Heating Up Wildfire Solutions

Key Takeaways:

• On average, wildfire frequency has tripled, fire size is up to four times larger, and fire speed has increased—all in the past few years.
• Wildfire resilience is crucial for saving lives, infrastructure, and money. It involves multiple key players, from homeowners to researchers, private sector actors, and government agencies and officials. 
• Colorado is addressing wildfire resilience through scientific research, community-based education, and federal mitigation initiatives, which can all be strengthened with Congressional action.

Across the United States, communities are experiencing longer wildfire seasons and an increase in the frequency, growth rate, and intensity of fires. These fires are exacerbated by hotter, drier weather and more expansive human activities in and near forested areas. In 2025, all U.S. states, except for a handful in the southeast and northeast, experienced wildfires—and more than 5 million acres were burned in total. In 2024, over 8 million acres burned. Not only are these fires affecting surrounding communities, but they also pose wide-reaching health risks, as seen with the Canadian wildfires that lasted from March to November in 2023, leading to air pollution in the United States and as far as Europe and Asia.  

Wildfire resilience is crucial for saving lives, infrastructure, and money. “Resilience” refers to a system's ability to absorb, withstand, and recover from an adverse event. Wildfire resilience can take many forms, from fireproofing homes to ecosystem restoration. It involves multiple key players, from homeowners to researchers, private sector actors, and government agencies and officials. 

Colorado’s wildfire resilience efforts include the use of scientific research, community-based education, and federal mitigation initiatives. With the right tools, these solutions can be replicated and used across the country. 

Wildfire Resilience Research in Universities

Resilience efforts require a detailed understanding of risk–this is where research plays a critical role. For instance, Earth Lab is a data synthesis center at the University of Colorado Boulder that focuses on actionable science, including wildfire exposure and vulnerability. To project fire risk for communities, Earth Lab pulls data from NASA’s satellite-derived fire perimeters, Zillow’s neighborhood mapping, and the US Forest Service incident reports. However, fire scientists and Earth Lab director Virginia Iglesias noted that the future of their research is uncertain due to changes in the federal funding landscape. 

In an interview with EESI, Iglesias explained that, on average, fire frequency has tripled, fire size is up to four times larger, and fire speed has increased—all in the past few years. “Faster fires are more destructive and more difficult to contain,” Iglesias explained. “It's more difficult for firefighters to get to the area, for incident teams to get their resources aligned and ready to go in order to fight the fire. And also for people to leave their homes if they need to.” 

Colorado's Dakota Ridge subdivision is protected from the spread of wildfires by this strip of road separating it from nearby forests, one example of creating defensible space. Credit: National Archives.

To address these risks, Iglesias and her team have identified key areas of concern with particularly high mitigation costs: home design, defensible space, and social vulnerability. Social vulnerability refers to the social, economic, and demographic issues that prevent communities from preparing and recovering from wildfires. For instance, an unpublished Earth Lab study found that 40% of census tracts—a standard geographic unit for studying neighborhood-level patterns in population and socioeconomic data defined by the U.S. Census Bureau—have increased fire risk and are also socially vulnerable. To address this, Earth Lab is collaborating with the NSF ASCEND Engine to support the integration of sensing, modeling, analytics, and decision-support across academia, the private sector, and government, with the aim of strengthening wildfire preparedness, response, and recovery.

Along with efforts to promote equity in wildfire resilience, Iglesias emphasized that resilience must happen collectively: “The vulnerability of a house often depends on what happens next door, and effective mitigation requires coordination among neighbors. It needs to be an effort that is accomplished at the community level, supported by policies that enable coordination, shared responsibility, and collective resilience.” She calls for both bottom-up and top-down mitigation efforts, starting at the home level and extending all the way up to state and federal policy.

Wildfire Resilience Adaptation in Neighborhoods

Mitigation measures that Boulder County residents can undertake to be eligible for a rebate from Wildfire Partners. Credit: Wildfire Partners.

