Statement on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources Markup

The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) commends Chairman Manchin, Ranking Member Barrasso, and the entire Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources for clearing a historic 75 pieces of legislation, including multiple crucial bills to confront the wildfire crisis.

FAS urges the Senate to consider and support the following legislation, which is critical to confronting and addressing the wildfire crisis:

“FAS is looking forward to working with Members of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee to continue advancing this bipartisan package of bills as it moves through the legislative process,” said James Campbell, a wildfire policy specialist at the Federation of American Scientists. “We appreciate the thorough consideration of this legislation and urge leadership to pass these bipartisan bills before the end of the year.”

Position on H.R. 8790 – Fix our Forests Act

The Federation of American Scientists supports H.R. 8790, the Fix our Forests Act, commends the House of Representatives for passing of the bill on strong bipartisan margins in September, and urges the Senate to consider this legislation.

“In particular, we strongly supported and advocated for Section 102 and the creation of the Fireshed Center, with its proposed center of governance within the U.S. Geological Survey,” said Dan Correa, Chief Executive Officer of the Federation of American Scientists. “The Fireshed Center would provide decision support across the entire wildfire lifecycle of prevention, suppression, and recovery efforts, thereby minimizing inequalities between different jurisdictions and allowing stakeholders to retain their autonomy while holistically addressing the wildfire crisis.

We are proud to have worked to include important provisions of this bill, including the Community Wildfire Risk Reduction Program (Sec. 201 & 202), Biochar Innovations and Research (Sec. 301), and Reporting on the Effectiveness of Hazardous Fuels Reduction Treatments (Sec. 302). Additionally, three FAS supported amendments made it into the final bill including incentivizing the use of proactive animal grazing for fuels mitigation, public-private partnerships for low earth orbit satellites, and addition of artificial intelligence support tools to the Fireshed Center.

FAS would have strongly preferred to see this bill passed with funding attached and the controversial litigation reform pieces, including restrictions on public comment, removed. However, building bipartisan solutions takes compromise, and given the urgency of this crisis, FAS applauds Congress for taking action on this important issue.”

Position on H.R. 9908 – Strengthening Wildfire Resiliency Through Satellites Act

The Federation of American Scientists supports H.R. 9908, the Strengthening Wildfire Resiliency Through Satellites Act.

The Strengthening Wildfire Resilience Through Satellites Act would help combat wildfires through advanced early detection using satellite technology. The bill creates a three-year grant program under the United States Geological Survey encouraging states to use satellite technology for wildfire detection, active fire monitoring, and post-disaster recovery.

“Rep. Pettersen and Rep. Obernolte are leading the way to ensure states have access to cutting edge satellite technology to modernize the way wildland fires are detected, monitored, managed, and recovered from. The Federation of American Scientists is proud to support this bill to better equip our states and first responders to tackle severe wildfires” said James Campbell, Wildfire Policy Specialist at the Federation of American Scientists.

Position on H.R. 8656 – Modernizing Wildfire Safety and Prevention Act

The Federation of American Scientists strongly supports H.R. 8656.

The Modernizing Wildfire Safety and Prevention Act would combat firefighter shortages by establishing a new Middle Fire Leaders Academy and grant programs to train and hire more firefighters and retain expert wildland firefighters with increased benefits and better working conditions. The bill would establish the Joint Office of the Fire Environment Center to improve fire response time with updated technology like developing risk maps and establishing. Lastly, it would address the public health crisis caused by wildfire smoke by establishing a nationwide real-time air quality monitoring and alert system.

“As the wildfire crisis continues to grow in size and severity, our solutions must be ambitious to meet the moment. The Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission developed 148 non-partisan policy recommendations to tackle this crisis and the Modernizing Wildfire Safety and Prevention Act is a bold and bipartisan package that incorporates a number of the Commission’s recommendations.” said Daniel Correa, Chief Executive Officer of the Federation of American Scientists. “Rep. Harder, Rep. Franklin and Rep. Neguse have put forth a multi-pronged innovative approach to tackle the wildfire crisis. In particular, the creation of the Fire Environment Center is a game changer for land and fuels management, community risk reduction, fire management and response.”

For more information contact James Campbell, Wildfire Policy Specialist, at jcampbell@fas.org.

Position on H.R. 9702, H.R. 9703, and H.R. 9704.

The Federation of American Scientists supports H.R. 9702 the Wildfire Coordination Act, H.R. 9703 the Cross Boundary Wildfire Solutions Act, and H.R. 9704 the Wildfire Risk Evaluation Act.

This package of bills is derived from recommendations in the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission’s report to Congress and would implement recommendations 24, 110, 116, 135, and 148.

“This package of bills would improve the effectiveness and efficiency of wildfire mitigation, establish an advisory board responsible for coordinating federal wildfire research, and require a comprehensive review of the wildfire landscape in the United States every four years,” said James Campbell, Wildfire Policy Specialist at the Federation of American Scientists. “This package of bills hits on a number of key areas that are critical to supporting increased collaboration across federal agencies and confronting the wildfire crisis head-on.” 

For more information contact James Campbell, Wildfire Policy Specialist, at jcampbell@fas.org.

The Wildfire Crisis and FAS: A Story of Policy Entrepreneurship

As FAS gets ready to officially kick off its Day One 2025 effort and looks back to the origins of Day One, it’s essential to also recognize the important policy innovations our community surfaced after that initial tranche of memos. It’s also useful to reflect on how FAS, as an organization, has developed institutional infrastructure to support more policy entrepreneurs, and to fully capitalize on policy windows – when those windows open widest.

There may be no better example bringing all of these elements together than the work FAS staff, our partner organizations, and budding policy entrepreneurs have done and continue to do to change the way the U.S. addresses the wildfire crisis.

The genesis of this work dates back to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) of 2021, and that law’s creation of the federal Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission. The law charged the commission with recommending improvements to how the federal government manages wildland fire.

The commission, co-chaired by the Departments of Agriculture and Interior and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was composed of 50 members, representing federal agencies, state, local, and Tribal governments, as well as the private sector. As part of its journey to a final report to Congress, the Commission wanted public input – and after conferring with experts in the field about the current landscape of stakeholders and gaps in policy – FAS sensed the opening of a crucial window.

Through the Wildland Fire Policy Accelerator, FAS supported 20 experts in developing 23 new policy recommendations as input into the Commission’s process. FAS partnered with COMPASS, Conservation X Labs, and the California Council on Science and Technology to source and develop ideas, leveraging their respective expertise in science communications, incorporating Indigenous knowledge, and navigating science-policy nexus. 

“We really wanted a range of perspectives – specifically from voices that have been traditionally left out of the conversation,” FAS Director of Science Policy Entrepreneurship Erica Goldman says. “Our accelerator cohort ended up including engineers and innovators; cultural burning practitioners; youth in wildland firefighting; engineers and innovators; public health professionals; and research scientists.”

Accelerator participant Alistair Hayden, an assistant professor of practice in the Department of Public & Ecosystem Health at Cornell University, authored four different policy recommendations on mitigating smoke impacts and the use of beneficial fire. 

He says FAS’s accelerator helped him in three big ways. “The named program gave me latitude to carve out time to dedicate to the memos, the excellent program structure sped the process along, and the experts I connected to along the way – including some who I ended up co-authoring with – gave incredible feedback to improve the ideas,” he says. 

Another participant, Shefali Lakhina, co-founder of Wonder Labs, brought 18 years of experience developing disaster reduction policy and programs, but most of her expertise was outside of the United States.

“The Accelerator enabled me to develop a decent understanding of America’s unique policy landscape, entry points, and inner workings,” she says. “FAS also played a critical role in helping me directly present my recommendations to the federal Commission. Although not explicitly acknowledged in the Commission’s final report, I found both my recommendations well represented in the text, which made the effort worthwhile.”

FAS’s efforts in the wildfire policy space were not just limited to helping memo authors hone their ideas into actionable policy. Staffers realized the universe of funding sources for wildfire mitigation efforts across the country was vast and not well understood even by those most concerned with the crisis. In partnership with Resources for the Future, FAS created the federal wildfire funding wheel – a data visualization tool that breaks down the current landscape of federal funding. FAS also continued to write about the funding landscape and the challenges posed by federal agency wildland fire budget structures in the months leading up to the Commission’s final report to Congress. The organization also hosted several convenings providing stakeholders from the science, technology and policy communities an opportunity to exchange forward-looking ideas with the shared goal of improving the federal government’s approach to managing wildland fire. 

All of these examples show that throughout the past several years, FAS has been building on the Day One model by not only surfacing and supporting policy entrepreneurs, but also by leveraging internal and external expertise to help lay the groundwork for a more informed policy discussion.

When the final report from the Commission came in the fall of 2023, there was evidence that FAS’s approach had made an impact.

