Wildfires are Getting Worse: Our Policies Need to Catch Up

Across the American West, like in the states of California, wildfire seasons aren’t just getting longer — they are becoming deadlier, more destructive, and far more expensive. In the past two decades alone, the United States has seen an escalation in both the size and intensity of wildfires, with the most recent and most devastating wildfire being the Palisades and Hurst fires, displacing thousands of residents and wiping whole communities off the map. The root causes are no mystery — they stem from a century of fire suppression policy, unprecedented fuel accumulation, and the accelerating rate and impact of climate change effects. 

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The Scale of the Problem 

Between 2001 and 2020, “fast-spreading” fires, blazes that grow to over 4,000 acres in size in a single day, have become nearly 250% more common in just 20 years. These fires account for 78% of structural loss and cost our taxpayers $18.9 billion in suppression expenses alone. California’s 2018 wildfire season totaled $148.5 billion in economic damages alone. These costs don’t include special or indirect costs that only continue to be attached to the bill, including loss of revenue from counties due to communities being destroyed and the rehabilitation measures taken to rebuild and redevelop neighborhoods that were impacted. For example, the cost of reconstructing the Palisades community following the Palisades fire has continued to skyrocket. The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has projected reconstruction costs for schools in the area to be over $604 million, where the board will reallocate funds from a $9 billion bond approved by voters. However, this estimate as reconstruction and rehabilitation measures start is only expected to increase.

Climate change is a major catalyst of the more extreme and extensive fires we are seeing across the American West. Xu Feng, in a study by Cornell University in 2024, found that human-caused climate warming accounts for 33% to 82% of burned area and nearly half of all wildfire smoke exposure in western states like California, Oregon, and Washington. This directly means that human-caused climate warming has led to millions of acres of land fueling mega-fires, destroying homes, habitats, and critical city infrastructure that would have otherwise remained unburned. Even worse, the plumes of smoke generated from fires burning for hours on end don’t respect state lines, blanketing entire regions in perilous air that results in thousands of premature deaths and severe health impacts. 

Beyond flames and property loss, wildfire smoke is a public health emergency impacting our American constituents even if residents are not directly impacted by the burning blazes. Fine Particulate Matter (PM2.5) from smoke can penetrate deep into the lungs. This has the potential to trigger early onset heart attacks and failure, strokes, increased rates of asthma, dimension, and low birth weights. From 2006 to 2020, climate-driven wildfire smoke has been estimated to have caused approximately over 15,000 excess and preventable deaths in the U.S. This disproportionately impacts vulnerable groups like children, the elderly, and outdoor workers.

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Why Our Policy Responses Falls Short

The United State’s approach to wildfires has been dominated by suppression for over a century. Decades of aggressively extinguishing every fire have disrupted the natural cycles of low-intensity burns that clear the very fuel that generates devastating wildfires. Low-intensity burns, even though creating small amounts of atmospheric pollution, have the potential to reduce the severity and size of fast-spreading fires like we have seen in California. This is due to the fact that low-intensity intentional burns reduce the amount of dead trees, brush, and other vegetation that fuel fast-spreading fires. When the United States has consistently approached wildfires with aggressive extinguishing methods, the results are overstocked forests that are prime sites for explosive and devastating blazes. 

Despite record-breaking fire years in just the past two decades, funding remains tilted towards suppressions rather than mitigation. The United States Forest Service suppression costs have ballooned from under $400 million annually in the 1980s to over $1.4 billion today. This reactive spending tackling suppression rather than mitigation does little to address the underlying causes of longer fire seasons and more devastating fires — climate change, poor land management, and risky development patterns in the wildland. 

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What’s Needed

There are four things that are cardinal to fundamentally tackle the causes of the increasingly devastating wildfires we face. 

• Invest in Prescribed and Cultural Burns. 
• Reform Land-Use Policies. 
• Fund Resilience at Scale. 
• Address Climate Change Head On. 

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Scientific consensus has been clear that reintroducing planned fires into wildlife is essential for restoring healthy ecosystems and reducing the risk of fast-spreading extreme fires. Indigenous-led cultural burning practices have safely managed our American landscapes for centuries, yet our state governments have done little to integrate these fire mitigation measures that have kept communities safe. Sprawling developmental patterns, especially with urban and suburban sprawl plaguing western cities, consequently lead to high-risk developments in the wildlands. Instead of expanding outwards into higher-risk areas, smarter zoning, stricter building codes, and incentives for defensible spaces can limit the vulnerability of our communities and save lives lost every year from wildfires. Experts estimate that the U.S. needs to invest $5-6 billion annually in wildfire risk reduction. This includes fuel treatments, community planning, and ecosystem restoration to mitigate the root causes of devastating wildfires. Although this investment exceeds the wildfire suppression budgets we see in the status quo, these prevention methods result in billions of dollars being saved when communities aren’t faced with the costs of reconstruction, re-development, and rehabilitation.

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A Choice We Can’t Avoid

Wildfires are not a force of nature alone in the 21st century, but the predictable consequences of our policy failures to tackle the causes of the increasingly devastating wildfires we face in the American West. Continued inaction will mean rising death tolls, longer and more devastating fire seasons, mounting economic damages, and irreversible ecosystem loss. 

In order to live a more sustainable future, we must rethink fire itself—not simply as an enemy that must be extinguished, but as a natural process to manage through smart policy initiatives and measures. That shift demands a bold shift in our policy decision-making, land-use reform, and a climate strategy that deals with its root causes. The choice is ours: plan for the fire or be consumed by it. 

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