This text was initially revealed at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Area.com’s Professional Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
The western United States is going through one other damaging wildfire season, with extra acres burned in Colorado alone in 2025 than within the past four years combined. If world warming continues on its present trajectory, the quantity of forest space burned every year might double or even triple by midcentury.
In other words, more fire is coming, more often.
As U.S. forests burn, Congress and federal agencies are asking an important question: What role should federal land management play in reducing fire risk?
About two-thirds of forest land within the western U.S. is publicly owned, with the vast majority of it managed by federal companies such because the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Administration. These public lands are treasured for recreation, wildlife habitat, timber manufacturing and open area. They’re additionally where many of today’s largest fires burn.
Traditionally, lightning- and human-ignited fires saved forests much less dense and lowered forest litter and undergrowth that may simply burn. Whereas some managed burning continues immediately, the violent displacement of Native people, criminalization of Indigenous fireplace stewardship and more than a century of federal fire suppression have largely eliminated fireplace as a crucial ecological course of in fire-prone forests, leaving gasoline to build up.
When these forests burn immediately, the result’s usually hotter and more severe fires that elude any try at management. And rising world temperatures are raising the risk.
A number of of the present federal proposals for managing fireplace threat concentrate on increasing timber harvesting on federal lands as an answer. Additionally they suggest speeding up approvals for these initiatives by limiting environmental evaluations and public oversight.
As specialists in fire science and policy, we see some helpful concepts within the proposed options, but in addition causes for concern.
Whereas reducing bushes will help scale back the severity of future fires, it has to incorporate thinning in the correct locations to make a distinction. With out oversight and public involvement, growing logging might skip areas with low-value bushes that want thinning and miss alternatives for simpler fireplace risk-reduction work.
Harvesting timber to reduce fire risk
President Donald Trump cited wildfire risk in his March 2025 executive order calling for “an immediate expansion of American timber production.” And the U.S. Forest Service adopted with a dedication to increase timber sales on federal land by 25% over the subsequent 4 years.
Trump, federal officers and members of Congress who’re advancing legislation such as the Fix Our Forests Act have additionally known as for dashing up approval of timber-harvesting initiatives by lowering public remark durations on proposals, limiting environmental analyses of the plans and curbing the power of teams to sue to dam or change the initiatives in court docket.
These proposals are sometimes framed as pragmatic options to clear the best way for motion to scale back fireplace threat sooner. The urgency is actual, and this argument can appear intuitive. Nobody desires burdensome processes to face in the best way of lowering wildfire harm. But it surely’s vital to take a tough take a look at the issue and actual options.
Environmental reviews aren’t the problem
Research shows that environmental reviews are rarely the main barrier to forest initiatives geared toward lowering fireplace threat.
The larger obstacles are the shrinking of the federal forest workforce over the previous twenty years, the low commercial value of the small bushes and brush that must be eliminated, and the shortage of contractors, processing amenities and markets for low-value wooden.
Knowledge from the U.S. Forest Service helps these conclusions.
Between 2005 and 2018, over 82% of the U.S. Forest Service’s land management projects have been permitted utilizing categorical exclusions. Categorical exclusions permit companies to skip environmental assessments and are the quickest and least burdensome type of Nationwide Environmental Coverage Act, or NEPA, overview, with restricted evaluation or alternative for public involvement.
Less than 1% of the projects were challenged in court, and most of these challenges focused the most important and most complicated initiatives, the place public oversight and evaluation are crucial to getting it proper on the bottom, equivalent to massive mining operations or forest administration initiatives that may cover hundreds of thousands of acres.
An evaluation of the majority of U.S. Forest Service land administration initiatives between 2009 and 2021 discovered that complying with NEPA took between 7% and 21% of the initiatives’ timelines, usually shorter than the timelines for issuing contracts.
Some extent of planning, intergovernmental coordination and public involvement should occur earlier than beginning a fuel-reduction mission to know the place the work is acceptable and crucial.
Why reviews and public oversight matter
What would be lost if environmental-analysis and public-involvement requirements were curtailed?
Oversight helps ensure that projects happen where they are needed to scale back fireplace threat. With out that, political and economic pressures can result in extra forest thinning in places the place there are mills and beneficial timber – quite than within the areas the place wildfire threat is greater however the bushes aren’t as beneficial.
Environmental overview and public remark are among the many few instruments communities must form fire-mitigation initiatives.
These processes additionally be sure that the work would not cease at federal boundaries. And so they assist companions, equivalent to neighborhood organizations, state companies and native fireplace departments, plan and work collectively.
Oversight would not simply shield the setting — it permits funding and partnerships, safeguards communities and builds shared ownership of adapting to fireplace.
Solutions that work
So, what can Congress and the federal government do to reduce fire risk to communities? The answer starts with investing in forest management and projects that can reduce fire risk.
Joint projects involving communities and state, tribal and local agencies, like those under the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program, construct partnerships to reduce fire risk throughout massive landscapes and decrease the chance of fireplace spreading to properties and federal wildlands. The Good Neighbor Authority, created in 2001, permits federal companies to contract with states, counties and tribes to supply forest administration work on federal lands.
But federal funding for state, tribal and personal forest administration is on the chopping block. Wildfire threat and the capability to deal with the problem are getting into reverse instructions.
The Wildland Hearth Mitigation and Administration Fee, a bipartisan group of fireplace professionals, scientists, tribes, land managers and native officers, just lately launched recommendations for improving fire management that decision for larger funding and collaboration in any respect ranges to scale back the hearth threat. The report emphasizes the significance of proactive options pushed by native communities, shared decision-making and higher use of prescribed fireplace. Attaining these targets would require sustained collaboration throughout jurisdictions and sectors, with communities engaged as full companions within the course of.
Forest and fireplace administration are complicated jobs. It’s affordable to yearn for fast options to the wildfire disaster, however it’s vital that any fixes result in lasting progress. Deregulation and disinvestment could finally exacerbate wildfire threat.
This text is republished from The Conversation below a Artistic Commons license. Learn the original article.