While the Commission did not attribute any of their formal recommendations to specific public input or comment, many of the ideas and policy solutions laid out by FAS’s Wildland Fire Policy Accelerator cohort were reflected in the Commission’s final product. Some examples of accelerator ideas reflected in the Commission’s report include: 

Other FAS publications also informed the Commission’s work, demonstrated by citations of FAS’s work on federal appropriations in the final report. They cited the wildfire funding wheel data visualization tool that breaks down the current landscape of federal funding. Additionally, the Commission cited an FAS blog post (coauthored by Sonia Wang prior to entering her term of service at OMB) summarizing federal agency wildland fire budget structures. 

“With our multifaceted approach, we’ve helped leaders take advantage of a crucial policy window for building wildfire resilience across the country,” FAS’s Goldman says. “FAS is helping to ensure that science, data, technology, and expertise are effectively leveraged through public policy. And now that the Commission’s report is out in the world, the work continues – we aim to support its implementation through partnerships, issue education, and legislative outreach.”

Position on S. 4191 – Regional Leadership in Wildland Fire Research Act

The Federation of American Scientists strongly supports S.4191.

The Regional Leadership in Wildland Fire Research Act would establish regional research centers at institutions of higher education across the country to research and improve our understanding of wildland fire, develop, maintain, and operate next-generation fire and vegetation models, and create a career pathway training program.

“Extreme weather has pushed wildfires to grow in size and severity, making our current wildfire models inadequate. The Regional Leadership in Wildland Fire Research Act is a significant investment in understanding how wildland fire risks continue to evolve, and establishes a strong foundation that first responders and forest managers can rely on,” said Daniel Correa, Chief Executive Officer of the Federation of American Scientists. “We commend Senator Luján and Senator Sullivan for their leadership to champion and invest in innovative next-generation fire and vegetation models to protect human health, ecosystems, and our communities.”

For more information contact James Campbell, Wildfire Policy Specialist, at jcampbell@fas.org.

Firefighting Workforce Benefits from FY25 Budget Request but Sustained Investments are Necessary to Address the Wildfire Crisis

Despite growing federal spending on wildfire suppression, wildfires continue to grow in size and severity in the U.S. Nearly 100,000 structures have been wiped out by wildfires nationwide in the last two decades. Impacts of fires go far beyond what the flames touch; smoke from uncontrolled fires is worsening human health from coast to coast. 

We know uncontrolled wildfire is costly, but a full accounting of just how costly is elusive given currently available data. Federal spending on wildfire suppression has exceeded $1 billion every year since 2011, with spending sometimes as high as $4 billion; longer-term costs imposed on livelihoods, ecosystem services, and health are estimated to be much higher.

Investments in prevention (including beneficial fire to reduce highly flammable vegetation) are essential for decreasing these skyrocketing costs in the long-term. The Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission, which submitted a detailed report to Congress in 2023 with recommendations for improving how we manage wildland fire, noted that the historic focus on putting out fires without substantial investment in risk mitigation “perpetuates a reactive and expensive cycle and consigns ourselves to an ever-increasing catalog of loss.” 

In the last decade, the U.S. has made significant investments to address the wildfire crisis, including the historic investments in hazardous fuels reduction through the IRA and IIJA. But discretionary funding via the annual appropriations cycle has provided additional opportunities for Congress to make down payments on a more wildfire-resilient future. These investments include doubling of wildfire funding for the Department of Interior (DOI) and the U.S. Forest Service from fiscal year 2011 to 2020 (although much of this funding was for suppression-related activities). 

The president’s FY 2025 budget would add to this growth via modest but important increases for sustaining or enhancing wildfire work at specific agencies. Areas of focused investment include increases to support pay, health and wellbeing, and housing for wildland firefighters in recognition that “the federal government must provide a level of pay that is competitive with the compensation provided by state, local, and private employers.” The FY 2025 budget would also include increased or sustained funds for certain programs at the Federation Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to improve community capacity for wildfire preparedness. It also supports certain Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) programs that concern wildfire smoke. 

Wildfire in the FY25 Request

Below are a few highlights from the president’s FY 2025 budget concerning key activities at select agencies with relevance to wildfire. These highlights are just a sampling and do not constitute a comprehensive assessment of wildfire appropriations in the FY 2025 president’s budget at these or other agencies. The full spectrum of federal entities that undertake wildland fire activities is broader and includes NASA, NOAA, DOD, and CDC among others. 

U.S. Forest Service

Department of the Interior 

Federal Emergency Management Agency

Environmental Protection Agency 

The Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission released its report to Congress in September 2023, likely too late for its 148 recommendations to be considered thoroughly in agency budget development. While this budget request lays a foundation for important Commission recommendations such as pay increases and housing for federal wildland firefighters, significant additional investments will still be needed in the years to come. The Commission noted that “investments at a similar and sustained scale (to the IRA and IIJA) in federal land management agencies and programs are needed to successfully and proactively reduce growing wildfire risk,” and recommended strong support for wildland fire management through land management agencies to the tune of $85-95 billion total in the next decade (almost triple what has already been invested). Additionally, it recommended funding to support other agencies with critical roles in addressing the wildfire crisis including FEMA, NOAA, and EPA. 

While agency budget documents give us a general sense of the magnitude of investments in wildland fire at each agency, we don’t actually have a clear picture of wildfire spending across the federal government as a whole. As Taxpayers for Common Sense found, there is no single federal definition of what falls under the category of wildfire spending. Federal entities such as the Department of Agriculture, DOI, and FEMA use different budget structures to describe their direct and indirect spending on wildland fire (although DOI does package all of its wildfire spending into a department-wide budget).

Consequently, agencies, Congress, and the public are limited in their ability to assess wildland fire spending government-wide. An important Commission recommendation is thus that Congress “fund agency budgets offices to create crosscuts to better track all federal wildfire spending.” We highlighted this recommendation for Congress (along with other Commission recommendations on wildfire spending and budgeting) in a recent joint letter with The Pew Charitable Trusts, Taxpayers for Common Sense, and Megafire Action. 

There is no magic bullet for solving our wildfire crisis, but sustained investments that strategically leverage science, technology, data, and the workforce and emphasize prevention can pave the way to a more resilient future.

Ahead of the Wildland Fire Commission Report Release, a Roundup of FAS’s Efforts to Provide Input on Wildland Fire Policy

FAS is committed to producing science-based policy recommendations that improve people’s lives – and over the last year we’ve devoted considerable effort to understanding wildfire in the context of U.S. federal policy. We hope that some of our work will be reflected in the forthcoming Congressionally authorized Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission Report, anticipated for release in the coming days.

Over the past year, together with partner organizations COMPASS, Conservation X Labs, and the California Council on Science and Technology, FAS recruited diverse experts to participate in our Wildland Fire Policy Accelerator to develop actionable ideas, presented in a concise format, to inform the work of the Commission.  

In early 2023, FAS hosted a convening that provided stakeholders (including Commission members and Accelerator participants) from the science, technology, and policy communities with an opportunity to exchange forward-looking ideas with the shared goal of improving the federal government’s approach to managing wildland fire. 

Wildland Fire Policy Accelerator: Developing Actionable Recommendations

Working together, FAS and accelerator participants produced policy recommendations that provide targeted suggestions for addressing wildfire challenges in several domains, including   landscapes and communities; public health and infrastructure; science, data, and technology; and the workforce. With climate change worsening wildfire impacts, a holistic overhaul of wildland fire policy is urgent, but also within reach, if policymakers work collaboratively to implement a broad suite of changes.

FAS Wildland Fire Policy Memos

Effective wildfire management will require a thoughtful, multi-pronged approach, as detailed in these memos by Accelerator participants.

Wildland Fire in Context: Ensuring Broad Perspectives Are Incorporated 

Funding and Implementation of Wildland Fire Programs: Mapping the Landscape 

Our wildland fire work is not finished. We look forward to reviewing the policy recommendations of the forthcoming Commission Report and helping to amplify its messages in the halls of Congress and in federal agencies. We applaud the efforts of the Commission to incorporate and synthesize diverse perspectives over an incredibly short time frame and we hope that the report will be as robust and comprehensive as is required to improve how we live with wildland fire. Our staff, partners, and engaged subject matter experts, and others are sure to have thoughts, which we look forward to sharing in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.

Seeing Through the Haze: How the federal government does (and doesn’t) work to reduce public exposure to wildland fire smoke

Media coverage of wildfire often focuses on the brutality of death and destruction – but alongside these horrific outcomes is the often overlooked and underestimated danger of smoke. This insidious threat isn’t localized to the fire itself but can spread across the country. Worse, we don’t have a coordinated response. This report explores what is being done at the federal level to address wildland fire smoke, what’s missing, and makes recommendations to address this national health issue. 

