Fix Our Forests Act

The Fix Our Forests Act (FOFA) is a bipartisan bill aimed at improving forest management and reducing wildfire risk. 

/topics/healthy-forests

 

What does the science say about what's happening with wildfires?

Although the area burned by wildfires in the West varies from year to year depending on the weather, the average has been increasing over time. Thirty years ago, an average of about 400,000 acres burned each year in California’s wildfire seasons. Over the past decade that number has jumped to an average of over 1.4 million acres. 

Total acres burned by wildfires in California each year 1987–2024. Data from CAL FIRE.

The factors causing that increase in extreme wildfires can be lumped into two buckets: climate change and forest management.

What's the role of climate change in worsening wildfires?

Climate change has made the western United States hotter and drier, turning more vegetation into wildfire fuel. A 2022 study found that climate change turned what would have been a recent series of moderate natural droughts into a single record-breaking and decades-long megadrought in the Southwest. The wildfire season has also become longer. A 2018 paper found that climate change is shifting precipitation patterns such that less rain falls in the spring and autumn months surrounding California’s naturally dry summers. That means wildfires start earlier in the year and continue later into the year than they used to.

Overall, a 2016 study estimated that climate change “doubled the cumulative forest fire area since 1984.”

What's the role of forest management in worsening wildfires?

Forest management practices have also played a big role in worsening wildfires. A 2023 paper pointed to the role that colonialism played by ending Indigenous cultural burning practices. These were replaced by a philosophy of suppressing and extinguishing all wildfires as quickly as possible, which led to an overgrowth of dense vegetation in an increasingly hot and dry climate, creating the conditions for more extreme wildfires. A 2012 study called this increase in forest density combined with rising heat and dryness the "late-20th Century fire deficit," creating the conditions for extreme wildfires.

What are some consequences of worsening wildfires?

Those increasingly extreme wildfires cause all kinds of nasty consequences, including:

• The release of the carbon that was stored in the trees back into the atmosphere, further worsening climate change
• Lost wildlife and biodiversity
• More hazardous wildfire smoke in the air, which is very bad for people's health
• Lost lives, homes, and possessions
• The associated trauma
• The costs to recover and rebuild, which are threatening to trigger an insurance crisis

What are some solutions?

To stop wildfires and their damages and consequences from continuing, the most important thing we need to do is stop climate change. That's what we're working on through CCL's policy agenda. But there are some additional steps we can take in the meantime:

• Hardening of homes and communities to reduce their vulnerability to fires
• Managed grazing to reduce vegetation that can become wildfire fuel
• Housing policy to make it more affordable for people to live cities, with lower fire risk
• Insurance policy to allow insurance premiums to more accurately reflect climate risks
• Managed retreat to reduce rather than increase the number of people living in risky areas
• Better, faster forest management
• Prescribed, controlled burns
• Smart forest thinning

Many of these potential solutions fall under the category of forest management, and are included in the Fix Our Forests Act.

What's in the Fix Our Forests Act?

The Fix Our Forests Act (HR471) aims to help address the forest management side of the problem. It includes provisions to restore forest health, increase resiliency to catastrophic wildfires, and build fire-safety defenses for communities in high-risk areas. Specifically, the bill:

• Simplifies and expedites the most critical forest management projects while maintaining strong environmental standards, for example by eliminating redundant agency consultations
• Reduces delays to these critical actions due to litigation over insignificant impacts
• Adds new ways for communities to provide input early and often in planning and implementation
• Provides agencies with emergency tools to increase the pace & scale of forest management
• Invests in innovative fire detection, suppressant technologies, modernizing construction standards 
• Creates an interagency Fireshed Center
• Provides support for wildland firefighters
• Hardens utility rights-of-way against wildfire
• Creates a national strategy to increase the capacity of tree nurseries to address the nationwide shortage of tree seedlings
• Establishes a program to explore biochar innovations and opportunities

Who supports The Fix Our Forests Act?