Local government also has a role to play in community-level wildfire resilience. In Boulder County, representatives from Wildfire Partners assess individual homes and provide mitigation guidance and resources to reduce the risk of home ignition in a wildfire. If all required risks are mitigated, a certification is issued to help homeowners attain fire insurance. Wildfire Partners is a Boulder County government program that started in 2014, and since 2022 has been funded by a county Wildfire Mitigation Sales Tax, which has increased the pace and scale of wildfire mitigation in Boulder County. Kyle McCatty, senior wildfire mitigation specialist at Wildfire Partners, explained that their initiatives include individual assessments, strategic fuels programs (“fuel” encompasses vegetation or wood materials that can ignite a fire), wood-chipping services for excess fuels, rebate programs, outreach and education, and free services to improve wildfire resiliency for vulnerable individuals and communities. Free Individual Home Assessments are available to eligible homeowners in Boulder County. The Community Chipping Program helps residents reduce slash (vegetative debris and woody materials). McCatty emphasized that his organization’s main priority is using cost-effective, educational, and homeowner-engaged fire mitigation measures.

Additionally, a General Rebate Program is open to homeowners and renters who complete approved wildfire mitigation actions such as vegetation removal, structural hardening, and home-safety upgrades. For homeowners in need of financial assistance, Wildfire Partners can provide standard awards that cover 50% of the cost of hiring a Wildfire Partners Forestry Contractor, and more for those on limited incomes.

Wildfire Partners also administers the Strategic Fuels Mitigation Grant Program, which provides grants to fuel mitigation efforts across the county. This program also covers fuel treatments and creates fuel breaks (strips of land that have been altered to buffer against a fire).

The Wildfire Partners Individual Home Assessment Program promotes home hardening and has seen significant success since the program was first established in 2014. In 2025 alone, they conducted 804 assessments and issued 419 certifications. These certifications attract home insurance companies because science-based wildfire risk reduction has taken place. Allstate, State Farm (existing customers), and USAA accept the Wildfire Partners certificate as proof of proper fire mitigation, depending on the date of certificate. However, note that other factors, like a customer’s claim history, also impact insurance companies' decisions to write or renew policies.

Wildfire Resilience Planning in Communities

Within the public sector, Colorado is addressing wildfire resilience through Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPP), an initiative started by the Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003. CWPPs can be developed for any level of community (county, town, city, homeowners association, etc.) and must involve the participation of the local government, fire authority, and Colorado State Forest Service (CSFS) field office. CWPPs assess risks, set priorities, and create a community-level action plan carried out through fire-reduction projects over five years. Once the plan is finalized and projects are implemented, it is regularly updated for relevance. 

Additionally, the CSFS stores approved CWPPs in a public database, allowing communities or planners to use established plans as a resource to create their own strategies. The Colorado State Forest Service helps guide CWPPs, noting that “while we can’t control the weather, we can reduce the amount and arrangement of fuel available in forests to keep wildfires less destructive when they occur” through methods such as “removing trees, planting trees, prescribed burning and slash pile burning.” A review examining 30 years of fuel treatments showed that prescribed burning and thinning efforts reduced wildfire severity by 72%. Mitigation efforts from El Paso County’s CWPP saved more than 80% of at-risk structures in Waldo Canyon. During the 2012 Waldo Canyon Fire, only 346 homes out of nearly 36,000 at-risk homes in Colorado Springs were destroyed.

Congress's Wildfire Resilience Support

Many communities do not have the resources to protect their structures unassisted. The federal government can step in by funding nationwide home-hardening and fuel treatment efforts. In October 2025, Senator John Curtis introduced the Wildfire Emissions Prevention Act (S.3044). This bill further clarified “exceptional events” under the Clean Air Act (P.L. 91-604) to ensure that prescribed burns would not be penalized under federal air quality standards. One of the witnesses who spoke at the hearing, Georgia Forestry Commission Director Johnny Sabo, explained that “Prescribed fire can help to reduce hazardous fuel loads and protect communities from catastrophic wildfire…provides forage and improved habitat for wildlife, recycles nutrients back into the soil, and promotes the growth of trees, wildflowers and other plants.”

In September, the Senate also considered the Wildfire Smoke Relief Act (S.2856), which would authorize transitional shelter assistance for wildfire air pollution victims. A few other wildfire-related Senate bills were introduced earlier this year, including the Western Wildfire Support Act (S.91) and the Wildland Firefighter Paycheck Protection Act (S.135).

Additionally, a few wildfire-related bills have passed the House, including the Emergency Wildfire Fighting Technology Act (H.R.3389) and the Fix Our Forests Act (H.R.471), or FOFA. Representatives also introduced the Modernizing Wildfire Safety and Prevention Act (H.R.1923) and the Ensuring Casualty Assistance for our Firefighters Act (H.R.4671) more recently. By supporting bills like these, policymakers can bolster the preparedness of U.S. communities, which are now more vulnerable than ever to climate change-induced wildfires.