Fight damaging wildfires with your support: Palma
As fires rage to our West in California, where tens of thousands of residents have been displaced from their homes, the threats wildfires pose couldn’t be more apparent. This year in Nevada, we were lucky compared to other states. Still, we had 761 wildfires during 2017, which burned nearly 1.23 million acres. These fires impact our communities and livelihoods, and they take a staggering toll on our natural resources and management agencies’ budgets. More frequent and severe fires also threaten our water, pollute our air and negatively impact wildlife habitat.
The costs of fighting wildfires in the United States has been skyrocketing year after year because of longer fire seasons, increased development in the wildland-urban interface and millions of acres of unhealthy forests overstocked with trees that are stressed or dying from droughts. At a price tag exceeding $2.4 billion so far, the government has spent more money fighting fires this year than any other wildfire season on record. This ever-increasing cost creates a crippling burden on the U.S. Department of the Interior and the USDA Forest Service’s land management functions.
These agencies plan each year’s budget for fighting fires based on past fire seasons. Each new season, however, is proving to be anything but average. As a result, when the money budgeted for fighting fires runs out, land managers must shift resources from other areas. In the last several years, more than 50 percent of the Forest Service’s budget for resource management has been consumed by fighting wildfires. Our lands — including national forests, national parks, and state and private lands — and all who depend on them, pay the price.
As fire suppression takes up more funds, agencies are borrowing money from programs that support recreation and restoration to make up budget shortfalls. This means they’re also delaying and terminating planned projects, such as restoring forests and removing hazardous fuels, that would have improved forest health and helped reduce the risk of fire in the first place.
We need to break this cycle. We need to change how we fund firefighting — and there is hope for a solution.
Both chambers of Congress are currently considering legislation that would address the fire funding issue. The Senate introduced the Wildfire Disaster Funding Act in fall, and the House of Representatives introduced a similar bill last summer. The Senate also added a fire funding solution to a flood insurance bill. (After severe fires, trees lose their ability to hold and filter water. Subsequent heavy rains can cause floods and fill our reservoirs with ash and sediment.)
We know that firefighting costs are going to continue to rise. Under the government’s current funding structure, the U.S. can’t keep up, so it’s critical for Congress to pass a solution to this problem.
While fixing the fire funding problem is an urgent and immediate need to protect the health of our communities, The Nature Conservancy is also committed to tackling the underlying challenge of thinning our overgrown forests, which will help prevent extraordinarily costly fires from happening — and save money in the long run.
We’ve already invested, for example, in improving forests in Nevada and California that are critical to the water supply and quality of residents, businesses, ranchers and wildlife in Nevada.
We believe that, taken together, nature-based solutions and appropriate funding can be strong allies in moving toward solving our wildfire challenges.
To ask your member of Congress to support fire funding legislation, go to http://bit.ly/wildfirefix.
Juan Palma is the state director for The Nature Conservancy in Nevada.