Prescribed fire is a critical, but underused, conservation tool

By Jonathan Wood

This is a lightly edited excerpt of testimony recently provided to the U.S. Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee hearing "A Legislative Hearing to Examine a Discussion Draft of the Wildfire Emissions Prevention Act; and S. 881, the Renewable Fuel for Ocean-Going Vessels Act."

Many forest and grassland ecosystems in the United States are fire-adapted, meaning that periodic, low- or moderate-intensity fires are necessary to maintain ecosystem health and to support native plants and wildlife. For millennia, these ecosystems were assisted by Indigenous cultural burning practices. However, federal and state policies favoring fire suppression largely removed fire, including the use of prescribed fire and cultural burning, from many landscapes. As a result, the health of many of these landscapes has suffered, with the most visible impacts being the growing wildfire crisis in the West.

According to the National Association of State Foresters and Coalition of Prescribed Fire Councils, prescribed fire was applied to nearly 10 million acres in the U.S. in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available. While 10 million acres is a lot, there are more than a billion acres of forests and grasslands in the U.S., and use of prescribed fire is concentrated in the southeast, with nearly two-thirds of the acres burned in that region. In much of the country, only a tiny fraction of the forests and grasslands that need regular prescribed fire receive it.

In light of the environmental and other consequences of removing fire from forest and grassland ecosystems, there is a broad and growing consensus for increasing the use of prescribed fire and cultural burning. Both involve the intentional application of fire to a landscape, under controlled conditions, to remove fuels, reduce wildfire risk, and improve ecosystem health. While these tools entail risks, including smoke and a tiny chance of escape, they are far preferable to the consequences of catastrophic wildfire. 

Despite implementing several thousand prescribed fires each year, the Forest Service has acknowledged the need to significantly increase the pace and scale of its use of this conservation tool to address an 80-million-acre backlog of needed restoration in our national forests. States have also set goals to increase the use of prescribed fire. 

California, for instance, has set a goal to use prescribed fire on 400,000 acres per year to restore forest and grassland health. And conservation groups, including The Nature Conservancy and Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, have invested tens of millions of dollars to increase the use of prescribed fire on lands they own or manage, as well as to support public and private land managers' use of prescribed fire. 

Congress, too, has recognized the need for more prescribed fires, investing billions in recent years to fund forest restoration work.

Finally, because many forest and grassland ecosystems are fire-adapted, native plants and wildlife benefit from restoring fire to these ecosystems through the use of prescribed fire. 

According to the Audubon Society, for instance, many American bird species can continue to use habitats that have experienced low-intensity burns and often benefit from such burns. But catastrophic megafires cause species like the California spotted owl to entirely abandon charred habitats. 

In many ecosystems, periodic, low-intensity fires are also necessary to prevent encroachment by invasive plants and to maintain habitat for native species. Therefore, according to The Wildlife Society, prescribed fire “is an important resource management tool that can be effective at maintaining or enhancing habitats for many species of wildlife” and “the benefits of prescribed fire far outweigh negative effects.”

Prescribed fire is a proven conservation tool to restore forest ecosystems, improve air and water quality, maintain habitat for native plants and wildlife and protect communities from the wildfire crisis. The CAA unintentionally discourages prescribed fire by counting smoke from it against state compliance with air quality standards while allowing wildfire smoke to be excluded. WEPA would finally fix this problem by giving EPA and states much much-needed flexibility to protect air quality by ramping up prescribed fire.

Read the full testimony here.

Jonathan Wood is Vice President of Law and Policy at the Property and Environment Research Center.

_{*The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of EnergyPlatform.News.}