As the wildfire season has grown longer in the West, smoke events now sometimes stretch for weeks and across the continent. As a result, millions of people are exposed to harmful levels of air pollution on a near-annual basis. Wildland fire smoke is a chemical stew, but the component that is most well-studied and considered the most immediately threatening is fine particulate matter 2.5 microns in diameter and smaller (PM2.5). These particles are small enough to bypass the body’s natural defenses, burrow deep into the lungs, and even pass into the bloodstream where they set off a systemic inflammatory response. Smoke exposure leads to increased frequency and severity of asthma attacks, worsened COPD symptoms, increased risk of stroke and heart attack, increased susceptibility to infectious disease, and increased hospital visits and deaths. Recent research finds that repeated smoke exposure may also increase the risk of developing dementia.  Thousands of deaths and hospitalizations occur each year from wildland fire smoke exposure, with most of the impacted persons living far from an active fire. Those most at risk from wildland fire smoke include children and youths under 18, older adults, pregnant people, people with heart or lung disease, outdoor workers, and persons of low socioeconomic status. 

The federal government’s efforts to protect the populace from wildland fire smoke health impacts are made difficult because exposure to wildland fire smoke is influenced by many factors, including fire and smoke characteristics; the indoor environment; time and activity levels spent outside; use of respiratory protection; and the knowledge, belief, and ability to reduce exposure. Understanding and addressing these factors requires a broad array of specialties, including atmospheric science and chemistry, forestry and fire science, building and aerosol science, epidemiology and health effects research, air quality monitoring, risk communication, and social science.

Because there is no one federal office, department or agency with the expertise to address all facets of smoke exposure, collaboration across multiple entities is necessary. However, because coordination across agencies is often not formalized or even funded, projects are scattered across the federal science agencies, often with experts from multiple offices collaborating as needed on an ad hoc basis. 

Consequently, information about how federal entities are addressing the impacts of wildland fire smoke is scattered across dozens of agency websites and hundreds of public reports. Without a comprehensive accounting of federal action on wildland fire smoke, it may be difficult for researchers, grantees, and policymakers to collaborate across the landscape, diagnose inefficiencies, and propose innovative solutions. It may also be challenging for communities to know where to turn when seeking knowledge and tools for responding to the rising smoke threat.

Importantly, federal wildland fire smoke efforts are often distinct from wildfire management strategies. The latter do not usually consider potential smoke impacts when prioritizing initial attacks or determining suppression strategies. Rather, land managers are generally more focused on addressing future wildfire smoke impacts by using beneficial fire in hopes it will reduce future wildfire smoke emissions. 

To answer the question, “What is the federal government doing about wildland fire smoke, and who’s doing it?” we conducted an analysis of public-facing materials to understand a broad suite of federal wildland fire smoke activities. Then, we grouped them into four main categories of action: research; guidance preparation and dissemination; situational awareness; and direct community assistance. Finally, we identified opportunity areas for additional federal action to improve health outcomes for the most vulnerable. Note that this analysis is based on publicly available information to the best of our knowledge at time of publication. It may not encompass all wildland fire smoke efforts at all agencies.

 More about this analysis can be found at the end of this report.

Research

The most cross-cutting federal wildland fire smoke effort is research. Numerous agencies are conducting and participating in studies dedicated to smoke composition, movement, measurement, health impacts, climate change implications, and ways to mitigate public exposure. (For a sense of scale, see “Wildland Fire Smoke in the United States: A Scientific Assessment.” Published in late 2022, the assessment runs 346 pages and outlines research efforts dedicated to understanding wildland fire smoke and its impacts.)   

Scientists from land management (USFS, BLM, NPS), earth sciences (NOAA, NASA, USGS), health (CDC, EPA), and other (DOE, DoD, DHS, NIST ) agencies all take part in wildland fire smoke research, with frequent collaboration across agencies and offices (e.g. FASMEE and FIREX-AQ, below). In addition, federal agencies frequently partner with state, local, Tribal, university, international and nongovernmental partners. The federal government also sponsors wildland fire smoke research and innovation at universities and other non-governmental organizations, with federal grants coming from NSF, NIH, EPA, DoD, CDC-NIOSH, USFS and DOI (via the Joint Fire Sciences Program), HRSA, NASA, NOAA, and others.

Insights from these efforts inform public health guidance, improve smoke forecasting and communication, and may help the federal government develop meaningful policies and procedures to mitigate current and future smoke impacts.

There are far too many research efforts to summarize, even at a high level. See this table for an overview of where federal agencies and offices intersect with research topics. Below are some selected highlights:

FASMEE and FIREX-AQ

FASMEE (primary agency: USFS) and FIREX-AQ (primary agencies: NOAA and NASA) are large-scale, multi-year collaborative research efforts that combine data from satellite, aerial and ground measurements to improve our understanding of fire behavior and the resulting smoke’s movement, composition and impacts. An important end goal of these efforts is improved smoke modeling. Smoke modeling  will help alert communities to future smoke impacts and help land managers plan prescribed fires to minimize smoke impacts.

EPA

In addition to participating in the above smoke modeling projects, the EPA conducts and participates in an array of wildland fire smoke research.  EPA’s wildland fire smoke research catalog includes work on health effects, interventions, and risk communication to reduce smoke exposure, pollution monitoring, and characterizing smoke pollution chemistry and concentrations (i.e. smoke “emissions”). Some recent projects include an evaluation of DIY air cleaners, a characterization of emissions from fires in the wildland urban interface, an analysis of indoor air quality in commercial buildings during smoke events, and development of a community health vulnerability index for wildland fire smoke.

Joint Fire Science Program

The Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP) is funded by DOI and USFS. Since its establishment in 1998, JFSP has invested more than $25 million in wildland fire smoke research conducted by agency and nonfederal partners. JFSP also hosts the Fire Science Exchange Network to provide “the most  relevant, current wildland fire science information to federal, state, local, tribal, and private stakeholders within ecologically similar regions.”

Wildland Urban Interface Fires

Smoke from burning vegetation is composed of toxic chemicals. As more fires burn into the wildland urban interface (WUI), concern is mounting about additional harm from burning metals, plastics and other artificial components in the built environment. To better understand smoke in the WUI, NIST, NIEHS, and the CDC sponsored the 2022 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) consensus study report: The Chemistry of Fires at the Wildland Urban Interface, which “evaluates existing and needed chemistry information that decision-makers can use to mitigate WUI fires and their potential health impacts.” One of the knowledge gaps identified in the report is a characterization of the amount and type of pollutants generated when fires burn homes, vehicles, and other anthropogenic materials. To begin addressing this gap, EPA recently compiled emission factors for hazardous air pollutants that may be found in WUI fires.  And, while much of NIST’s work in fire has been focused on residential and commercial structure fires, the agency has started modeling WUI and landscape fires and researched how smoke may impact evacuations.

NASA Health Research

A (perhaps unexpected) source of wildfire smoke public health research funding is NASA. While much of NASA’s wildland fire smoke research efforts revolve around atmospheric science and the physical characteristics of smoke, NASA has been funding Health and Air Quality Applied Science Team (HAQAST) projects since 2016 as part of its Applied Science program. Not all HAQAST projects involve wildland fire smoke, but NASA recently funded a project examining the health burden of the 2017 wildfires in California. NASA also recently funded a study examining the impact of smoke from Alaska wildfires on respiratory and cardiovascular health.

Wildland Firefighter Exposure

Among those most exposed to wildland fire smoke are wildland firefighters. Recent research by CDC-NIOSH (in collaboration with USFS and DOI) aims to understand the impacts of repeated smoke exposure on wildland firefighter health. This will build on previous USFS and JSFP research on wildland firefighter smoke exposure. Because wildland firefighters often do not have access to adequate respiratory protection for their occupation, DHS is funding efforts by an industry partner to develop a respirator to meet these firefighters’ unique needs. 

Guidance preparation and dissemination

When wildland fire smoke enters a community, residents need to know about health risks and how they can limit their exposure. Federal public health agencies (EPA and CDC) have largely assumed the task of preparing wildland fire smoke guidance and providing it to the public and to state, local, and Tribal agencies. 

The following is a broad summary of the federal government’s guidance preparation and dissemination efforts at the time of publication.

Resources for Public Health Officials and Physicians

EPA’s comprehensive Wildfire Fire Smoke Guide for Public Health Officials (developed in collaboration with experts from CDC, USFS, and non-federal partners) addresses health concerns, outdoor activities, indoor air quality, respirators, interpreting air quality data, protecting vulnerable persons, pets and livestock, and more. Because medical training does not typically cover air pollution health impacts, EPA and CDC have created a course for physicians and other medical professionals so they can better prepare their patients for wildland fire smoke events.  

Resources for the Public

EPA and CDC also provide fact sheets by topic that are available for public dissemination. CDC-NIOSH has guidance available for protecting outdoor workers from smoke and, as the certifying body for respirators, provides the public and workers with information about respirator selection and use. 