Many organizations have expressed their support for the bill, including:

• The National Congress of American Indians
• American Forests
• The Western Fire Chiefs Association
• Grassroots Wildland Firefighters
• The Federation of American Scientists
• The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership
• Tall Timbers
• The American Property Casualty Insurance Association
• The California State Association of Counties
• The National Association of Counties
• The Association of California Water Agencies
• The National Special Districts Coalition (NSDC)
• MegaFire Action
• The Property and Environment Research Center (PERC)
• The Evangelical Environmental Network
• The Edison Electric Institute
• Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E)
• The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association
• Xcel Energy
• Placer County Water Agency
• Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition (RVCC)
• Citizens’ Climate Lobby

The bill also passed the House of Representatives by a bipartisan vote of 279 to 141. That included 215 Republican and 64 Democratic yes votes, including 24 California Democrats (those representing some of the Americans most directly threatened and affected by wildfires) voting yes compared to 15 voting no.

Will Fix Our Forests undermine core environmental protection laws?

No, the Fix Our Forests Act does not amend, alter, or roll back the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) or the Endangered Species Act. But it does provide the US Forest Service with some emergency response authorities, which CCL staff believe are warranted given the ongoing wildfire crisis.

For example, the US Forest Service can currently implement wildfire resilience projects over an area of up to 3,000 acres under what's known as a "categorical exclusion." These are a category of actions that a Federal agency has determined normally do not significantly affect the quality of the human environment, and thus do not require extensive environmental assessments. Wildfire resilience projects would still be required to maximize the retention of old-growth and large trees, consider the best available scientific information to maintain or restore forest ecological integrity, and be developed and implemented through a collaborative process. The Fix Our Forests Act would expand the land area available to these wildfire resilience project categorical exclusions to as large as 10,000 acres. This change was requested by California and the US Forest Service to allow them to better respond to wildfire risks.

Would Fix Our Forests exempt logging from environmental review, and is it just a Trojan Horse for the logging industry?

No, all practices in the bill are scientifically proven methods to reduce wildfire risk. Nothing in the Fix Our Forest Act expands the ability for the US Forest Service to log or do any other activity they don’t already have authority to do. But it does expand the area under which categorical exclusions apply from 3,000 to 10,000 acres per wildfire resilience project, as noted above.

Would Fix Our Forests prevent citizens from holding federal agencies accountable?

No, but the Fix Our Forests Act places certain limitations on who can bring lawsuits against wildfire resilience projects. For example, the lawsuit has to be filed within 120 days of the agency's public announcement of the intent to carry out a fireshed management project. And the party bringing the lawsuit must have submitted a comment during the public comment period. The purpose of this provision is to ensure that the US Forest Service was given the opportunity to address the concerns being raised, to prevent groups from bringing last minute lawsuits to stop a project without giving the Forest Service the opportunity to address the concerns. This change would place forest management plan litigation on the same standard as many surface transportation, energy, and aviation projects.

For a narrowly targeted set of critical forest management projects in the most fire prone areas, it requires a litigant to show substantial environmental harm would result from a proposed wildfire resilience project. Because the bill does not amend NEPA or the Endangered Species Act, this change will not impact court challenges to actions by federal agencies in other areas.

On balance is Fix Our Forests beneficial for the environment?

CCL staff thinks so. Like every piece of legislation, the Fix Our Forests isn't perfect. But it will expedite and expand the US Forest Service's ability to conduct the kinds of wildfire mitigation projects that it already performs, like prescribed burns and forest thinning. Given that the annual area burned by western wildfires has more than tripled over the past three decades, the threats discussed above that these extreme wildfires pose (to the climate, our health, homes, lives, wildlife, etc.), and the fact that these threats continue to grow as temperatures rise, it's important to give forest managers the tools necessary to minimize these risks in an expedient manner. As Danielle Watson from American Forests put it on the February 2025 CCL national call,

Will our forests be in a better position with the help of the provisions in this bill? Absolutely. The status quo pace of planning and management is simply inadequate to meet the crisis that we are facing ... if you say we have a crisis, which we do ... then we cannot keep doing what we're doing at the pace that we're doing it. 

Dana Nuccitelli

Jennifer Tyler

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