SECTION 1.
The Legislature finds and declares all of the following: (a) For millennia, fire has shaped and renewed the ecosystems of California’s forest lands. In many parts of the state, historical fire regimes were frequent, with fires occurring as often as every five to 15 years. Some of these fires were naturally ignited by lightning, but fire was also an important tool for Native Americans, who used it to promote the growth of certain plants they relied on for food, medicine, and materials to make baskets, string, and shelter, and which limited the build-up of fuels in forest lands.
(b) For more than a century, states and the federal government have adopted fire suppression policies that have resulted in high fuel accumulations and significant ecological impacts on forest lands. This has been reflected in the increasingly severe fire seasons in recent years with more acres burned at high intensity, increased numbers of large-scale catastrophic fires, significant carbon dioxide and other emissions, problematic and dangerous containment and suppression efforts, increased financial costs, and reductions in resiliency and biodiversity of California’s fire-adapted ecosystems. In addition, implementation of fire suppression policies has impacted tribal communities throughout the state, and continues to threaten cultural resources, practices, ceremonies, and cultural identity.
(c) The 2013 Rim Fire demonstrated the dangers and cost of high fuel accumulations on forest lands. The Rim Fire burned more than 250,000 acres over a period of 69 days, caused at least hundreds of millions of dollars in economic and environmental damage, destroyed significant habitats for a number of California’s rarest animals, blanketed large swaths of northern California and northern Nevada with thick smoke impacting 7 million people per day with poor air quality, threatened reservoirs, such as Hetch Hetchy, and demanded more than $125 million in firefighting costs. The fire caused the Governor to declare states of emergency in the Counties of Mariposa, San Francisco, and Tuolumne, and the President of the United States to make a major disaster declaration. According to federal forest ecologists, the Rim Fire’s exponential growth was tied to a century’s worth of fuel left behind due to historic policies of fire suppression and fire exclusion. The lack of fire over the years had led to overgrown and unhealthy forests. In fact, the fire slowed only after hitting areas that had burned in the past two decades due to prescribed and natural burns.
(d) Many states and the federal government have been taking measures to increase the use of prescribed burning as a vegetation management tool to reduce the naturally occurring buildup of vegetative fuels on forest lands, thereby reducing the risk and severity of wildfires and lessening the loss of life and property. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, National Park Service, United States Forest Service, United States Bureau of Land Management, and United States Fire Administration are part of an interagency strategy that has adopted direction and guidance for prescribed burn planning and implementation. These agencies have created a formal prescribed fire plan template as part of this effort. Moreover, several states have laws that promote prescribed burning, and approximately one-half of the states in the country have prescribed fire councils.
(e) Prescribed burning is recognized as an important tool in the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection’s 2010 Strategic Fire Plan for California. This plan includes the objective of increasing “public education and awareness in support of ecologically sensitive and economically efficient vegetation management activities, including prescribed fire, forest thinning and other fuels treatment projects.”
(f) In addition to reducing the frequency and severity of wildfires, prescribed burning of forest lands helps to prepare sites for replanting and natural seeding, to control insects and diseases, and to increase productivity. It is also an important tool for increasing the fire resilience and heterogeneity of California’s diverse landscapes, and for creating, restoring, and maintaining critical habitats, resources, and ecosystem services. Importantly, prescribed burning also supports public health by reducing emissions associated with more catastrophic wildfires.
(g) Prescribed burning is often the most cost-effective, efficient fuel treatment option for forest lands. This is especially true in areas dominated by steep terrain or lack of vehicular access. In some circumstances, costs may be a challenge when preburn thinning is required to avoid fire escape during burns. In California, some of these costs may be offset through existing timber harvest permit exemptions (for example, the Forest Fire Prevention Pilot Project Exemption) that allow landowners to harvest timber to offset the cost of thinning or burning.
(h) While prescribed burning inherently creates wood smoke, this smoke pales in comparison to the air quality issues created by catastrophic wildfires. Therefore, by reducing the threat of catastrophic wildfires, prescribed burning can have net air quality benefits that are significant to protecting public health.
(i) California needs to develop a training curriculum for firefighters to become proficient in prescribed fire and should use certified professionals as fire bosses even while the training curriculum is enhanced.
(j) Forest ecosystems are crucial for absorbing and storing atmospheric carbon; however, catastrophic wildfires impede the forest’s ability to sequester carbon. Accelerating the pace and scale of prefire treatments, such as prescribed fire, promises to help modify future wildfire impacts and thus protect our forests’ ability to sequester carbon.
(k) Though prescribed burning is widely recognized as an effective, powerful management tool, it is complex in nature and highly regulated. Despite the fact that prescribed fire is often the only option in portions of California, successful implementation of prescribed burning requires careful planning, specific weather conditions, qualified crews, funding, public support, and compliance with various laws and regulations. These variables can make it difficult for managers to utilize prescribed burning.
(l) To limit the threat of catastrophic wildfires and to improve forest health, it is a priority of the state to have an effective prescribed burning program that is developed collaboratively with federal agencies and crafted by prescribed burning experts at state public universities, public agencies, nonprofit entities, private landowners, and other relevant organizations. It is also a priority of the state that a prescribed burning program should assist forest landowners in exercising due diligence to control prescribed burning so as to prevent fire escape. By promoting due diligence, the state will be protecting the public, reducing the risk of landowner liability, and taking steps to encourage more responsible prescribed burning.
(m) Considerable expertise exists in universities, resource conservation districts, fire safe councils, and other entities that should be employed more widely and more strategically to provide nonregulatory information to property owners, homeowners, and local governments. This information could relate to defensible space around homes, restoring prescribed fires on a regularized basis to the landscape, information about smoke monitoring from prescribed fires, hardening residences to improve resistance to wildfires, evacuation routes, land management that improves fire resiliency or carbon sequestration, and activities or programs that improve public safety, among other things.