Column: Climate change and lax forest management fuel wildfires

There's no denying climate change is making wildfires worse.

Some still try, but their arguments run counter to the facts, the conclusions of the scientific community and what's happening before their eyes. What was projected by experts years ago is occurring right now.

California is hotter and conditions have changed to make fires more intense and, consequently, more devastating to life, property and the environment.

At the same time, lax forest and wildland management in years past has contributed to the problem. Gov. Gavin Newsom has recognized that. He does not, however, equate those shortcomings with the impact global warming is having in California and around the globe.

"We're in the midst of a climate emergency," the governor said from a fire zone in Butte County last week.

He also acknowledged more should have been done on the ground.

"I am not going to say that the forest management practices in California over the last 100 years have been ideal," he said. "Not for one second. But there's something else going on, not just bad past practices."

"That's one point," he added about management, "but it's not the point."

Newsom is a leading voice on the need to reverse climate change, and has pushed policies aimed in that direction. Last week, he pledged to take even more aggressive action.

"Across the entire spectrum, our goals are inadequate," Newsom said.

Meanwhile, he has moved to improve forest management. The day after being sworn in as governor on Jan. 7, 2019, he issued an executive order directing Cal Fire to come up with a plan to better manage California's fire-prone lands.

Despite ongoing tensions with President Donald Trump over climate change and other issues, Newsom last month announced an agreement with the administration's U.S. Forest Service that "includes a commitment by the federal government to match California's goal of reducing wildfire risks on 500,000 acres of forest land per year."

That's no small matter, though it may not seem like much at the moment, with more than 3.2 million acres of California land having burned so far this year.

Like just about everything else, discussion about what and who is responsible for the firestorms has become political. The Republican president lays the blame entirely on poor forest management, dismissing climate change in general and specifically as a factor in the fires.

The Democratic governor says climate change is the real culprit. Scientists back him up, with some saying the level of forest management had little, if anything to do with the intense fires in recent years. In 2018, experts pointed out that some fires burned in areas where fires raged not many years before, reducing the undergrowth often pinpointed as prime fuel for wildfires, according to The Associated Press.

That dispute played out Monday during Trump's visit to Sacramento to address the wildfires, which only recently have appeared on the presidential campaign radar. In Pennsylvania, former Vice President Joe Biden criticized Trump for not acknowledging climate change is making fires worse.

But as Newsom has shown, land management shouldn't be dismissed. Besides, tackling climate change requires a long-range, global effort that may or may not come together. Clearing out dead trees, undergrowth and dense chaparral in various regions _ including the use of controlled or prescribed burns in some cases _ is something that can be done relatively quickly, though it must be sustained.

In a report responding to Newsom's executive order, Cal Fire last year identified 35 priority projects that can be "implemented immediately to help reduce public safety risk for over 200 communities." Among them are removal of dead trees, vegetation clearing, creation of fuel breaks and community defensible spaces, and establishing access and exit corridors.

Last week, the governor said all of those projects have been completed, maintaining they "would have taken 10 years to do before. We've done [them] in 15 months."

"But that's not just the issue here in California," he added.

A group of Northern California Republican lawmakers, led by Sen. Jim Nielsen of Tehama, disagreed, though they gave credit to Newsom for his efforts, in a somewhat backhanded way.

"The excuse of climate change cannot be used to deflect from the fundamental failure to address the fuels build-up in our forests that are the cause of these devastating fires," they said in a statement as the governor toured the fire zone. "Two years of long-awaited forestry management investments don't make up for decades of inaction by Democratic politicians who control this state, and the radical environmentalists that drive their agenda."

Newsom and others have pointed out that many of the fires are burning on federal lands in California. He reiterated Monday that the federal government owns 57 percent of forest land in California, compared with 3 percent owned by the state.

A report by the Legislative Analyst's Office in 2018 noted the complexity of forest management given the multiple agencies that need to be involved, including the federal government. The report also said that policies over the past several decades have limited timber harvesting, emphasized fire suppression and increased environmental permitting requirements.

"These practices and policies have combined to constrain the amount of trees and other growth removed from the forest," according to the report. "This has significantly increased the density of trees in forests across the state, and particularly the prevalence of smaller trees and brush.

"Overall tree density in the state's forested regions increased by 30 percent between the 1930s and the 2000s."

The report goes on to say that healthy forests play an important role in combating climate change because trees absorb and store carbon dioxide, thus reducing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Large older trees do more of this than smaller ones.

The dense conditions of the state's forests, in which smaller trees overcrowd and inhibit the growth of larger ones, "represent a lost opportunity to sequester" greenhouse gases, according to the report.

That can become part of a grim cycle, the report suggests: Dead trees help fuel wildfires, which release a lot of carbon into the atmosphere and contribute to climate change.

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