Resources for Communities

EPA has compiled resources for communities into their Smoke Ready Toolbox, which serves as a catchall for interested persons to learn about smoke and how they can protect themselves and their community. In addition, both EPA and CDC have created resources targeted at children to help them navigate fires and smoke.Experts from multiple federal agencies contribute to the creation of guidance; however, outside the health agencies, few federal agencies provide that guidance to the communities their programs serve. When they do, it is often buried as a blog post or news post rather than a static page. There are some limited exceptions: NPS and FEMA include information on their websites about respirators for the public in the event of wildland fire smoke; USFS provides smoke preparedness information on the Interagency Wildland Fire Air Quality Response Program and the Wildfire Risk to Communities sites; DHS provides information about respirators and indoor air quality on Ready.gov; and the DoD provides a fact sheet for military personnel about wildland fire smoke (though it has incomplete health impact information and does not include recommendations related to clean indoor air).

A white truck drives alongside a column of smoke during the 2017 Jones Fire.

Wildland fire smoke is a chemical stew. 

Photo by Marcus Kauffman on Unsplash

Situational awareness/monitoring

To prepare for and respond to wildland fire smoke, the public and decision makers need to know current and projected smoke levels. Multiple federal agencies work to provide air quality monitoring data,  smoke forecasts, and satellite imagery to the public, and their efforts rely on frequent interagency collaboration and data sharing. 

The following is a broad summary of the federal government’s situational awareness efforts. 

Air Quality Monitoring

Air quality monitoring data provides real-time information about how much smoke is currently impacting communities.

Real time air quality monitoring data allow the public to understand current conditions.  EPA, USFS, NPS and state, local and Tribal air pollution control programs deploy and maintain particulate pollution monitors that can measure the PM2.5 levels in wildland fire smoke. EPA provides access to PM2.5 air monitoring data from permanent monitors across the country via Airnow.gov and its apps. For wildfires, however, the agency directs the public to the Fire and Smoke Map. This map is a public-facing collaboration between EPA and USFS that provides near real-time data about both smoke pollution and fires based on the user’s location. The Fire and Smoke Map incorporates air quality data from permanent monitors, temporary monitors, and Purple Air sensors; heat detections from NOAA and NASA satellites; fire information from the National Interagency Fire Center; smoke forecast from the Interagency Wildland Fire Air Quality Response Program; and smoke plume overlays from NOAA’s Hazard Mapping System.

EPA’s color-coded Air Quality Index provides the public with pollution severity indicators and associated protective measures, which allows individuals and decision makers to understand current health risks and implement exposure reduction strategies.

Satellite Imagery and Heat Detections

Satellite imagery shows current smoke conditions and smoke movement as fires burn across the landscape. Satellite-based heat detections show real time fire activity and can be used by smoke forecasters to anticipate smoke production. These data are also incorporated into smoke models discussed below.

Science agencies including NOAA and NASA provide satellite imagery and analysis to scientists and the public for near real-time pollutant monitoring, smoke plume tracking, and fire detection. 

Smoke Forecasting

Smoke forecasts in the form of models and narratives provide information about how much smoke is expected to impact an area. Multiple agencies contribute expertise or funding to smoke modeling work, including NOAA, EPA, USFS, NIST, DOE, NASA, and DoD. 

NOAA develops smoke forecasting models such as HRRR Smoke and RRFS Smoke, and provides air quality forecasting guidance. Forecasters with NOAA’s National Weather Service issue air quality alerts on behalf of air pollution control agencies and sometimes include projected smoke impacts in their narrative forecasts. 

USFS led the creation of the Interagency Wildland Fire Air Quality Response Program, which embeds Air Resource Advisors (ARAs) into teams of officials managing active wildfires (known as incident management teams). The USFS gathers ARAs from an array of federal agencies (including USFS, NPS, and EPA), state, Tribal and local governments, and the private sector. ARAs provide daily smoke outlooks to the public and incident management teams and deploy air quality monitors. USFS also created the BlueSky smoke modeling framework, which supports ARA efforts and is available to the public. USFS incorporates EPA’s CMAQ smoke model into BlueSky’s framework to provide daily smoke projections.

Direct community assistance

With no end in sight to repeated smoke exposures and research showing that a significant amount of smoke comes indoors, there is growing recognition that communities need to prepare for smoke not only outside but also in their homes, schools, and businesses. This necessitates upgrading existing building filtration and ventilation systems, distributing air cleaners to vulnerable community members, having respirators available for outdoor workers, setting up respite cleaner air shelters, and more. 

Federal agencies such as EPA and USFS encourage the creation of smoke-ready communities, but so far, direct community assistance in the form of monetary or expert technical assistance has been limited.  Unlike hazards such as flood and fire, there are no smoke-specific community resilience grants available from FEMA, and smoke-related efforts are not explicitly included among FEMA’s eligible fire-mitigation projects. 

This section describes federal community assistance efforts currently underway to address wildland fire smoke.  

EPA

EPA has provided technical assistance to communities interested in turning schools into neighborhood cleaner air and cooling centers. They have also partnered with USFS to help two counties develop smoke preparedness plans as part of a research study. EPA recently launched the Wildfire Smoke Preparedness in Community Buildings Grant Program, which provides eligible entities a chance at a part of $10.67 million to improve public health protection against wildland fire smoke. The agency anticipates funding 13-18 projects. 

While EPA’s Environmental Justice Grant program is not specifically targeted at wildland fire smoke, some communities have successfully applied for EPA Environmental Justice Grants to implement smoke-preparedness projects. 

EPA also maintains an air sensor loan program to assist communities seeking more information about local air quality impacts, including from wildland fire smoke.

USFS

As a significant step forward in acknowledging smoke as a wildfire hazard, USFS now includes smoke-ready planning and implementation projects as eligible for Community Wildfire Defense Grants (CWDGs), which fund community wildfire fire protection plan (CWPP) development and revision as well as implementation of projects identified in existing CWPPs. However, USFS’s requirement that all implementation projects be identified in pre-existing CWPPs is a significant hurdle for accomplishing community smoke preparedness under the CWDG. The Healthy Forest Restoration Act (HFRA) of 2003 that drove the creation of CWPPs prioritizes hazardous fuel treatments and reducing structure ignitions. HFRA makes no mention of smoke, and smoke preparedness is not included in existing CWPP guidance. Unsurprisingly, out of $197 million awarded to 100 projects in March 2023, only a single funded CWDG project mentioned smoke preparedness in its CWPP planning project summary. No funded implementation projects include smoke preparedness efforts. (It is possible successfully funded CWPP updates will result in smoke preparedness planning that was not included in the short project summaries available online.) 

CDC

The CDC provides Public Health Emergency Preparedness (PHEP) funding to state, local, and territorial public health departments. The PHEP program is designed to “strengthen national preparedness for public health emergencies including natural, biological, chemical, radiological, and nuclear incidents.” While PHEP funds are not targeted specifically for wildland fire smoke response or preparedness, they are designed for flexibility and have been successfully used to purchase air purifiers and HEPA filters. In 2017, the Missoula City-County Health Department (MCCHD) in Missoula, Montana overdrew its PHEP budget to purchase air purifiers for communities hit with hazardous smoke. The following year, MCCHD used PHEP funds to purchase replacement HEPA filters and additional air purifiers.

American Rescue Plan Funding for Schools

In March 2021, the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) allocated billions of dollars to “keep schools safely open” in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Schools can use ARPA Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds, which the Department of Education administers to states and school districts, can be used to support HVAC and filtration improvements in schools. In fact, schools are projected to spend almost $10 billion on HVAC upgrades using these funds. 

While these ESSER funds are focused on reducing the spread of COVID-19, filters recommended for the fine particles in wildland fire smoke are the same ones recommended for viruses. Consequently, schools that upgrade their filtration using these funds (and in accordance with EPA or ASHRAE guidance) will also likely be better protected from wildland fire smoke. While there are many factors beyond filtration that impact indoor air quality, HVAC maintenance and filter upgrades are important interventions.

A Note About Beneficial Fire

A growing push is underway to restore ecosystem balance and reduce hazardous fuel buildup via beneficial fire, which includes cultural fires, prescribed fires, and wildfires with ecosystem benefits that are controlled but allowed to burn. These interventions, in addition to more frequent and intense wildfires, will mean additional smoke creation for years to come. 

The drive to put more fire on the ground is aimed at reducing the severity of future fires and protecting “communities, critical infrastructure, watersheds, habitats, and recreational areas.”  Additionally, a small but growing body of research is suggesting prescribed fire may reduce future wildland fire smoke emissions. Unsurprisingly, studies project less smoke impacts from prescribed burns than would be seen from a wildfire in the same place (which generally consume more fuels and produce more smoke). 

This is a nuanced discussion, since beneficial fire creates its own smoke and there is no guarantee a wildfire will occur in a burned area before the benefits from the prescribed fire wear out and require a reburn. Prescribed fires also don’t protect communities from all future smoke impacts. An area treated with prescribed fire can still burn; even if it doesn’t, communities can still be impacted by wildfire smoke that has traveled from a fire burning thousands of miles away. In addition, questions remain about the public health impacts from prescribed fire, and much is needed to be done to protect communities from prescribed fire smoke, particularly at the scale needed to address the wildfire crisis. Recent studies from Australia have indicated health impacts from prescribed fire smoke can sometimes exceed that from wildfire smoke, and if climate change continues to worsen, the increased health burden of wildfire smoke will “undermine prescribed burning effectiveness.” 

