California Wildfire Report: A Model For Climate Crisis Response?

Pacific Palisades fire Jan. 7. Photo by Chris Villanueva

This year began with two of the most devastating wildfires California has ever seen, due to the number of structures destroyed as well as their locations. They’re part of a long-term trend of worsening wildfires driven by climate change. Yet, there’s reason to hope, according to a new report, “California Wildfire 2025” from the Climate & Energy Policy Program at Stanford University.

As the Trump administration refuses to even participate in the COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil — and U.S. corporate media downplays its coverage — this report shines like a beacon, illuminating a major scope of action that the state of California can take on its own, regardless of the madness driving national policy. While it could require some major revisions going forward, as suggested by one expert Random Lengths consulted, the potential for a coherent long-term plan of action provides reason to hope.

“Wildfire is a unique natural hazard in that society can have a profound impact on the magnitude of challenge it presents,” the report notes in its conclusion. “While climate change may make the problem worse, home hardening, good community preparation, and landscape fuels management can turn a “category 5” wildfire into a “category 2” wildfire that can be successfully managed by well-resourced fire services. Florida and Texas wish they could be so lucky with hurricanes. Science and experience suggest that if we do the work, we can have different outcomes.”

This could even be an understatement, since the climate-driven intensification of hurricanes may soon lead to the creation of a new category — “category 6,” reflecting how much worse things are getting elsewhere.

In addition, the report notes a profound historical parallel:

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, fires burned large parts of the cities of Chicago (1871), San Francisco (1906), and Baltimore (1908), after which civil engineers, firefighters, and insurance experts worked together to redesign US cities so these disasters couldn’t happen again. We are confident that such an evolution can happen for the crisis we are now facing in California.

The report discusses the major forms of wildfire harm to the state, all of which are rising. These include structural losses, insurance costs, air quality impacts. Highlights include:

Structural loses: While they vary greatly year-to-year, cumulative losses have grown sufficiently to impact housing affordability and availability: The Palisades and Eaton Fires destroyed 11,674 residential structures, “approximately 9% of the number of new homes completed statewide in the prior year or more than 60% of the number of homes created in Los Angeles County in 2024.”
Insurance Costs: Average homeowner insurance rose 66% from $1,222 a year in 2020 to $2,029 in 2024. And some insurers are restricting underwriting, forcing homeowners to turn to the state’s insurer of last resort, the California FAIR Plan, which is bare-bones and requires purchase of a supplemental difference-in-conditions policy. As a result, “For a growing share of Californians, home insurance now costs more than $10,000 per year, placing additional pressure on housing affordability.”
Retail electricity costs: Price increases have outpaced inflation from 2020 to 2025, rising 73%, 73%, and 32% for residential PG&E, SCE, and SDG&E customers, respectively, while the Consumer Price Index has increased by only around 23%.
Wildfire smoke exposure: Increased from a typical level of less than 1,500 million person-days annually from 2010 to 2016, to a record high of 4,500 million person-days in 2020. The report notes that “Wildfire smoke contains a complex mixture of volatile compounds, toxic gases, and fine particles that can penetrate deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream, exacerbating respiratory and cardiovascular conditions,” and that “there is no safe amount of wildfire smoke exposure; even low levels can be harmful.”

Three Levels Of Action

As noted above, there are three interlocking, overlapping levels at which action needs to be taken, that of individual structures (“home hardening”), communities, and the surrounding landscape. Although the report doesn’t use the term, at each level, a guiding principle is “biomimicry,” meaning “humans mimicking nature, and specifically looking at what characteristics and what features nature has evolved to deal with the environment,” as UC Merced fire expert Krystal Kolden explained to me in 2018, after the 2018 Camp Fire.

At the level of individual structures this means reducing the internal chances of ignition (by installing ember-resistant vents, for example, and protecting walls and roofs with fire-resistant materials — stucco for walls and metal for roofs, Kolden suggested) as well as external ones (by clearing nearby flammable material, particularly within five feet of structures known as “Zone 0”). The combination of such measures “can double the likelihood that a structure survives a wildfire” according to a recent study noted in the report.

