Congress considering bipartisan legislation to expedite forest restoration in areas threatened by wildfires

Congress is considering bipartisan legislation to expedite forest restoration and management in areas most threatened by catastrophic wildfire. The legislation focuses on implementing necessary treatment of forest lands, including reintroducing prescribed fire, which can thin overgrown forests and reduce the risk of destroyed homes, communities and livelihoods, along with other improvements to the wildland fire system.

Wildfire is now a year-round problem across the U.S., threatening communities, forests, farmers and private landowners

Uncharacteristically severe wildfires destroy old growth ecosystems, crops, erode topsoil and damage water infrastructure, undermining the livelihoods of farmers, ranchers and foresters. People and important landscapes across our nation will benefit if the federal government has the appropriate tools to better manage catastrophic wildfire risk, and the Senate’s Fix Our Forests Act is a science-based proposal that protects people and property.

Environmental Defense Fund issued a statement on the introduction of the Senate’s version of the Fix Our Forests Act. EDF Action, the advocacy partner of Environmental Defense Fund, has endorsed the Senate version. The Senate’s Fix Our Forests Act cleared the Senate Agriculture Committee 18-5 with bipartisan support in October.

This support reflects that catastrophic wildfire resilience is a non-partisan issue

The Senate’s Fix Our Forests Act reflects the needs of a broad collection of stakeholders who have found common ground to mutually protect forest health, the environment and communities from catastrophic wildfire.

The Wildfire Mitigation and Management Commission mandated by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law included 50 members with diverse expertise in wildfire including an EDF representative. The Commission required consensus among all 50 members and generated over 200 recommendations, many of which are included in this bill.

The Senate version of the Fix Our Forests Act differs from the House proposal in important ways

The Senate proposal:

1. Gives tribes greater authority to initiate and lead forest resilience projects on federal and tribal lands
2. Strengthens community wildfire protection programs to prevent urban conflagrations like the deadly fires in Los Angeles and Maui
3. Allows more substantive interaction and engagement for communities
4. Removes the requirement that groups or individuals comment during the comment period in order to challenge a project in court
5. Maintains the ability of the public to have input on these projects up-front; and
6. Reduces presidential administration emergency authorities

The U.S. Forest Service is an essential partner in wildfire management

The Senate’s Fix Our Forests Act directs the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Geological Survey to use high-risk “fireshed management areas.” These are areas where catastrophic wildfires most threaten communities and drinking water because of forest density, the local climate and/or proximity to communities.

Then it accelerates U.S. Forest Service and Department of the Interior implementation of proactive wildfire mitigation through prescribed fire, ecological thinning and community resilience programs supported by science-based decision-making.

Successful implementation of the Senate’s proposal will require the U.S. Forest Service to be appropriately funded and staffed – a challenge exacerbated by illegal executive actions impounding funding for the agency and firing workers. To enable effective implementation, Congress should provide full funding for the Senate Fix Our Forest Act’s programs and actions to restore and rebuild the U.S. Forest Service so that the Senate Fix Our Forest Act’s programs and tools can deliver results on the ground.

Our current wildfire preparation system fails to reduce risks for homeowners, and our current recovery systems leave people vulnerable after their homes or livelihoods are destroyed

Before catastrophic wildfires begin to burn, homeowners need tools to make their homes more resistant to fire, but there is currently no support for home hardening in federal policy. The Senate Fix Our Forests Act creates new programs for home hardening.

Post-fire hazards regularly kill people, and drinking water is often severely degraded for years after a catastrophic wildfire. The Senate Fix Our Forests Act would ensure existing programs allow communities to use funds for recovery. It also creates a unified disaster assistance intake process to reduce the burden on survivors to navigate the labyrinth of federal programs available for recovery.

The proposed Wildfire Intelligence Center would improve data sharing across agencies, early detection of catastrophic wildfire and interagency coordination

The federal government has strong expertise in wildfire, but that expertise is siloed across different agencies which leads to structural barriers to collaboration.

Creating a service center with capacities such as multi-state smoke modeling and weather prediction for burn windows would give land managers, state officials and private landowners access to real-time information that improves response and planning.

The Wildfire Intelligence Center also would enable information sharing between government partners, tribal entities, academia and the private sector to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires instead of reinventing the wheel each time a different stakeholder needs the same tool or information.

Good Neighbor Authority and stewardship contracting have been highly successful in restoring public lands

Revenue from any commercial timber elements of a Good Neighbor Authority (GNA) project are put in a fund that pays forward into more restoration. While Tribes technically have GNA authority, they don’t have the ability to manage revenue. The Senate Fix Our Forests Act gives Tribes the authority to manage revenue, expanding their ability to do land management. GNA is also extended to more entities, opening possibilities for new implementation partners for the USFS.

Stewardship agreements have been very successful, pay revenue forward into more restoration and have additional provisions that support local rural economies such as preference for local contractors. The Senate Fix Our Forests Act expands this tool to look across the longer time scales needed to do this work at scale and incentivize investments in restoration infrastructure.

Prescribed fire is an essential tool in landscape treatment to avoid the most catastrophic wildfires

A new national operational strategy for prescribed fire would orient private, state, local, Tribal and federal government activities and resourcing for prescribed fire. The new national operational strategy would allow for improved collaboration to increase the pace and scale of implementing prescribed fire projects and better clarity about how prescribed fire goals connect to local fire deficits.

The bill modernizes prescribed fire training to enable more people to get needed experience. There is a shortage of people with the highest levels of prescribed fire management burn credentials, known as “burn boss” credentials. Expanding the pathways for fire practitioners to meet live fire experience requirements will help address this shortage.

Currently, it is very difficult to receive the highest level of burn boss training without working for the federal government and deploying to wildfires throughout the summer, locking out institutions without the ability to participate in that system.

The bill expands the pathways for the federal government to enter into long term agreements with non-federal entities, including Tribes, to do prescribed fire on federal land.

If this Senate proposal is signed into law, project plans impacting forests will remain publicly available – and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) will continue to apply to those plans

NEPA guarantees that federal agencies assess the potential environmental impacts of their actions. However, time limits for the public to file legal challenges will move from six years to 150 days from the release of project plans by federal agencies.

In addition, the Senate proposal includes five categorical exclusions to NEPA, which allow federal agencies to expedite environmental review of low impact and environmentally beneficial projects. Four of these categorical exclusions are already in use, but allowable acreage would be expanded. The new categorical exclusion would allow for hazardous tree removal, those most likely to harm firefighters and others in harm’s way.