Battling wildfires across our country takes a toll here in Arkansas, even if those fires don't often hit close to home.
At a price tag of more than $2.4 billion so far, the government has spent more money fighting fires this year than any other wildfire season on record. Fires burned through more than 8.8 million acres of publicly and privately owned land this year. Not all of these fires were catastrophic, and most were beneficial in restoring fire-adapted forests, but many were bad fires destroying property and endangering lives.
All of them need to be managed.
While earthquakes, floods and other disasters use emergency funds for damages and recovery, wildfire disasters are paid for directly from the budgets of federal agencies.
As Congress considers additional disaster relief aid in response to the hurricanes that recently devastated parts of the U.S. and Caribbean, lawmakers can protect people and forests by permanently changing the way the U.S. pays to fight very large bad wildfires. Treating catastrophic wildfires like the disasters they are and making disaster funding accessible for federal firefighting efforts is critical to solving the problem.
Right now, when the U.S. Forest Service and Department of the Interior make their annual agency budgets, they must plan for costs based on past fire seasons. Unfortunately, each new season is proving to be anything but average. Much of this is due to increasing development in fire-prone forests and other natural lands.
This flawed way to pay for fighting these very large wildfires means that federal agencies must choose: Put the fires out, or spend the money on the natural-resource management work they've historically focused on.
While the priority to save lives and property should remain of top concern, it also means agencies borrow money from programs such as forest health, fuel reduction, and other land management to make up budget shortfalls. But it's that very forest management work on public and private lands--such as thinning the trees in dense forests and removing brush--that reduces risk of wildfire in the future.
Not all wildfires are bad or need to be put out. When fires are part of a forest's natural cycle, they prevent the pile-up of grass and brush that leads to large, uncontrollable wildfires later. They can sustain habitat. And when forests aren't healthy--when brush builds up and groups of trees are too tightly packed--wildfires rage out of control. They destroy homes and communities, threaten water supplies, and cost a lot of money.
It doesn't make sense to have firefighting come at the expense of projects that would make our forests healthier--and less fire-prone--in the first place. We need to break out of this cycle, and Congress holds the keys to a solution.
Lawmakers are currently considering how to fix this problem so we can pay for firefighting, reduce the risk of future large catastrophic wildfires and benefit from forest management and other programs here in Arkansas. Our natural resources that make forests healthier and safer from wildfires for the long-term programs are hurt when the government must funnel that money into fighting fires.
The Senate this fall introduced the Wildfire Disaster Funding Act, and the House of Representatives passed a similar bill this summer. The Senate also added a fire-funding solution to a flood insurance bill.
In Arkansas, we think these approaches are a great idea, and they can't be enacted soon enough. We've been working with a broad coalition of groups interested in conservation to show just how much bipartisan support is out there for these bills.
You can help, too, by letting your members of Congress know a wildfire funding fix is important to you.
We know that firefighting costs are going to continue to rise. And under the government's current funding structure, the U.S. can't keep up.
We need to not only fight wildfires, but also fund natural-resource management programs across the country. And we need to keep our forests healthy to prevent bad wildfires--and protect our land, property and people in Arkansas and across America.
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Scott Simon is director of The Nature Conservancy of Arkansas. Joe Fox is Arkansas' state forester. Max Braswell is executive vice president of the Arkansas Forestry Association.
Editorial on 12/15/2017