Preventing Catastrophic Wildfire Under Climate Change
Summary
Wildfires, damages, and deaths are increasing because of unnatural accumulations of wood from outdated forest policies and intensifying heat from human-caused climate change. Preventing catastrophic wildfires requires improved, science-based policies that will shift the government from after-the-fact firefighting to proactive controlled burning. This would improve the lives of Americans and the health of our ecosystems by reducing deaths and damage due to wildfire, restoring damaged forests that naturally require fire, and decreasing the carbon emissions that cause climate change.
This memorandum outlines a policy approach to achieve these outcomes. Executive action will establish a national strategy for proactive fire management. Legislation will ensure revenue neutral implementation by reallocating funds currently used for firefighting to less expensive and more effective fire prevention. Finally, fire managers will increase prescribed burning and use of natural fires, relying on scientific analyses to target areas at greatest risk under climate change.
The Federation of American Scientists supports H.R. 471, the re-introduction of the Fix Our Forests Act.
Understanding and planning for the compound impacts of extreme heat and wildfire smoke will improve public health preparedness, mitigate public exposure to extreme heat and wildfire smoke, and minimize economic losses.
This strategy provides specific, actionable policy ideas to tackle the growing threat of extreme heat in the United States and was co-signed by more than 60 labor, industry, health, housing, environmental, academic and community associations and organizations.
Extreme heat has become a national economic crisis: lowering productivity, shrinking business revenue, destroying crops, and pushing power grids to the brink. The impacts of extreme heat cost our Nation an estimated $162 billion in 2024 – equivalent to nearly 1% of the U.S. GDP.