyed tens of thousands of homes. More than 5.3 million acres have burned in California over the past five years, including catastrophic fires in Redding, the Wine Country, and the town of Paradise in Butte County.
And the annual drumbeat of smoky terror is continuing. Conflagrations known as the SCU Lightning Complex, which started on Aug. 18 in the East Bay, and the LNU Lightning Complex, which started a day earlier in the North Bay, are now the second and thirdlargest fires in California history, respectively. They are still threatening communities and fouling the air all over the state.
The plan is for the state and federal governments to each reduce wildfire risk on 500,000 acres of forest and wildlands a year, including the removal of forest debris and using prescribed fire. These fuel treatments are expected to cost an average of about $1,000 an acre.
The U.S. Forest Service manages more than 20 million acres across 18 national forests in California and nearly 58% of the state’s 33 million acres of forest. That’s compared to nearly 14 million acres of private and stateowned forest lands.
The joint effort will encourage ecologically sustainable timber harvesting and recycling of forest byproducts. Under the plan, the Forest Service, Cal Fire and other state agencies will coordinate with cities, counties, environmental organizations, industry and landowners on fireadaptation projects designed to make communities safer.
“Will the shared stewardship agreement be the silver bullet? I don’t know. But what I do know is we have to do something different than what we’ve been doing,” said Barnie Gyant, the deputy regional forester for resources and stewardship for the U.S. Forest Service. “California is an environment where fires are going to occur. The question is, can we all work together to protect communities, infrastructure and critical habitat over the landscape?”
But the agreement is only a framework and lacks specifics about how to accomplish the goals it outlines. The only concrete strategy offered so far is to manage vegetation on a million acres.
Max Moritz, a specialist in wildfire with the University of California Cooperative Extension, said no plan will work unless it includes adaptations for climate change and develops strategies for vulnerable communities. He said hundreds of thousands of Californians live in the wildland urban interface — the outskirts of towns next to forests and grasslands that are considered high risk for fire. Much stronger urban planning guidance is thus needed for where and how we build on fireprone landscapes, he said.
“We won’t ever get a grip on these fires and their associated losses through vegetation management. It’s that simple,” said Moritz, who is also an adjunct professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at UC Santa Barbara. “The vegetation part of the problem is not a very strong causal factor in all of these wildland urban interface fires.”