In light of the recent Los Angeles fires, a 2023 Columbia Climate School report on wildfire mitigation strategies provides valuable insight into what’s needed to reduce fire risk and how it might be done. 

According to the report, wildfires have always occurred naturally and play an important role in forest health. Fires burn off dead vegetation, release nutrients in organic matter, stimulate growth in some seeds, and kill pests. Today, however, because so many people have settled near forested land, fire suppression—rather than fire management through prescribed burns or the reduction of flammable material—has become the main way the U.S Forest Service deals with fire risk. 

We spoke with Lisa Dale, author of the report and director of the M.A. in Climate and Society program at the Climate School, about the best strategies to reduce fire risk and the difficulty of implementing them. Her research focuses on wildfire risk zones across the American West.

Was L.A. prepared for these fires?

No. The L.A. fires started as a wildfire, and very quickly became an urban fire and a structure fire. In a lot of wildfire situations, the most common source of home loss and damage is not from wildfire; it’s from burning embers from your neighbor’s house. These embers become fuel, and a house goes quickly from being a victim of the fire to an instigator of the fire. This new era, where the rise in the number of people living in the wildland urban interface, combined with increased risk of fire due to, among other things, climate change, has created conditions where wildfires very quickly become structure fires and urban fires. We’re going to need to draw on expertise from both urban disaster management and forest disaster management when we rethink how to manage these types of hazards.

What is the most effective fire preparedness strategy?

All the research tells us that home hardening is the best fire-preparedness strategy. Home hardening means doing work to properties to make them less flammable, including things like managing building materials, planning landscapes around the homes, properly situating your wood pile, choosing the right siding for your house and determining how close the homes are to each other. California is the national leader in mandatory building codes, and California Building Code Chapter 7A is the most robust example of a building code in the US—it establishes minimum standards for building construction in areas at risk of wildfire, including requiring fire-resistant materials and construction and vegetation management. 

So to your question, were they prepared? In some ways, they’re the most prepared because they have the most aggressive building code statewide for new construction. The problem is that 80 to 90% of the properties are exempt from that building code because the law, which was passed in 2008, only applies to new construction; it does not include retrofitting structures that existed before 2008.  The scale of trying to harden every structure that exists in the state of California, including with retrofits, is just impossible to imagine. 

But homeowners should harden their own homes to reduce risk, right?

Yes, but part of the problem here is, let’s say I have 10 neighbors around me. If I do all this home hardening on my property at great expense—I get an expert to come and give me technical advice, I move my wood pile, I re-roof my house, I change the materials—my home is relatively well hardened, but if none of the other 10 neighbors do any work, the effectiveness of my effort is diminished. So home hardening is really a collective action problem. We need to begin to see some of these policies scale up to be community-wide for best results. We need to think about better incentives for home hardening, because even a mandatory building code isn’t getting us there.

Some organizations like Firewise (https://www.nfpa.org/education-and-research/wildfire/firewise-usa) are attempting community scale hardening. A town can decide to become a Firewise community, and it means they’ve done home hardening. They’ve thought about roads and escape routes, utility corridors, their relationship to public land, etc. And then they get to have the Firewise sign at the entrance to their town. Sometimes this designation makes them eligible for certain grants so it can be an incentive.

Are there other places besides California that have building codes to reduce fire risk?

There are examples of other municipality-level building codes that are almost entirely voluntary. They exist on a much smaller scale, and they usually only apply to houses in mapped risk zones. These risk maps are based on historical data, but we know that because of climate change, historical data is no longer an accurate predictor of the future. We’re starting to see a shift toward future modeling. This may prove to be more useful, but my first thought is, the modeling is going to show that everybody’s at risk for burning, especially across the American West, where at least a third of the land is public land in the 11 western states. So that means those states have a huge amount of forested land at risk of wildfire.

What can the federal government do to reduce fire risk on its lands?

