USDA to invest $500 million in Forest Service’s Wildfire Crisis Strategy

The three largest wildfires in Colorado history all burned during the same summer of 2020, a fire season that saw some 665,000 acres burn within the state. While devastating, that was merely a fraction of what happened across the entire American west, as California lone saw over 4.3 million acres burn that year – and an additional 2.5 million the following season.

As climate change continues to warm the earth, the fluctuations within actual seasons have become more and more extreme. Storms have become more intense, while droughts have become more prolonged. With lightning the single biggest sparker of fire in the west, that will continue to pose a serious threat to the burgeoning communities in areas where naturally occurring fire was once simply part of nature’s regenerative process.

Property and livelihoods are now more on the line in these Wildland-Urban Interface areas than ever at the same time that the risks there are as high as can be.

In the wake of those awful fire seasons, the Biden Administration’s Forest Service enacted a concrete Wildfire Crisis Strategy, one with future dedicated funds coming its way through the proceeds of the Inflation Reduction Act. On Tuesday, a $500 million sum that had previously been allocated was officially invested within the program, one that highlighted 21 particular priority landscapes for fire mitigation and strategy along the way.

A major focus of this will go towards ‘hazardous fuel reductions,’ another way of saying that they’re going to begin to do what they can to clear these priority landscapes of the kind of escalators that can turn the average fire into a hellscape. Downed timber, beetle kill, and the like fall into this category, as the USDA and Forest Service intend to do what they can to protect not just personal property, but the power lines, roads, and water piping that are threatened in these landscapes, too.