The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act established the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission and tasked the Commission with creating policy recommendations to address “the wildfire crisis.” In September, the Commission released a report with 148 recommendations.
The first recommendation is a no-brainer: “Establish a Community Wildfire Risk Reduction Program … to proactively address wildfire risk reduction actions and increase ignition resistance of the built environment.” Virtually everyone with expertise on the topic agrees on this point.
However, the report promotes continued landscape-scale forest-thinning as an effective tactic “in reducing the risk of uncharacteristically severe wildfire” and cites a 2021 study by Jain et al. 2021 in support of this claim. However, as noted in the Summer 2023 edition of Forest News, the study actually raises significant doubts about the effectiveness of landscape-scale fuel treatments and cites a lack of empirical evidence to justify these logging projects.