If you live in a western state near a forested area, chances are that it’s a federally managed parcel of public land. For example, 52% of California’s land base is federally managed public land, which means that only the federal government has the authority to modify that property. The federal government can come in and do fuel reduction treatments—prescribed burns, or mechanical treatments to reduce the fuel load. Private owners and neighborhoods can’t.

The problem is, now we have such a proliferation of homes sitting right up against public land, there’s not much room for a prescribed fire. Prescribed fires work really well in the back country where they can lower the density of the forest and reduce flammable material, but that’s not doing anything to reduce the risk for homes, which are often on the border of public land. 

In addition, there’s very little public support for prescribed fire because of real and perceived risks. In reality, less than 1% of prescribed fires ever escape, but when they do, it’s headline news, and it causes private homeowners to not want any of it in their neighborhood. 

Other barriers to expanded use of prescribed fire are the same weather conditions that are driving these fires in the first place. You can’t get a permit to start a prescribed fire when it’s too hot, too windy or too dry. With a changing climate, most days are hot, dry and windy, and any one of those is disqualifying because the odds of escape are much higher.

How are insurance companies dealing with all this fire risk?

Most insurance policies in California cover fire, and most of those policies do not differentiate between an urban fire and a wildfire. Many states have a mandated standard fire policy, and that means insurance policies must cover fire, including wildfire. This often leaves insurers in a position of real exposure and vulnerability [when they must pay out for damages or loss]. 

As a result, insurance companies are dropping policy holders. They’re withdrawing all over the West, premiums are going up, and more and more households in these very high-risk areas are finding they cannot get insured. As a result, these households end up on things like the California FAIR Plan—the insurance of last resort. [Fair Access to Insurance Requirements are state-mandated insurance plans that provide coverage to individuals and businesses unable to obtain insurance in the regular market.] This policy was never meant to protect the entire state. It was intended to protect homeowners who, through no fault of their own, had multiple disasters impact their home and were uninsurable, but wanted to buy real estate and needed insurance to get a mortgage. The insurers in the state can say ‘no’ to insuring someone, but by virtue of being in the state, they must contribute to the fund that supports and underwrites the FAIR Plan.

Another issue is that states are artificially reducing the price of insurance. California did this. They had a law that made it illegal for insurance companies to drop your policy for a year after a fire. They’re doing it for a good reason—they don’t want people who have just been made homeless to get their insurance policy dropped. But this means the insurance company can no longer use risk-reflective pricing; they must use the price that the government sets. The policy holder then doesn’t have the benefit of a clear risk signal, because their price is reflective of politics, not of actual risk as determined by their insurance company. If we allow risk-reflective pricing in insurance, many low- and middle-income households will be priced out of insurance and only millionaires will be able to afford insurance. Governments keep stepping in to try to prevent this, but I think it makes things worse in the long run, because they’re masking risk by imposing a lower price.

Can municipalities do anything to reduce fire risk?

Zoning happens at the municipal or city level. But I’m not aware of any examples in the U.S. of mandatory wildfire-oriented zoning policies in place. There are a couple of examples of them being proposed and shot down. For example, when I lived in Colorado, I worked on a proposal for aggressive zoning at the municipal level, but real estate agents were opposed to it, because as soon as you zone something as a risk zone, the property values in that zone bottom out. Municipal bonds crash. The ability of a municipality to raise money comes from property taxes, and if we declare half of its property high risk, the property taxes tank. Those financial costs are real ones that immediately hit homeowners and towns.

What can we learn from the L.A. fires?

What we’re seeing in terms of the hazard is so off the charts that it’s difficult to make sense of the strategies we’ve relied on for so long. We need to know better what is working and where. I’ll be really interested to see what we learn from the California fires. How many of the homes that had done hardening work survived? How does that compare to homes that didn’t? Living with fire has long been a mantra across the American West, but it never was quite so life and death as it is now. We are facing the need for some sort of foundational rethinking of where we allow people to build and how.