Still, if prescribed burns can limit fire duration and severity, they will lead to less smoke overall than if they had not been conducted. Wildfires may also progress more slowly across the landscape if they encounter patches of land previously treated with prescribed fire, buying more time for response and producing less smoke overall. As a result, prescribed burning is considered a tool in the arsenal to reduce future wildland fire smoke impacts. While this may be promising, currently, reduced future smoke is more a side benefit of prescribed fire rather than an objective for the burns. Most prescribed burns are planned for community fire protections and ecosystem benefits rather than reducing the probability of long duration smoke events impacting communities. Agencies conducting prescribed burning include USFS, BLM, BIA, NPS, FWS, and DoD.

Several of the topic areas described above are conducted by the federal government in support of prescribed fire.

The federal effort to protect the populace from wildland fire smoke health impacts are made difficult because exposure to wildland fire smoke is influenced by many factors.

Photo by Patrick Perkins on Unsplash

Opportunities

The federal government has shown interest in better understanding smoke and its potential impacts on United States residents. However, there are gaps in federal actions and resulting opportunities that, if taken, could lead to stronger protections from the known health impacts of wildland fire smoke. If the government takes a more proactive role in reducing public exposure to smoke, future fire seasons may bring less illness and death.

Policy to Protect Vulnerable Populations

Notably, policies or rules to protect workers or school children are not on the list of federal smoke-related actions. The federal government is investing heavily in smoke research, situational awareness, and hazardous fuels mitigation but has thus far not implemented rules mandating protection from unhealthy air quality. As a result, states have stepped in with piecemeal protections, and a person’s level of regulatory protection depends on their jurisdiction.

Currently, only California and Oregon mandate employers protect workers from wildland fire smoke. (Washington is in the process of finalizing a similar rulemaking to replace an emergency rule that expired in September 2022.) Protections vary among these states based on air quality, work environment, and enforcement. 

This fragmented landscape could be rectified by a federal requirement to limit worker wildland fire smoke exposure. In a 2022 consensus study report, a NASEM committee recommended OSHA set standards for wildfire smoke exposure and mandate employers protect workers. As part of that report, the committee also recommended that Congress expand OSHA’s authority to cover “unpaid volunteers, family members of farm employees, domestic workers in residential settings, gig workers, and many workers now categorized as independent contractors,” all of whom are not currently protected under OSHA authority.

While there are no EPA or OSHA indoor air quality standards for particulate matter or wildland fire smoke, ASHRAE is preparing guidance for commercial buildings that localities can adopt to better protect indoor workers and school children from smoke’s harmful effects. (Formerly known as the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, ASHRAE develops and publishes standards and guidance for the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) industry.) In 2021, ASHRAE released a framework for commercial buildings and schools to protect occupants from wildland fire smoke. At time of publication, ASHRAE’s formal guidance, Guideline 44-202x: Protecting Building Occupants from Smoke During Wildfire and Prescribed Burn Events, is available for public review. Experts from several federal agencies (EPA, NIST, CDC-NIOSH, GSA) are members of the ASHRAE committee that created the forthcoming guidance.  States and localities can adopt or encourage the adoption of this guidance to help their communities better prepare for smoke events.

Funding and Legislation for Community Assistance

While FEMA provides multiple funding opportunities for pre-and-post fire hazard mitigation work, wildland fire smoke is not identified as a hazard that can trigger a federal emergency declaration under the Stafford Act and FEMA does not currently fund wildland fire smoke mitigation projects. The S.2387 Wildfire Smoke Emergency Declaration Act of 2023 aims to address this by authorizing the President to declare a smoke emergency and enable FEMA and other federal agencies to “provide emergency assistance to states and local communities that are or will be affected by the emergency, including grants, equipment, supplies, and personnel and resources for establishing smoke shelters, air purifiers, and additional air monitoring sites.“  

Another introduced bill, the Cleaner Air Spaces Act of 2023, would direct $30 million to air pollution control agencies via EPA grants for smoke preparedness activities.  

In fact, multiple bills have been recently introduced in Congress to address community wildland fire smoke protections and smoke forecasting. None of these bills have made it out of committee as of publication.

It is beyond the scope of this piece to analyze proposed legislation. However, effective community assistance will require additional resources. While the federal government has shown interest in helping communities, a lack of dedicated funding means state, local and Tribal governments interested in smoke-readiness must mine their own budgets, apply for competitive grants from government and nonprofit organizations, and occasionally solicit donations to protect vulnerable community members.  As a result, a community’s wildland fire smoke protection often depends on the capacity of state and local government staff and nonprofit partners to apply for grants. 

In rural areas, that capacity can be particularly hard to come by. For example, the five-person Central Montana Health District provides public health services for five counties. Also in Montana, the single public health nurse for Granite County is based out of neighboring Deer Lodge County. Communities without persons able to engage in the competitive funding environment for wildland fire smoke response will have lesser public health protections.

Local health departments and air pollution control programs receive federal funding, but it is already too little for the programs to function without additional grants and state and local support. Public health has long been chronically underfunded in the United States., and local health departments do not have the resources on hand to deal with the added threat posed by increasing wildland fire smoke. The federal government is investing billions of dollars to address fuel buildup in our forests in the hope it will lead to reduced catastrophic fire and smoke. Programmatic funding to help communities prepare now for smoke could go a long way to reducing impacts from the smoke we are currently experiencing.

Improved Respirators for the Public

Several agencies recommend the public use NIOSH-certified N95 respirators to protect themselves from the fine particulate matter in wildland fire smoke. However, these respirators are designed for workers, not the public. A 2022 NASEM consensus study report sponsored by EPA, CDC, DOS, and the CDC Foundation identified several shortcomings of N95s as the only respirator for public use, including comfort, limited sizing, incompatibility with facial hair, and incompatibility with some outdoor occupations, such as wildland firefighting.  Also, in a work environment with a respiratory protection program, workers undergo a “fit test” to ensure the respirator seals tightly to their face and, when used correctly, will provide the promised protection. The NASEM committee recommended the government establish a research and approval program to guide the development of innovative respiratory protective devices designed for a wide range of public users, including infants, children, and the frail elderly that can provide adequate protection in absence of formal fit testing.

As a positive step toward following some of the NASEM report’s recommendations, NIOSH (collaborating with NASA and Capital Consulting Corporation) recently launched a crowd-sourcing competition to improve respirator fit evaluations and make them more user-friendly for the public. However, there remain many recommendations in the NASEM report that the federal government could take on to improve the public and workers’ protections from wildland fire smoke.

Improved/Comprehensive Communication to Inform the Public About Health Risks and Mitigation Strategies

This review of publicly available information about the federal government’s engagement with wildland fire smoke took us through hundreds of websites and publications. A significant amount of work has gone into characterizing wildland fire smoke movement and identifying prescribed burning windows. Work is also being done to understand the tradeoffs of prescribed fire and wildfire smoke emissions. Meanwhile, significant efforts have been put toward understanding the health and economic burden of wildland fire smoke and how we can better protect people from its harms. 

During wildfires, smoke is treated as a hazard across agencies, and the public receives information about how to protect themselves from its impacts. During prescribed fires, the smoke is treated as more of a nuisance or a throwaway concern from land management agencies. News releases about upcoming prescribed fires may mention smoke being visible or present over roadways, but rarely include any recommendations for protective measures the public can take to minimize potential health impacts. Meanwhile, the USFS Wildfire Crisis Strategy documents lean heavily on the need for more prescribed fire, but do not mention the impact from prescribed fire smoke on the public.

In addition, there are many government sites and documents with advice for reducing wildfire risk and creating fire adapted communities (FACs), but often, this advice is limited to protection from flames. (Of note, on the USFS FAC site, the only mention of smoke states: “Fuel reduction projects often involve smoke, so its important residents understand the value of fuel treatments and tolerate the temporary inconvenience of smoke that could reduce the long-term risk of wildfire.”)

These are missed communication opportunities. Anywhere we talk about fire, we should talk about smoke and how to stay protected from its impacts. The more the public sees the government treating smoke seriously and offering practical guidance for staying protected from its impacts, the more likely we can reduce harms from both wildfire and prescribed fire smoke and increase the amount of prescribed fire on the landscape. On a positive note, fireadapted.org, run by the Fire Adapted Communities Network (which counts several federal agencies and collaborations among its members), includes public health and smoke concerns as a key component to fire preparedness. 

