One human caused fire remains one too many: Forests Minister

With more than a dozen wildfires wreaking havoc in California alone, the Forest Service revealed that more than half of its operating budget – or roughly $1.2 billion – is going toward fighting fires.

As the Forest Service faces higher fire-related costs, other mission-critical programs that can help prevent fires in the first place – such as forest restoration and watershed and landscape management – will likely see steep cuts. The Florida Forest Service, a division of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, uses prescribed fire as a safe way to apply a natural process to ensure ecosystem health and reduce wildfire risk. He says the deployments are a good way to learn how agencies around the country contain fires and possibly apply them here. Wildfires are also more routinely ending up closer to homes and towns as development expands into once rural or wilderness areas.

“Climate change and other factors largely beyond our control are causing the cost of fighting fires to rise every year”, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement, “but the way we fund our Forest Service, which we can control, hasn’t changed in generations”. “One human caused fire remains one too many and this continues to be a source of significant frustration to our wildfire service, to the province and to our ministry”.

“It’s a distressing trend”, said lead economist and climate policy manager Rachel Cletus of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental group that issued a similar report last year, but was not involved in the Forest Service report.

In the U.S., the Forest Service absorbs increased firefighting costs into its regular budget, which has remained relatively flat since 1995.

A solution to the funding problem must be found, he said.

“We must treat catastrophic wildfire not like a routine expense, but as the natural disasters they truly are”, Vilsack said. When firefighting costs exceed the amount appropriated by Congress, the emergency spending would then be exempt from normal budget caps, rather than having it be siphoned off from other programs.

Vilsack said the bipartisan Wildfire Disaster Funding Act, already introduced in the House and Senate, is an important step forward in addressing the funding problems. The agency manages 193 million acres of public land, provides assistance to State and private landowners, and maintains the largest forestry research organization in the world.

That’s just 3 percent of the state’s 741 fires so far this season, and not quite two-tenths of a percent of the almost 5 million acres ablaze this year.