Center Square: “Just One Palisades Brush Clearance Before Fire”
A story about forest management in California cites RFF research on the costs of fuel treatment practices.
Republican leaders have advocated that the state maintain a new wildfire prevention baseline of $1 billion per year, which a new working paper from Resources For the Future, whose lead author is a former US Forestry Service senior researcher, suggests could eliminate the state’s highest-risk backlog in just five years.
Resources For the Future, an independent research institute, estimates it would cost approximately $17 billion to treat all of California’s lands at high risk of wildfire, finding mechanical thinning costing an average of $577 per acre, and prescribed burns $170 per acre based on U.S. Forestry Service data.
Should the state focus only on the highest-risk areas at the wildland-urban-interface where the risk of death and destruction from wildfire is the highest, RFF says treating these highest-risk 8.7 million acres would cost $5 billion.
