California’s wildfire threat shows no signs of easing, and last year’s devastating Altadena and Palisades fires made that painfully clear to residents across Southern California. The fires destroyed homes, upended communities and, in some cases, claimed lives — the latest chapter in a wildfire crisis that continues to intensify across the state.
The consequences extend well beyond the immediate destruction. Rising wildfire risk is driving up insurance costs for homeowners, threatening iconic natural resources like the state’s giant sequoias, and putting pressure on the mountain watersheds that supply much of California’s drinking water.
Forecasters are warning that 2026 could bring another above-average fire season. Recent years have shown that dangerous fires can erupt even after a wet winter, and the numbers tell a sobering story: severe wildfires have tripled in size across the Sierra Nevada since 1990, while the financial toll from wildfire damage has more than quadrupled over that same period.
It’s understandable that Californians feel exhausted by this pattern. Generations of aggressive fire suppression allowed brush and vegetation to accumulate across the landscape, setting the stage for more destructive blazes. Add a warming climate to the mix, and the conditions for catastrophic fire have only worsened.
There is, however, reason for cautious optimism. State agencies have launched an ambitious, coordinated push to reduce wildfire danger across 1 million acres of wildland every year — a goal overseen by a state task force and matched to the scale of the crisis at hand.
A new analysis from the Public Policy Institute of California, drawing on data tracked by that task force, found real momentum building. Between 2021 and 2024, the state averaged 591,000 acres per year of treatment aimed at reducing wildfire hazard, and that pace has been accelerating.
The task force’s newly unveiled five-year action plan reinforces a “worst first” approach, targeting the most vulnerable landscapes for treatment. That strategy appears to be working: 83% of the acreage treated through thinning, controlled burns and other methods was located in zones with high wildfire potential, areas where homes and wildlands meet, or both.
One of the clearest successes has been the resurgence of what’s known as beneficial fire — a practice with deep roots in California history. Native tribes used low-intensity, controlled burns to manage the land for thousands of years before European settlement disrupted that tradition. Now, prescribed and cultural burning is making a comeback, with acreage treated this way nearly doubling from roughly 100,000 acres in 2021 to about 200,000 acres in 2024.
That growth in prescribed and cultural burning offers a relatively low-cost, ecologically sound path toward restoring forest and woodland health across the state.
But this progress faces real headwinds. Federal agencies are stepping back from commitments to reduce wildfire risk, and the U.S. Forest Service — which oversees more than half of California’s forestland, along with other federal partners — has seen significant budget and staffing cuts. That retreat introduces new uncertainty into California’s broader wildfire strategy.
State funding is also on shakier ground. California’s wildfire mitigation budget could shrink by hundreds of millions of dollars as key revenue streams dry up. Lawmakers recently voted to restructure the state’s cap-and-trade program, which charges polluters for their emissions, a change expected to cut roughly $200 million a year from wildfire prevention funding.
Without stable, dedicated funding, this work — which affects public health, housing costs, water supplies and far more — simply won’t happen at the scale California needs.
Our research points to several ways the task force could sharpen its approach going forward. That includes better tracking of how long fire-reduction treatments actually remain effective, and providing more support to smaller, under-resourced partners so that mitigation work on private land — which may currently go unreported — gets properly counted.
Above all, this effort depends on a strong working relationship between state and federal agencies, a partnership that has already produced measurable results. Protecting that collaboration should be treated as a top priority.
The risks facing California communities keep growing, but so does the progress being made to confront them. This is the wrong moment to let that momentum slip away.
Original source: CalMatters
