Rethinking California fire policy

Contextualizing the LA fires—and some ideas on the way forward.

Photo from the Eaton Fire in Los Angeles County, January 2025. Credit: CALFIRE

Pacific Forest Trust’s Paul Mason reflects on the current conflagrations in SoCal and offers recommendations on future policy.

The scale of destruction in Southern California’s wind-driven fires is staggering. Many families suddenly lost everything, and our hearts go out to them.

Amidst all the fast-moving reporting and social media on the fires, the amount of misinformation and attempts at political opportunism is extreme. As someone who has worked on fire and natural resource policy issues in Sacramento for the last couple decades I want to add some context to the situation, what the state has done in recent years, and a few ideas on what to do going forward.

This is bad, and we’re going to see more situations like this in the future.

The LA region hasn’t had meaningful rain yet this year, a situation driven in part by climate change. The lack of enough rain to end “fire season” means that the extremely dry conditions, indicative of peak fire season, are now overlapping with Santa Ana winds. We are likely to see more “very dry, very windy” conditions in the future. Climate scientist Dr. Daniel Swain has been doing a great job explaining this on social media (see HERE if you can access Twitter, or HERE for a relevant academic paper on this). Below is a good graphic from that paper:

Note that this is not just an issue for LA. As climate change shifts seasonal precipitation patterns, we will end up with large areas around the western US (and globally) that are uncharacteristically dry and will see extreme fire behavior. The December 2021 Marshall Fire near Boulder Colorado is similar in that it was uncharacteristically dry, then the winds drove a very fast-moving destructive wildfire. As we see in LA, even relatively modest changes in precipitation can have massive changes in fire behavior and consequences to people and the environment.

California has two different fire problems: too much fire in much of coastal SoCal, but too little “good fire” in the “frequent fire forests” of the Sierras, Cascades, and North Coast.

California’s vegetation evolved with fire, both from lightning and from indigenous Californians, and needs fire for healthy ecosystems. But 170+ years of colonization and massive increases in population have changed how fire occurs on the landscape. To oversimplify a bit, our fire suppression efforts have been too effective in the forested regions which now have a buildup of fuel and densification of the forest. In contrast, in the heavily populated areas of coastal SoCal there are unnaturally frequent fire ignitions by humans are causing the coastal chapparal to burn too frequently. This prevents natural regeneration and facilitates conversion to other vegetation, like invasive shrubs and grasses (which are a greater fire hazard).

In SoCal where the fires are currently burning, the generally accepted strategies are:

1. Prevent fires from starting or stop them almost immediately. You may hear the phrase “pre-positioning” fire engines and resources when there is going to be a red flag weather event. In the case of the current fires, I believe the state had deployed an additional 66 engines to SoCal to be able to react more quickly to any new fire starts.

2. Make structures less flammable. There are lots of ways to make homes less vulnerable, including removing flammable vegetation & material from within 5’ of the house, getting rid of landscaping bark, replacing wood-shake roofing, upgrading single pane windows, and upgrading attic vents to keep embers from getting sucked into the attic. Some of these are expensive (roofs and windows) and some are unpopular (non-flammable zone 0-5’ from home), but they can make the difference between a home being doomed versus being defendable. Note that modern building standards are much better for fire than older standards that were used for most existing homes.

3. Restore more natural landscape conditions. Past management, invasive species, and fire suppression have changed the type and density of vegetation. Restoring conditions more analogous to pre-colonization conditions would be better adapted to fire.

California has dramatically increased spending on fire preparedness and landscape resilience. That will need to increase and continue indefinitely.

The state has dramatically increased investments since the catastrophic fires in Santa Rosa and Paradise in 2017-2018. CAL FIRE’s budget has doubled in recent years, and last year the state began adding another 2,457 permanent positions to CAL FIRE by 2028-29.

In addition to expanding the Department, the state has invested about $2.7 billion since 2020 on a variety of programs to protect communities and improve forest and landscape resilience. Much of that funding has gone out as grants and contracts that are still underway.

There have been some partisan attacks that California cut investments in fuel reduction and wildfire preparedness. In last year’s budget agreement, there was some substitution of funding sources (shifting from General Fund to GGRF) and some small reductions, but there was still an allocation of $454 million (more than double the $200 million required by law). You can view the details of allocations since 2020 HERE. Keep in mind that it takes time to actually use these funds, so much of this $2.7 billion is still being utilized in multi-year grants by various partners.

California must redouble efforts and investments in restoring our landscapes to more natural conditions to be prepared for the increasing consequences of these climate-exacerbated wildfires. One way to do that is by better incorporating the restoration of natural and working lands into state climate policy. The state’s Nature-Based Solutions Climate Targets are a good framework and those actions can be funded from the climate bond as well as incorporated into an improved cap and trade program should that be reauthorized this year.

A side-effect of aggressive fire suppression is that our large fires happen under the worst conditions.

California is a fire-adapted landscape and fire is an essential part of our ecology, just like rain. The best estimate is than prior to European colonization around 4-5 million acres were burned annually, mostly at a low to moderate severity that helped shape the density of vegetation and maintain the open forests of large old conifers with branches that started 100’ above the ground.

Under the state’s current fire policy, the goal is to put out every wildfire as quickly as possible. It’s generally easy to put out fires that are burning under moderate (cooler, damper, less windy) conditions, so the unintended effect of this policy is that we stop the “good” fires and end up with a larger portion of the landscape burning under extreme conditions with maximum damage.

Many of us are working to increase the use of prescribed and cultural fire so that more of the landscape burns under conditions that achieve good outcomes, and there has been real progress. Last year SB 1101 (Limón) passed with broad support from across the spectrum (enviros, government, air quality advocates, landowners, etc) – that bill will streamline CAL FIRE’s ability to do large prescribed fire projects and requires the identification of a statewide network of fuel barriers that can facilitate more prescribed fire and more nuanced fire management under reasonable weather conditions.