The EPA, CDC and partner agencies have done the work to create actionable guidance for the public. Anywhere the government writes about wildland fire, it should include the health risks associated with the smoke and the steps the public can take to prepare.The government and media will often breathlessly recount the number of homes lost to fire, but data relaying the number of deaths and illnesses caused by wildland fire smoke are generally missing from public discourse. Too often, this information is relegated to estimates in academic journals and increases in odds and relative risk ratios that are not lay friendly. A recent FAS policy recommendation would see the CDC and EPA create a nationwide data dashboard showing mortality and morbidity attributed to wildland fire smoke.  This type of data, presented clearly to the public, could help policy makers and the public better understand the significant harms of wildland fire smoke, which would hopefully lead to more investment in community protections on both the federal and local level.

Conclusion

Wildland fire smoke is a health threat that will return year after year. More wildlands and more homes will burn, and residents across the country will bear that burden via smoke that pools in valleys and travels thousands of miles. The federal government has shown interest in understanding and forecasting wildland fire smoke, and many agencies are taking part in researching smoke’s health impacts and relaying guidance to the public. However, there remain significant funding gaps, both for agency actions and for community assistance. Despite annual death tolls in the thousands, smoke from wildland fires takes a backseat in many fire-oriented federal discussions (for example, EPA and CDC only recently gained seats on the Wildland Fire Leadership Council, which has been around for decades). Hopefully, this will begin to change. The Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission, tasked by Congress to form “federal policy recommendations and strategies on ways to better prevent, manage, suppress and recover from wildfires,” is expected to release their recommendations this fall. With a workgroup focused on public health, we look forward to seeing how the Commission recommends improving the government’s response to the wildland fire smoke crisis.

Impact Fellow Sarah Coefield contributed to this issue brief during her residency at FAS and prior to beginning her assignment at the Environmental Protection Agency.

About This Analysis

NOTE 1: This investigation did not dive into budgetary expenditures, which likely vary widely among agencies. For many agencies, wildland fire smoke work is more tangential to their overall mission. In addition, for EPA, at least, wildland fire smoke work is conducted on the side without a dedicated funding source or staff position.

NOTE 2: This is only an overview of activities by the federal United States government. State, local, Tribal, university, nonprofit and international experts are active in the wildland fire space and contribute significantly to the breadth of wildland fire smoke knowledge and efforts to protect public health.

NOTE 3: This analysis is based on publicly available information to the best of our knowledge at time of publication. It may not encompass all wildland fire smoke efforts at all agencies.

Acronyms: 

Next-Generation Fire and Vegetation Modeling for a Hot and Dry Future

Summary 

Wildfires are burning in ways that surprise even seasoned firefighters. Our current models cannot predict this extreme fire behavior—nor can they reproduce recent catastrophic wildfires, making them likely to fail at predicting future wildfires or determining when it is safe to light prescribed fires. 

To better prepare the fire management community to operate in a new climate, Congress should establish and fund five regional centers of excellence (CoE) to develop, maintain, and operate next-generation fire and vegetation models to support wildland fire planning and management. Developing five regional CoEs (Southeast, Southwest, California, Pacific Northwest, Northern/Central Rockies) will ensure that researchers pursue a range of approaches that will ultimately lead to better models for predicting future wildfire behavior, improving our ability to safeguard human lives, communities, and ecosystems.

Challenge and Opportunity

In the decade ending in 2021, total federal wildfire suppression expenditures surpassed $23 billion, which is a fraction of the total costs of damages from wildfire over that period. For example, the 2018 wildfires in California are estimated to have amounted to $148.5 billion in economic costs for the state. The costs of suppressing fire, and the societal and natural resources costs of extreme wildfire, will continue to increase with increasing temperatures. 

Fewer than 2% of ignitions become large wildfires, but it is this 2% that cause most of the damage because they are burning under extreme conditions. The area of forests burned by wildfire annually in the western United States has been increasing exponentially since 1984. While the number of ignitions remains relatively constant from year to year, climate change is drying fuels and making forests more flammable. As a result, no matter how much money we spend on wildfire suppression, we will not be able to stop increasingly extreme wildfires. Thus, we need to better understand where the risks lie on our landscapes and work proactively to reduce them. 

When vegetation—especially dead vegetation—is subjected to high temperatures, any moisture absorbed during the winter months quickly evaporates. As a result, increasingly hot summers are making our forests more flammable. Live vegetation moisture content does not react as quickly as dead vegetation, but sharp increases in air temperature when conditions are dry can make live plants more flammable as well. While this relationship between temperature and ecosystem flammability has remained consistent over time, until the past decade we had not reached a level of warming that dried ecosystems sufficiently to allow for consistent extreme fire behavior. This is in part because large dead fuels, such as dead trees and logs, did not dry sufficiently to become flammable for the majority of the fire season until recently. 

Our current operational models for simulating wildfire and vegetation are incapable of reproducing the extreme fire behavior and rapid ecosystem change that we are now experiencing. Forest growth-and-yield models, such as the Forest Vegetation Simulator, used by managers have served them well for decades. However, because they are built using statistical relationships between past tree growth and climate, they are incapable of capturing the effects of changing climate, especially extreme events, on tree growth and mortality. Similarly, our operational fire models, such as FARSITE, that are used for both management planning and simulating fire spread to plan fire suppression activities are not designed to deal with the substantial ecosystem changes that are occurring from climate change. These fire models have served us well in the past, but increasing temperature and a drying atmosphere are causing conditions that far exceed the data used to build these models. 

For example, our current operational fire models do not account for large dead trees and logs and how they contribute to fire spread or for the way fire behaves in the wildland–urban interface. Yet wildfires are increasingly burning through communities, and the number of dead trees and logs is increasing because of drought- and insect-induced tree mortality and is increasingly available to burn because of high temperatures. The 2020 Creek Fire in the Sierra Nevada, California, burned through an area of extensive tree mortality from prolonged drought and insect outbreaks. The operational fire spread model ELMFIRE, which is used to predict fire spread of active wildfires, was unable to predict the mass fire behavior created by the massive number of dead trees.

Managing wildfire risk both prior to and during wildfires requires advanced models that are able to account for changing climatic conditions. We need new wildfire models that account for the increasing fuel dryness that facilitates extreme fire behavior, and we need new vegetation models that account for the effects of extreme drought and temperature on vegetation mortality. The research and development necessary to prepare us for our increasingly flammable world requires both fundamental and applied research, neither of which is sufficient on its own. 

Further, we need to ensure that we commit to maintaining these models as the climate continues to change so that we do not create another tool that fails to serve us well within a decade or two. As the climate continues to change, these next-generation fire and vegetation models will be challenged with novel conditions that require continuous efforts to ensure they are capable of capturing the dynamics of the system. In addition, we must ensure that the mechanistic understanding of the system that develops is applied to supporting fire and vegetation management decision-making. This will require ongoing experimentation and observations of actual wildfire behavior, along with extensive data collection to characterize how quickly the flammability of the system changes as a function of vegetation type and weather conditions. 

Developing these next-generation models is necessary for both fire suppression and management planning. Incident command teams rely on fire spread models to help plan suppression efforts for active wildfires, and thus having better predictions of fire spread is essential for effective operations and firefighter safety. Likewise, planning forest treatments that are effective for reducing the risk of high-severity wildfire under extreme weather conditions requires better vegetation and fire models that can capture the influence of changing climate on the probability that high-severity wildfire occurs. 

Plan of Action

Developing and future-proofing next-generation fire and vegetation models will require new and sustained investment. Further, we must accept that these advanced models will require a level of expertise to operate that we cannot expect from a land manager trained in natural resource management, requiring that we fund expert model users to support management planning and suppression efforts. 

As with all research and development, there are many possible pathways. Regional differences in weather, vegetation, and management history will alter climate effects on vegetation growth, mortality, and flammability. Similar to the Manhattan Project approach of simultaneously pursuing two different ignition systems when there was more than one potential viable alternative, we lack the necessary understanding to pick a “winning” model at this point. 

To account for regional differences in vegetation and the research momentum that is developing in different nascent modeling approaches, an effective and robust federal investment would entail the following actions. 

Recommendation 1. Congress should establish and fund five centers of excellence housed at academic institutions in the Southeast, Southwest, California, Pacific Northwest, and Northern/Central Rockies to develop and maintain next-generation fire and vegetation models that are capable of modeling extreme fire behavior and can be operationalized to support planning for wildfire and vegetation management and to support wildfire suppression. 

Establishing five centers with this geographic distribution will allow for investigation into the forest types where the majority of wildfire area occurs and will capture the range of climatic conditions under which wildfires are occurring. It will also take advantage of past and ongoing regional research efforts that will form the information foundation for each center. While these centers should have largely independent research programs, it will be necessary to coordinate some large-scale experimentation and to ensure that research findings and advances are shared rapidly. To achieve these objectives, one center should be selected to act as the coordinating center for the network. 

Recommendation 2. Congress should require institutional partnerships between the host institutions and federal research institutions (e.g., U.S. Forest Service Research and Development, Department of Energy National Labs, U.S. Geological Survey, etc.). 

