Managing forests and their wildfires

OPINION:

President Trump’s comments linking forest management to the tragic fires in California generated a firestorm of their own, partly because of a lack of nuance. Forest management is a complex subject — public and private owners usually have very different management objectives and operate in very different regulatory environments.

From a social perspective, all of us have an interest in how forests are managed to provide us with forest products, watershed protection, wildlife habitat, carbon sequestration, recreation and a host of other ecosystem services. Sometimes these competing demands on forests are in competition, sometimes they are complementary, and sometimes it isn’t clear how they relate to each other. California’s experience in the last decade has highlighted that balancing competing management priorities requires us to pay attention to the importance of ecological and social resilience.

Drought, insects and fire are all integral elements of forest ecology, and good forest management acknowledges their place while seeking to avoid widespread tree mortality and the problems that follow on its heels. The communities in and adjacent to forests vary in demographics and economic well-being, but more often than not include households for which fires can have devastating economic and health outcomes.

Unfortunately, the public discourse on forest management in America has often been polarized along both philosophical and political lines. Disagreements over clearcutting, the use of herbicides, or reforestation failures condition current discussions on watercourse protection, stocking, and the use of prescribed fire have never really been resolved in the minds of many stakeholders.

In my role as chair of the California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, I am acutely aware of these past conflicts every time we meet — enter the room with us when we meet to discuss forest policy issues. Trust and a willingness to experiment with new ideas is sometimes in short supply relative to the often-shared feeling that action is needed in the face of a changing climate. But ecological boundaries are being redrawn on the landscape whether we like it or not. Our approach to forest management needs to be as dynamic as the forest’s response will certainly be to changes in rainfall, temperature and growing season. The need for science-based, adaptive management has never been more evident.

Research does give us some directions for how our forest management might need to change. Data from California’s forests make it clear that the probability of any given acre burning is strongly influenced by whether it is actively or passively managed. Our forests can become overstocked with trees in the absence of fire or fire surrogates like biomass or timber harvesting. When fires occur in overstocked forests, we can experience losses of lives and homes, as well as ecological outcomes such as conversion of forests to shrub lands that most of us are not comfortable with.

When we discuss issues like stocking or reforestation requirements and the scientific basis for regulation, the complexity can be daunting. The right recipe for resiliency depends on the purposes for which any acre is being managed, its proximity to homes, utility corridors, watercourses, and critical wildlife habitat, and the desired landscape outcome. But complexity doesn’t require us to oversimplify the situation with uniform stocking requirements or fire return intervals, nor does it require us to put more fire on the landscape where this isn’t going to be socially acceptable or consistent with other legislative mandates like the Clean Air Act and its treatment of the particulates emissions from fires, cars and other activities.

Ultimately, characterizing forest management as “good” or “bad” isn’t very useful from either an operational or regulatory perspective, and doesn’t help us find places where consensus can be reached. Research has shown that how we incorporate the risk from natural hazards into our decision-making is strongly conditioned by our personal experiences, and by the timing of those experiences.

Unlike devastating earthquakes, tsunamis, floods or hurricanes, residents of California and the American West have experienced losses from wildfires in recent years on a frequency that may allow us to avoid the rapid loss of focus on natural hazards as we realize the cost and effort needed to adapt our building codes, transportation and utility networks, zoning, and disaster planning and response. In so doing, they may point the way for the nation. Regulatory agencies at all levels of government need to cooperate to harmonize their policies and prevent the cost of managing forests from dis-incentivizing forest management, particularly for small landowners. Insurance markets will need to both recognize risks and reward actions that mitigate those risks.

Both the California Legislature and Congress seem to understand the urgency of the situation, with the former dedicating significant, ongoing funding for forest management in its last legislative session, and the later adopting a new budgeting framework for the U.S. Forest Service to avoid the problem of rising fire suppression costs crowding out other critical programs. There is reason for hope that we can and will do better.

• J. Keith Gilless, a professor at The University of California, Berkeley, specializes in forest economics and management.