We must restore more natural conditions to a landscape that is deeply altered by past resource extraction and fire suppression, so that fire can again occur as a natural process.

California’s landscape looks very different than it did before European colonization. Logging removed the big, old trees and the loss of fire as a natural process, both from fire suppression and oppression of indigenous Californian’s fire stewardship, has replaced relatively open forests of large trees with extremely dense thickets of young trees. These dense young forests are far more likely to completely torch in a fire compared to the more open forest of larger trees where fire is likely to stay on the ground and help maintain those open conditions. It’s the difference between stand replacing fires vs stand maintaining fires.

Restoring more natural forests is a multi-step process, and it will take generations to re-grow the big old trees that once defined our forests. There are three main steps we can be taking today:

1. Thin unnaturally dense forests down to a more ecologically appropriate level. Note that AB 2276 (Wood, 2024) consolidated and improved an existing forest thinning permit process to make it easier to use, and clearer about retaining the biggest trees. This was supported by enviros, forest landowners, local governments and others.

2. Reintroduce fire as extensively as possible. Thinning a forest makes it easier to have a controlled burn with good outcomes, and removing that material reduces the amount of smoke generated by the fire. But thinning by itself is not enough, fire is the key natural process and it makes the risk reduction effort much more effective than thinning alone. A key partner in this effort is indigenous tribes, who have been practicing cultural burning since time immemorial. They are in a unique position to help lead a reconnection with the beneficial use of fire and train other fire practitioners across the state. For example, the Karuk Tribe is developing a multi-purpose Fire Training Center that can anchor these efforts in northwestern California which the Legislature should fund though the Climate Bond.

   There is also a need to support locally based prescribed fire efforts, including California’s ~28 prescribed burn associations, which have brought prescribed fire back onto private lands across California and catalyzed a broad shift in public sentiment around and demand for prescribed fire. There is a need to support these Tribal and community-based efforts with stable investments in staffing, training, and capacity building.

   Note that while prescribed fire is mostly just applying a natural process under conditions where we get the best outcomes, the permitting required can be truly onerous, taking years and tens of thousands of dollars (or more). Both the state and feds need to get nimbler and more efficient with prescribed fire to do enough to make an impact on the scale of the problem.

3. Change how we are managing forests to restore more fire-resilient conditions. Privately owned forests are often managed for financial return and optimizing that return generally leads to the type of dense, young forest that currently dominates our landscape and creates so much fire risk. The best way to shift management to develop more natural conditions with larger trees and more diverse structure is through “working forest conservation easements”. These are permanent, legally binding commitments that can include specific changes in management that guide management toward more fire-resilient, climate adapted conditions. These changes have a cost to the landowner that can be assessed and appraised to establish the value, and the landowner can be compensated with public funding for the foregone income. In this way the public helps make it economically viable to do the type of forest management we want to see, and there is a legal commitment attached to that parcel in perpetuity to ensure it continues through multiple generations. This is a well-accepted tool: Pacific Forest Trust has over 130,000 acres of these easements that are changing management across northern California and Oregon. These permanent commitments are especially important in forestland since growth takes centuries and harvest takes days…

Restoring more natural conditions, and fire as a natural process, applies in other ecosystems too. Native vegetation across the state has been replaced with invasive species from eucalyptus trees to European grasses. While details vary, in general the ecology that evolved here for millions of years is more resilient to fire than the species that have taken hold in the last 200 years. Of course, restoring native species and ecosystem processes is good for wildlife and biodiversity too.

So, what do we do next?

These fires will trigger state action on a wide range of issues, but in the realm of landscape resilience and community protection some initial actions could include:

1. Require every county in California to develop a Wildfire Resilience Plan which serves as an implementation plan for a comprehensive approach to mitigating fire risk to acceptable levels over the next 20 years (or similar long planning horizon). This plan would include a risk assessment, modeling of fire behavior under projected future climate conditions, assessment of relevant action needed (ranging from water system upgrades to the parcel level recommendations on hardening). Include requirement for a strategy to fund the effort, implement code enforcement, and take other governmental actions to achieve the Resilience Plan. Make future state grant funding contingent upon having a credible plan in place.

2. Accelerate forest and landscape restoration efforts that combine near-term restoration actions of thinning and prescribed fire with permanent working forest conservation easements (where appropriate) to ensure climate-smart and fire resilient management in perpetuity. Prioritize areas of critical value to statewide water resources and/or high ecological value. Create a new role in state climate policy (cap & trade reauthorization) for landscape restoration and conservation projects that are permanent, verifiable, and have real and material climate benefits over time.

3. Be more careful about where we build, and how we rebuild. All places have some hazards, but we should sharply discourage new developments in areas with high and very high fire hazard designations, while expediting in-fill development. Also, building standards make a meaningful difference in whether structures survive, but the Governor’s Executive Order creates a 60-day process for potentially suspending some of the fire-safe building codes. While folks are understandably eager so help people rebuild, post-fire reconstruction should incorporate all the modern fire-safe building codes, not just for the survival of that structure but for the safety of neighboring homes.

There will be more to say in the coming days and weeks, but I wanted to share these thoughts ASAP.

Lastly, as we have policy discussions in the coming months let’s keep in mind that this has been (and continues to be) a terrifying and traumatizing experience for many thousands of people. May we all be kind and compassionate.

Paul Mason is the Vice President of Policy & Incentives for Pacific Forest Trust and has worked on natural resource policy for public interest nonprofits for thirty years, including over twenty in Sacramento.