We are currently in an all-hands-on-deck situation in the fire and fuels research community, and we need to operate in a collaborative and regionally coordinated manner. Requiring partnerships between the academic centers of excellence and federal research facilities within each region will ensure that effort is not duplicated and a wider range of expertise. For example, efforts are under way at federal research facilities that could be integrated within the regional fire centers. The integration will ensure collaboration between academic and federal partners and allow for the overall research effort to draw on the strengths of these different types of institutions. 

Recommendation 3. Congress should mandate and fund the centers to operate these next-generation models and support wildfire and vegetation management planning and operations. 

To date, we have relied on fire and vegetation models developed by the research community to use data collected by fire and forest managers and packaged so that natural resource professionals can operate the models. Both of these constraints have contributed to the limitations of our current suite of models. We can no longer afford the limitations imposed by expectations on the research community to develop models that a natural resource professional can run on a desktop computer. Accounting for a range of factors, such as how changing climatic conditions will directly change the amount of fuel on the landscape and also for how short-term changes in weather will interact with longer-term changes in climate and influence fuel moisture, requires a more sophisticated approach to simulating the system than is necessarily accessible to a non-expert user. Expecting a natural resource professional to use an advanced coupled atmosphere-biosphere fire model would be like teaching someone how to balance their checkbook and then expecting them to calculate exactly how much they need to save every week for retirement. Further, important feedback to model improvement will come from repeated application by expert model users. To deploy next-generation fire and vegetation models in a manner that will effectively support fire and natural resource management decision-making, each center will employ experts who will work collaboratively with managers in response to their requests to run simulations for pre-fire management and suppression operations planning.

Recommendation 4. Congress should mandate the creation of strategic plans to support implementation and coordination across centers. 

Each center will develop a five-year strategic plan to guide its research and development efforts. Following strategic plan development, representatives from the five centers will convene to determine necessary coordinated experimentation and implementation plans to facilitate coordinated efforts. The coordinating center will hold biannual leadership meetings to ensure data and information flow and identify additional opportunities for collaboration among individual centers. 

Conclusion 

Establishing five centers of excellence to develop, maintain, and operate next-generation models will cost approximately $26 million per year, which is less than 1% of the 2021 federal wildfire suppression expenditure. This level of funding would provide $5 million per year per center (plus an additional $1 million per year for the coordinating center). The annual budgets would fund staff scientist and research assistant positions, provide support for the experiments necessary to develop and parameterize new models, provide computing resources for computationally sophisticated models, and fund staff analysts to run the models in support of managers. Initially, the majority of the annual appropriation would be focused on model development, transitioning to maintaining and operating the models to support land management as the technology matures. 

The centers could be supported through National Science Foundation (NSF) funding. NSF could provide financial support for five university host institutions (one in each region) selected through a competitive bidding process. In turn, these university host institutions can manage the required federal partnerships. Selection of university host institutions could be based in part on demonstrated capacity to manage successful partnerships with federal institutions. 

It is imperative that we invest in new models that will support more effective mitigation to reduce wildfire severity, otherwise spending on suppression will continue to balloon despite improved fire intelligence.

Frequently Asked Questions
Are there universities with demonstrated capacity to perform the kind of work required to make this centers of excellence program successful?

Yes. Just a few examples include the colocation of the University of Georgia with fire researchers in the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) Southern Research Station; the University of New Mexico’s existing relationships with Los Alamos National Lab, Sandia National Lab, and the U.S. Geological Survey; and the University of Washington’s long-standing relationship with the USFS Pacific Northwest Fire and Environmental Applications research group.

Why might NSF be the right agency to fund the proposed centers?

NSF is in wildland fire research and, jointly with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, already funds research on fire in the wildland–urban interface. While much of the research needed to develop next-generation fire and vegetation models is basic, all wildland fire research is inherently applicable. NSF hosted a five-day Wildfire and the Biosphere Innovation Lab, and the findings included the assertion that “support for applied research will be most effective by aiming at both short- and long-term applications and solutions,” acknowledging that the application of research findings is an important part of the research enterprise.

Large investments in hazardous fuels management are being made now. Will models developed through this research have an impact in the near term?

Yes. These centers will bring together and build from ongoing efforts. There are already efforts under way to develop optimal treatment strategies that account for changing climatic conditions using advanced forest landscape models. This approach, with some refinement and validation, will be useful for informing treatment placement within the next two years.

Why do we need five centers of excellence? Wouldn’t it be more efficient to have one center that tracks and evaluates regional modeling efforts and creates best practices for management application?

This is functionally the system we have now. The Fire Research Management and Exchange System (FRAMES) provides a clearinghouse of models developed for fire and vegetation modeling to inform management. FRAMES may be a good interface to help increase manager awareness of the models the five centers will develop, but it is not a mechanism for facilitating the research and development needed to tackle the wildfire problem. We need five centers because there are already a number of efforts under way to develop new fire and vegetation models. None of the models will be perfect because they all take different approaches and there are tradeoffs inherent in any given approach. With simultaneous investment, we will be able to capitalize on the aspects of each model that best simulate a part of the fire spread or vegetation growth process and then develop a system that incorporates the best of each model. Competition within the U.S. scientific enterprise has helped our country achieve high global standing. Funding five centers will shift that competition away from researchers spending much of their time competing for funding and focus it on competing with their best ideas in a way that prepares us for managing wildfire in the future.

Save Lives by Making Smoke Tracking a Core Part of Wildland Fire Management

Toxic smoke from wildland fire spreads far beyond fire-prone areas, killing many times more people than the flames themselves and disrupting the lives of tens of millions of people nationwide. Data infrastructure critical for identifying and minimizing these smoke-related hazards is largely absent from our wildland fire management toolbox. 

Congress and executive branch agencies can and should act to better leverage existing smoke data in the context of wildland fire management and to fill crucial data infrastructure gaps. Such actions will enable smoke management to become a core part of wildland fire management strategy, thereby saving lives.

Challenge and Opportunity

The 2023 National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy Addendum describes a vision for the future: “To safely and effectively extinguish fire, when needed; use fire where allowable; manage our natural resources; and collectively, learn to live with wildland fire.” Significant research conducted since the publication of the original Strategy in 2014 indicates that wildfire smoke impacts people across the United States, causing thousands of deaths and billions of dollars of economic losses annually. 

Smoke impacts exceed their corresponding flame impacts and span far greater areas coast to coast. However, wildfire strategy and funding largely focus on flames and their impacts. Smoke mitigation and management should be a high priority for federal agencies considering the 1:1 ratio of economic impacts and 1:30 ratio of fire to smoke deaths.

Some smoke data is already collected, but these datasets can be made more actionable for health considerations and better integrated with other fire-impact data to mitigate risks and save more lives.

Smoke tracking

Several federal programs exist to track wildfire smoke nationwide, but there are gaps in their utility as actionable intelligence for health. For example, the recent “smoke wave” on the East Coast highlighted some of the difficulties with public warning systems. 

Existing wildfire-smoke monitoring and forecast programs include:

The EPA also publishes retrospective smoke emissions totals in the National Emissions Inventory (NEI), but these lack specificity on the downwind locations impacted by the smoke that would be needed to be used for health considerations.

Existing data are excellent, but scientists using the data combine them in non-standardized ways, making interoperability of results difficult. New nationwide authoritative smoke-data tools need to be created—likely by linking existing data and existing methods—and integrated into core wildland fire strategy to save lives.

Smoke health impacts

There is no single, authoritative accounting of wildfire smoke impacts on human health for the public or policymakers to use. Four key gaps in smoke and health infrastructure may explain why such an accounting doesn’t yet exist. 

  1. The U.S. lacks a standardized method for quantifying the health impacts of wildfire smoke, especially mortality, despite recent research progress in this area. 
  2. The lack of a national smoke concentration dataset hinders national studies of smoke-health impacts because different studies take different approaches. 
  3. Access to mortality data through the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), managed by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), is slow and difficult for the scientists who seek to use mortality data in epidemiological studies of wildfire smoke. 
  4. Gaps remain in understanding the relative harm of wildfire smoke, which can contain aerosolized hazardous compounds from burned infrastructure, compared to the general air pollution (e.g., from cars and factories) that is often used as analog in health research. 

Addressing these gaps together will enable official wildfire-smoke-attributable death tolls to be publicized and used by decision-makers.

Integration of wildfire smoke into wildland fire management strategy

Interagency collaborations currently set wildland fire management strategy. Three key groups with a mission to facilitate interagency collaboration are the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), the National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG), and the Wildland Fire Leadership Council (WFLC). NIFC maintains datasets on wildfire impacts, including basic summary statistics like acres burned, but smoke data are not included in these datasets. Furthermore, while NWCG does have 1 of its 17 committees dedicated to smoke, and has collaborations that include NOAA (who oversees smoke tracking in the Hazard Mapping System), none of the major wildfire collaborations include agencies with expertise in measuring the impacts of smoke, such as the EPA or Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Finally, WFLC has added calls for furthering community smoke-readiness in the recent 2023 National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy Addendum, but greater emphasis on smoke is still needed. Better integration of smoke data, smoke-health data, and smoke-expert agencies will enable better consideration of smoke as part of national wildland fire management strategy.