At the community level, the report cites “Two particularly striking examples [that] occurred in September of 2024, when the Line Fire and Bridge Fire exploded in Southern California.” These occurred toward the end of what used to be “fire season,” just four months before the Palisades and Eaton fires brutally reminded us that that term is no longer meaningful.

The Bridge Fire “made an extraordinary nighttime run straight into the community of Wrightwood,” but just 13 homes, less than 1% of the community, were lost, largely due to “careful fuel management around structures by residents.” And the Line Fire “burned up a forested slope at high intensity … until it hit an area where vegetation had been actively managed to reduce flammable fuels in the path of homes in previous years, including through the use of a prescribed burn conducted earlier that year.”

The report notes that “These two outcomes show what is possible, even under the most extreme conditions, when careful preparation is combined with adequate fire fighting resources.” But the Line Fire example overlaps with the third level of dealing with the landscape through managed “beneficial fire.” This refers to low-intensity fire that helps keep ecosystems healthy and reduces the risk of uncontrolled high-intensity fire, which not only threatens life and property directly, but also produces much more severe health effects via smoke pollution.

“Native Californians historically burned an estimated 4.4 million acres per year,” the report notes. “Now, after decades of wildfire suppression, beneficial fire has become an important tool for land managers,” with the goal set in 2020 of applying beneficial fire to 1 million acres per year in California by this year. That goal has yet to be met, and the report devotes significant attention to reasons involved. But there’s a deeper potential problem, according to Chad Hanson, a wildfire scientist with the John Muir Project, who is cited in the report’s footnote on the Bridge Fire.

Concerns Raised About Beneficial Fire

“The report is correct that home hardening and good community wildfire preparation are highly effective, and essential,” Hanson told Random Lengths. “However, the report is wildly inaccurate and, frankly, dangerous in its promotion of ‘landscape fuels management,’” he warned. “Generally, that means logging and chaparral removal in wildlands distant from homes. That is where the vast majority of taxpayer money is going.” He cites three reasons it could actually increase the fire threat: by diverting resources, by giving a false sense of security, and by “removing trees and other vegetation” that “reduces wind friction and increases the speed of wildfires,” so that “they reach towns faster,” leaving less time for people to safely evacuate and for first responders to arrive and help.

But he’s not opposed to the idea in principle. “I support burning — managed wildfire, prescribed fire, and Indigenous cultural burning — so long as additional burning isn’t conducted in ecosystems that already have too much fire,” he said. “Forests in California generally still have a deficit of fire, but we are getting closer to natural levels now, whereas California chaparral ecosystems have too much fire, mostly from large numbers of unplanned ignitions from human communities adjacent to chaparral. So, adding more fire there is not a good idea and won’t help anything,” he warned.

Another issue Hanson raises is that “California has typically taken the scientifically false position that, in forests, logging must occur ostensibly to reduce forest density before burning can occur,” even though we have a half a century of science telling us otherwise, he said, providing a fact sheet listing 16 studies from 1975 to 2024 to back him up.

The report itself doesn’t advocate thinning, though an appendix cites three examples of tribal burning projects where thinning is involved. Rather, what it does say is that instead of mandating that fire suppression get the lion’s share of wildfire management funding, “Congress could empower federal land management agencies with the autonomy to develop, fund and implement holistic and responsive fire management plans.” If properly done, this could be guided by the science Hanson cites.

The report also devotes significant attention to the challenges of pursuing the policies discussed, such as the fact that while beneficial fire reduces harmful exposure from devastating wildfires “over the long-term,” the impact of smoke it produces “cannot be ignored.” Thus there’s a need to build “a consensus between groups concerned about the air quality impacts of prescribed fires and those advocating for their increased use” in order to create a regulatory framework that balances these concerns.

The promise of this report is that framing California fire policy in a comprehensive way that can help create such a consensus among all California stakeholders to address the most serious climate crisis impact we face as a state. While it’s a far cry from the global consensus on all climate issues that we ought to have reached decades ago, it’s an encouraging model that can both be improved on over time, and inspire others in similar efforts.