The devastating fires raging near Los Angeles have again drawn national attention to America’s wildfire crisis. Such destructive blazes have become increasingly common, and their human toll is staggering: lives lost, families displaced, and entire neighborhoods reduced to ashes. Like other recent severe wildfires, the blaze in Los Angeles raises questions about what can be done to prevent such devastation in the future.
Fortunately, we know what works. Proactive forest-restoration efforts, such as mechanical thinning and prescribed burning, can significantly reduce the dangerous fuel loads that have turned forests and surrounding landscapes into tinderboxes. A growing body of evidence substantiates how these activities lower the risks of extreme wildfires and enhance forest resilience. Yet the pace and scale of restoration work remains woefully inadequate, hampered by a thicket of regulatory and bureaucratic barriers.
The problem is particularly acute in California, where state policies have hindered forest-restoration efforts. In 2020, after experiencing its worst wildfire season in modern history, California pledged to perform fuel treatment (reducing vegetation and other flammable materials) on 500,000 acres annually by 2025. The state’s environmental policies and management decisions, however, have prevented it from meeting this goal. The California Environmental Quality Act, for example, imposes stringent review requirements that can delay critical restoration projects. That process often involves years of analysis, public comment, and litigation before projects can even begin.
But the problem is not unique to California. The federal government manages most of the forests in the western United States, including over half of California’s forestlands. Decades of fire-suppression policies on these lands have left them dangerously dense and overgrown, while federal laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act significantly delay forest-restoration efforts. Under NEPA, even projects with clear environmental benefits—like prescribed burns and selective thinning—can take years to approve, leaving forests and communities at risk.
A recent analysis by my colleagues at the Property and Environment Research Center underscores just how cumbersome NEPA-related delays can be for the projects most needed to reduce fire risks. On average, it takes 3.6 years to begin a mechanical thinning project and 4.7 years to implement a prescribed burn after the U.S. Forest Service initiates the environmental review process. For large projects requiring environmental impact statements, the timeline stretches even longer, averaging 5.3 years for mechanical treatments and 7.2 years for prescribed burns.
Projects can take even longer if they are challenged by environmental litigants, as is often the case. A recent Breakthrough Institute study found that public land-management projects, and those on forests in particular, are the most common target of NEPA litigation—far more so than infrastructure or fossil-fuel-extraction projects. A forest-restoration project near Bozeman, Montana, designed to protect the city’s water supply, was delayed for 16 years before work finally began a few years ago.
These obstacles not only hinder proactive restoration efforts but also increase the risk that wildfires will ignite before such work can begin. In 2020, for example, the Berry Creek area in California was devastated by the North Complex Fire while critical thinning projects were mired in CEQA reviews. The fire killed 16 people. Similarly, in the town of Grizzly Flats, a forest-restoration project designed to protect the community was delayed nearly a decade. By the time the initiative was approved, it was too late: two-thirds of the town burned in a 2021 wildfire. Similar stories have become all too common across the American West.
Thankfully, the political winds are shifting. During his first presidency, Donald Trump memorably clashed with California governor Gavin Newson over the need to “clean” the state’s forest floors. Now, as the Sacramento Bee recently reported, Golden State leaders are “surprisingly aligned” with Trump on forest management, noting that “[r]esearch shows he wasn’t entirely off base.” In 2022, the Biden administration launched an ambitious wildfire-crisis strategy, calling for millions of acres of additional fuel treatments on public and private lands in the western U.S. The administration made some progress, but it declined to tackle the thornier regulatory and bureaucratic barriers that frequently block restoration projects.
Bipartisan efforts like the Fix Our Forests Act could address some of these challenges. Cosponsored by Rep. Scott Peters (D–CA), the bill aims to streamline environmental reviews for forest-restoration projects, exempt certain projects from the most extensive NEPA reviews, and limit frivolous lawsuits. The bill passed the House of Representatives last year with significant bipartisan support, even in the face of Biden administration opposition—yet it failed to receive a Senate vote. As California’s fires rage, the bill will likely be reintroduced in the new Congress.
The wildfire crisis is as much a policy question as it is an environmental one. Century-old fire-suppression strategies have allowed fuel loads to accumulate to dangerous levels. Forests once characterized by widely spaced trees and grassy understories are now densely packed with smaller, more combustible vegetation. In some parts of the West, such as the Sierra Nevada, forests are six to seven times denser than they were a century ago, fueling unnaturally catastrophic blazes.
The consequences of these changes are profound. Catastrophic wildfires not only destroy communities but also emit vast amounts of pollution. According to a UCLA study, California’s wildfire emissions in 2020 were roughly twice the total greenhouse-gas reductions that the state achieved from 2003 to 2019. A single wildfire season, in other words, effectively reversed nearly two decades of emissions reductions. Moreover, the health impacts of wildfire smoke—a major source of fine-particulate matter—are well-documented, contributing to respiratory illnesses and premature deaths.
Extreme fires also threaten the ecosystems once sustained by more moderate fires. Iconic species in California like giant sequoias, long resilient to low-intensity blazes, are now succumbing to today’s megafires. In many parts of the West, conifer forests are being lost at an alarming rate to extreme fires, often replaced by non-forested shrubland.
Addressing these challenges will require a fundamental shift, including permitting and regulatory policies that some environmental groups are reluctant to reform. Streamlining federal and state environmental-review processes is critical. Exempting beneficial restoration projects from the most extensive reviews could prevent delays that cost lives and landscapes. And litigation reform is essential to reducing frivolous lawsuits that delay critical restoration efforts.
The wildfire crisis is not inevitable. While climate shifts may deepen the risks, the primary drivers are policy-related. Decades of fire suppression, combined with regulatory inertia, have left forests overgrown and vulnerable. The devastating fires near Los Angeles should serve as a wake-up call—not just to California but to the entire American West.
Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images