Forest thinning reduces wildfire risks when done right

@Dana Nuccitelli
When they do”logging”. They make money.

When they do fuel reduction, that costs money, you have to pay the logger to do it, and Congress would have to apporoaite funds to do it,

is that right ?

Hi @Rob Johnson. No, the paper notes that forest thinning generates revenue because the removed trees can be used for some kind of profitable purpose. And the associated revenue is also enough to pay for controlled burns, when both are done on the same forest area.

Using Mech that included mastication as well as restoration thinning resulted in positive revenues and was also relatively strong as an investment in reducing wildfire hazard … The Mech + Fire treatments may represent a compromise between the desire to sustain financial feasibility and the desire to reintroduce fire. It was near break-even when considering its net cost to the landowner, and was also near break-even as an investment in reducing wildfire severity

Senator Hickenlooper's office pointed us to some relevant research by the US Forest Service as well. A group of researchers tested different combinations of thinning and controlled burns. For the thinning, in 2011 they went to California's Stanislaus-Tuolumne Experimental Forest and tried some low-variability (leaving evenly-spaced groups of trees) and high-variability (more randomly-dispersed clusters of trees) thinning. The high-variability thinning was intended to replicate what the forest looked like in the past, based on surveys done in the 1930s.

And then they also followed up with some controlled burns. They went back around 2020 and surveyed the results, after California had been in the midst of an extreme drought that killed over 150 million trees in the Sierra Nevadas. They found two key results:

• The plots with variable thinning plus controlled burns recreated the historical forest structure that was more resilient to wildfires in the past.
• The thinned plots were also more resilient to the drought because there was less competition between trees for water, nutrients, and sunlight.

What I take from this is that wildfire mitigation efforts like forest thinning and prescribed burns can be effective in making our forests more resilient against both climate-worsened wildfires and droughts. And the US Forest Service is doing some good research in this area and has the expertise to develop smart wildfire management plans 🤓

@Dana Nuccitelli thanks for providing this data and the source for one of the papers on mitigation strategies that you reviewed in the Fix Our Forests Act--Senate Version training. You mentioned two other papers--I believe published in 2023 and 2025. Would you be able to provide the sources for those as well?

A couple of other questions--

1. Your presentation in the training highlights the benefits of thinning, chipping and controlled burning in areas at the wildland-urban interface critical to human habitation and society (around Lake Tahoe prior to the Caldor Fire and around the site of a NASA/JPL facility). Pretty much everyone agrees that this type of mitigation is important. But the FOFA list of projects eligible for categorical exclusions doesn't mention proximity to homes or human development, nor any other criteria aimed at protecting lives and personal property. So I'm concerned that this bill doesn't address concerns that we should focus limited forest mitigation resources to areas at the WUI most important for protecting lives and property (and those areas are often privately owned, not National Forest land). I think this discrepancy is at the heart of some of the opposition to the bill, as the eligible areas in the maps Jenn shared include old growth forests in wilderness. Can you address this?
2. CCL's main goal is promoting policies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We have generally avoided bills that address only resilience/adaptation. The activities facilitated by this bill may reduce GHGs by keeping more existing trees alive and reducing serious crown fires. But the processes of thinning, chipping and controlled burning release carbon into the atmosphere. Are there any models or projections about the overall impact of this bill on GHG emissions? If there are not, I'm just curious about how this meets CCL's bottom line requirement for legislation we support. Thanks!
   

Hi @Joanne Leovy. Two of the papers (from 2020 and 2023) are discussed above, and here's the 2025 paper I mentioned. To your other questions:

1. The emergency fireshed management measured and associated categorical exclusions pertain to the highest wildfire risk forest areas. But as Jenn has discussed, the bill does a lot more than that. With respect to the wildland-urban interface for example, it creates an interagency program to help those communities build and retrofit homes with wildfire-resistant measures. You can see some summaries at the bottom of Senator Padilla's FOFA page.
2. Yes there was recently a good paper on this subject that I summarized on the forum here (specifically, see Page 11 of the paper for a summary of carbon impacts in different scenarios). They found that net forest carbon flux increases during the first 10 years after treatment, but then the forest benefits from increased wildfire resilience in the long-term, and you can get up to a 14% reduction in forest carbon loss over a 50-year period with good climate-smart forestry practices. They note that to get these benefits you have to utilize the biomass in some good way, which is why FOFA's biochar programs are a really good provision.

This also aligns with the research above finding more tree survival post-drought and wildfire after thinning and/or controlled burn practices.

@Joanne Leovy, @ Rob Johnson

The results of this recent scientific research may be helpful in addressing your and @Rob Johnson's questions about the 1) economics of forest thinning with controlled burning and 2) the carbon emissions from burning residue piles (values do not include emissions from machine emissions associated with cutting and yarding materials, or building piles) (Barker et al 2025) Assessing costs and constraints of forest residue disposal by pile burning

I copied a summary below of the paper from The Overstory newsletter (Yale School of the Environment - Forest School)
Study Explores Climate-Friendly Actions to Reduce Wildfire Risks "To prevent destructive wildfires, the U.S. Forest Service thins forests and places the cuttings, called residue, into piles for burning. However, a recent study led by Jake Barker ’24 MF and a team of researchers projected that a significant amount of carbon dioxide is released during these events, which works against climate-change mitigation goals. The burns are also financially costly.

The residue burns by the Forest Service are being used to prevent catastrophic fires that have been fueled by logging, drought, climate-change, and previous government-mandated fire suppression that have led to the accumulation of debris and dense stands of small trees, which provide fuel for enormous blazes.

The study, published in Frontiers for Global Change, simulated residue burning across western U.S. forests, and estimated that the burns contributed over 1.7 million metric tons of carbon emissions annually. The researchers found that costs for labor and equipment were also notably higher than had been reported.

The authors suggest that alternatives to burning residues, such as using them for biofuels or burying them to sequester carbon, could help reduce fire risk and carbon emissions. Steep forest terrain makes removing residues for other uses difficult and costly. They recommend the Forest Service seek subsidies to aid in funding infrastructure for climate-friendly alternatives.
“Forests play a big part in natural climate solutions,” Barker said. “We’re demonstrating the opportunity for novel and creative pathways to transform residues into a natural climate solution.”​"