Plan of Action

To make smoke management a core and actionable part of wildland fire management strategy, thereby saving lives, several interrelated actions should be taken.

To enhance decision tools individuals and jurisdictions can use to protect public health, Congress should take action to:

  1. Issue smoke wave alerts nationwide. Fund the National Weather Service (NWS) to develop and issue smoke wave alerts to communities via the Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) system, which is designed for extreme weather alerting. The NWS currently distributes smoke messages defined by state agencies through lower-level alert pathways, but should use the WEA system to increase how many people receive the alerts. Furthermore, a national program, rather than current state-level decisions, would ensure continuity nationwide so all communities have timely warning of potentially deadly smoke disasters. Alerts should follow best practices for alerting to concisely deliver information to a maximum audience, while avoiding alert fatigue.
  2. Create a nationwide smoke concentration dataset. Fund NOAA and/or EPA to create a data inventory of ground-level smoke PM2.5 concentrations by integrating air-monitor data and satellite data, using existing methods as needed. The proposed data stream would provide standardized estimates of smoke concentrations nationwide, and would be a critical precursor for estimating smoke mortality as well as the extent to which smoke is contributing to poor air quality in communities. This action would be enhanced by data from recommendation 4 (below).
  3. Create a smoke mortality dataset. Fund the CDC and/or EPA to create a nationwide data inventory of excess morbidity and mortality attributed  to smoke from wildland fires. An additional enhancement would be to track the smoke health impacts contributed by each source wildfire. Findings should be disseminated in NIFC wildfire impact summaries. This action would be enhanced by data from recommendations 4-5 and research from recommendations 6-8 (below).

The decision-making tools in recommendations 1-3 can be created today based on existing data streams. They should be further enhanced as follows in recommendations 4-10:

To better track locations and concentrations of wildfire smoke, Congress should take action to: 

  1. Install more air-quality sensors. Fund the EPA, which currently monitors ground-level air pollutants and co-oversees the Fire and Smoke Map with the USFS, to establish smoke-monitoring stations in each census tract across the U.S and in other locations as needed to provide all communities with real-time data on wildfire-smoke exposure. 
  2. Create a smoke impact dashboard. The current EPA Fire and Smoke Map shows near-real-time data from regulatory-grade air monitors, commercial-grade air sensors, and satellite data of smoke plumes. An upgraded dashboard would combine that map with data from recommendations 1-3 to give current and historic information about ground-level air quality, the fraction of pollutants due to wildfire smoke, and the expected health impacts. It would also include short-term forecast data, which would be greatly improved with additional modeling capability to incorporate fire behavior and complex terrain.

To better track health impacts of wildfire smoke, Congress should take action to:

  1. Improve researcher access to mortality data. Specifically, direct the CDC to increase epidemiologist access to the National Vital Statistics System. This data system contains the best mortality data for the U.S., so enhancing access will enhance the scientific community’s ability to study the health impacts of wildfire smoke (recommendations 6-8).
  2. Establish wildfire-health research centers. Specifically, fund the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to establish flagship wildfire-smoke health-research centers to research the health effects of wildfire smoke. Results-dissemination pathways should include through the NIFC to reach a broad wildfire policy audience.
  3. Enhanced health-impact-analysis tools. Direct EPA to evaluate the available epidemiological literature to adopt standardized wildfire-specific concentration-response functions for use in estimating health impacts in their BenMAP-CE tool. Non-wildfire functions are currently used even in the research literature, despite potentially underestimating the health impacts of wildfire smoke. 

To enhance wildland fire strategy by including smoke impacts, Congress should take action to:

  1. Hire interagency staff. Specifically, fund EPA and CDC to place staff at the main NIFC office and join the NIFC collaboration. This will facilitate collaboration between smoke-expert agencies with agencies focused on other aspects of wildfire.

Support landscape management research. Specifically, direct the USFS, CDC, and EPA to continue researching the public health impacts of different landscape management strategies (e.g., prescribed burns of different frequencies compared to full suppression). Significant existing research, including from the EPA, has investigated these links but still more is needed to better inform policy. Needed research will continue to link different landscape management strategies to probable smoke outputs in different regions, and link the smoke outputs to health impacts. Understanding the whole chain of linkages is crucial to landscape management decisions at the core of a resilient wildland fire management strategy.

Diagram with arrows showing data flow from top to bottom, between the proposed infrastructure, with each shape representing one recommendation. Data flows from the data inputs (top boxes) to actionable tools for decision-making (circles), and finally on to pathways for integrating smoke into wildland fire management strategy (bottom boxes). The three blue shapes are recommendations that can be implemented immediately.

Cost estimates

This proposal is estimated to have a first-year cost of approximately $273 million, and future annual cost of $38 million once equipment is purchased. The total cost of the first year represents less than 4% of current annual wildfire spending (subsequent years would be 0.5% of annual spending), and it would lay the foundation to potentially save thousands of lives each year. Assumptions behind this estimate can be found in the FAQ.

RecommendationCompletion DateAgencies Responsible
1. National smoke alertingASAPNWS
2. Smoke concentration datasetASAPEPA/NOAA
3. Smoke mortality datasetASAPEPA/CDC/NIFC
4. More air-quality sensors5 yearsEPA
5. Smoke impact dashboardASAPNOAA
6. Improved access to mortality data1 year to start, then ongoingCDC
7. Wildfire-health research centers2 years to start; 5-year grantsNIH
8. Enhanced health-impact-analysis tools1 yearEPA
9. Interagency staffingOngoingEPA/CDC/NIFC
10. Landscape-management researchOngoingUSFS/CDC/EPA

Conclusion

In the U.S., more and more people are being exposed to wildfire smoke—27 times more people are experiencing extreme smoke days than a decade ago. The suggested programs are needed to improve the national technical ability to increase smoke-related safety, thereby saving lives and reducing smoke-related public health costs.

Frequently Asked Questions
How long will it take to implement the proposal described in this memo?

Recommendations 1-3 can be completed within approximately 6-12 months because they rely on existing technology. Recommendation 4 requires building physical infrastructure, so it should take 6 months to initiate and several years to complete. Recommendation 5 requires building digital infrastructure from existing tools, so it can be initiated immediately but relies on data from recommendations 2-3 to finalize. Recommendation 6 will require one year of personnel time to complete program review necessary for making changes, then will require ongoing support. Recommendation 7 establishes research centers, which will take 2 years to solicit and select proposals, then 5 years of funding after. Recommendation 8 requires a literature review and can be completed in 1 year. Recommendations 9-10 are ongoing projects that can start within the first year but then will require ongoing support to succeed.

How many people die each year due to wildfire smoke?

The latest estimates indicate that thousands of people die across the United States each year due to wildfire smoke. However, there is no consistent ongoing tracking of smoke-attributable deaths and no centralized authoritative tallies.

For how long after a wildfire does smoke cause deaths?

Many deaths occur during the wildfire itself—wildfire smoke contains small particles (less than 2.5 microns, called PM2.5) that immediately increase the risk of stroke and heart attack. Additional deaths can occur after the fire, due to longer-term complications, much in the same way that smoking increases mortality.

Where are people dying due to wildfire smoke?

Wildfires and wildfire smoke occur across the country, so deaths attributable to these causes do too. Recent research indicates that there are high numbers of deaths attributable to wildfire smoke on the West Coast, but also in Texas and New York, due to long-distance transportation of smoke and the high populations in those states.

How were the cost estimates for this proposal calculated?

One-time costs for recommendations 2, 3, and 8 were estimated in terms of person-years of effort and are additive with their annual costs in the first year. Recommendations 2-3 require a large team to create the initial datasets and then smaller teams to maintain, while recommendation 8 requires only an initial literature review and no maintenance. One person-year is estimated at $150,000 per year, including fringe benefits.


One-time costs for recommendation 4 were calculated in terms of air-quality monitor costs, with one commercial grade sensor ($400) for each of the 84,414 census tracts in the U.S., one sensor comparable to regulatory grade (estimated at $40,000) for each of the 5% most smoke-impacted census tracts, and 15% overhead costs for siting and installation.


Annual costs for recommendations 1-3, 5-6, and 9-10 were estimated in terms of person-years of effort because salary is the main consumable for these projects. One person-year is estimated at $150,000 per year, including fringe benefits.


Annual costs for recommendation 4 were estimated by assuming that 10% of sensors would need replacement per year. These funds can be passed on to jurisdictions, following current maintenance practice of air-quality monitors.


Annual costs for recommendation 7 is for four NIH Research Core Centers (P30 grant type) at their maximum amount of $2.5 million, each, per year.