More Deadly, Destructive Wildfires in Today’s News: Can We Prevent This Being Our Future, Too?

Growing forests soak up tremendous amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere each year, helping to slow climate change while providing many other vital environmental benefits for the nation. However, tens of millions of acres of the nation’s forests across the west are at increasing risk from droughts, heat waves, infestations, and wildfires. They are rapidly changing from carbon sinks into carbon emitters. Yet, at the same time the White House and Congress are failing to provide the resources needed to reduce hazardous fuels and restore forest ecosystems, thereby reducing the destructive scale and intensity of wildfires. Expanding markets for wood products and bioenergy could help make forest treatments more affordable for federal land managers and more beneficial for local communities.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to the hundreds of families who have recently lost loved ones and homes in wildfires in Arizona, Colorado, California, and elsewhere.

Wildfires are getting bigger, more destructive, and posing greater threats to nearby communities. Climate change is a driving factor. Recent testimony by U.S Forest Service (USFS) Chief Thomas Tidwell before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing June 5 presented the stark challenges and ominous trends well:

" Florida, Georgia, Utah, California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, have all experienced the largest and/or the most destructive fires in their history just in the last six years. On average wildfires burn twice as many acres each year as compared to 40 years ago, and there are on average seven times as many fires over 10,000 acres per year (Climate Central, 2012).

In 2012 over 9.3 million acres burned in the United States. The fires of 2012 were massive in size, with 51 fires exceeding 40,000 acres. Of these large fires, 14 exceeded 100,000 acres (NICC, 2012). The increase in large fires in the west coincides with an increase in temperatures and early snow melt in recent years. This means longer fire seasons. The length of the fire season has increased by over two months since the 1970s (Westerling, 2006).

We estimate that 65 to 82 million acres of National Forest System lands are in need of fuels and forest health treatments — up to 42 percent of the entire system. Part of the problem is severe drought, resulting in extreme fire weather and very large fires. At the same time landscapes are becoming more susceptible to fire impacts, more and more Americans are choosing to build their home in wild lands. The number of housing units within half a mile of a national forest grew from 484,000 in 1940 to 1.8 million in 2000. The number of housing units within national forest boundaries rose from 335,000 in 1940 to 1.2 million in 2000. Forest Service estimates indicate a total of almost 400 million acres of all vegetated lands are at moderate to high risk from uncharacteristically large wildfires, and over 70,000 communities are at risk. "

A recent USFS report Effects of Climate Variability and Change on Forest Ecosystems: A Comprehensive Science Synthesis for the U.S. Forest Sector warns that, due to climate change, wildfires in the United States will likely be at least twice as destructive by 2050, burning as much as 20 million acres per year nationwide.

The President’s Climate Action Plan (released June 25) points out that " America’s forests play a critical role in addressing carbon pollution, removing nearly 12 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions each year," and that "conservation and sustainable management can help to ensure our forests continue to remove carbon from the atmosphere while also improving soil and water quality, reducing wildfire risk, and otherwise managing forests to be more resilient in the face of climate change."

However, the President’s proposed FY14 budget would dramatically reduce funding for USFS wildfire management programs (e.g. hazardous fuel reduction and ecosystem restoration), according to a recent letter to the Obama Administration from Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Mark Udall (D-CO), and James Risch (R-ID).

Federal spending for wildfire fighting has increased dramatically over the past decade, averaging $3.5 billion per year since 2008. It now consumes about 40 percent of the USFS budget. By contrast, funding for the USFS Hazardous Fuels Reduction Program has remained relatively flat for the past decade when adjusted for inflation ($500 million in 2012). The budget sequestration this year cut funding by 16 percent, and the President’s FY14 budget calls for cutting the program by another 30 percent, according to a recent Associated Press article published in the Missoulian .

There are alternative approaches that could help address the problems of both preventing increasingly intense and widespread wildfires and finding the budget resources needed to rapidly expand and accelerate preventive forest treatments. Expanding markets for wood products and bioenergy (thereby increasing demand for biomass) could help make preventive forest treatments more affordable for federal land managers and more beneficial for local communities.

The USFS has already been successfully developing this approach on a small scale through its Woody Biomass Utilization Grant Program. For example, on June 20, the USFS announced the award of $2.5 million for ten renewable biomass energy projects. " The projects will use woody material removed from forests during projects such as wildfire prevention and beetle-killed trees, and process woody biomass in bioenergy facilities to produce green energy for heating and electricity. The awardees will use funds from the Woody Biomass Utilization Grant program to further the planning of such facilities by funding the engineering services necessary for final design, permitting and cost analysis ."

Sustainable Northwest in Oregon has been involved with this program as described in a recent article, "Oregon’s Forest to Boiler Movement," by Renee Magyar in Biomass Magazine (July 1). She reports: " Saving money and using a renewable fuel is great for small towns and schools, and it’s also great for the neighboring national forests. Since the decline of the timber industry in the early 1990s, forests in eastern Oregon have grown to an unhealthy, fire-prone condition. Restoration projects are underway each year to thin overcrowded and dead trees, but the U.S. Forest Service is still struggling to fund the amount of work necessary to return the forests to historic, fire-adapted conditions where forest fire is natural and beneficial instead of widely destructive ."

However, there remain significant barriers to developing these types of woody biomass projects. These are assessed in a recent report, Financing Wood Biomass Clusters: Barriers, Opportunities, and Potential Models for the Western U.S. , released in June by the U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities. The study surveyed dozens of bioenergy and biomass producers and assessed the key opportunities and challenges that they reported. Loans and loan guarantees, tax incentives, and investment in research and development are key areas where federal policy could help.