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The Department of Agriculture and the Forest Service have launched a “comprehensive response to the nation’s growing wildfire crisis.” The 10-year strategic plan outlines “the need to significantly increase fuels and forest health treatments to address the escalating crisis of wildfire danger.”
Citing “risk-based information” from new research on “high risk ‘firesheds,’” a Forest Service statement says the agency will work with partners to “create shared priorities for landscape scale work … in areas identified as being at the highest risk, based on community exposure.”
The strategy calls for the Forest Service to cut down trees and use prescribed burns to “treat” up to an additional 20 million acres in national forests. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act provides about $3.3 billion for these treatments and other fire-response actions.
