Communities continuing to be impacted by recent wildfires across New Mexico can find resources and more through the After Wildfire NM website. You can learn more about fire adapted communities, including post-fire recovery, through the Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network.
“In fire-adapted landscapes, prescribed fire creates conditions that reduce the intensity of subsequent wildfires, increase suppression success, and reduce firefighter exposure and risk.”
Happy Wednesday, FACNM community!
On September 8th, 2022, U.S. Forest Service Chief Randy Moore announced an end to the agency’s 90-day pause on prescribed burning, coupled with a 107-page report reviewing the Forest Service’s prescribed burning program practices. The National Prescribed Fire Program Review covers a lot of ground and makes a series of recommendations for how to improve the safety and regularity of prescribed burning. An essential part of being fire adapted is a commitment to learning, and that means changing our behaviors and way of doing things when there is better science or practical knowledge to guide us.
This year has been extremely difficult for so many here in New Mexico and we recognize that there is a lot of trauma surrounding prescribed fire. Understanding the changes being made and how the agency is responding will help us all to better understand our role in living with wildfire.
Today’s Wildfire Wednesday features:
Immediate changes to the USFS prescribed fire program
Long-term cultural changes to the program
What it all means for prescribed burning in New Mexico
Take care,
Rachel
Time to Act - Implementing Change
Why a federal review of prescribed burning?
The National Review Team’s report is relevant to the actions taken by and protocols of the United States Forest Service. Its findings will influence the way that the agency operates in the near- and long-term. At its core, the intent of this review and surrounding dialog is to improve the practice of prescribed burning for fire practitioner, firefighter, and public safety.
As we prepare for wildfires shaped by our climate future, we need a range of tools and skills to make our landscapes and communities more resilient and ready. These tools include fire prevention, home hardening, forest thinning, expanded options for forest stewardship such as Forest Councils, and also prescribed fire and wildfires which are managed for ecological benefit.
Before learning more about the contents of the national prescribed fire review, please take a moment to learn about the importance, and success, of prescribed burning as a tool in the land management and resilience toolbelt.
How is the Forest Service rethinking its approach to prescribed fire?
The proximate cause of the Forest Service’s 90-day prescribed fire pause and policy review was the 2022 Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon fire and other escaped burns, but the root cause is rapidly changing environmental conditions - drought, extreme wind events and record temperatures - and how they impact fire behavior. These conditions lay the foundation for catastrophic wildfires and may increase the probability of escaped prescribed burns, thus affecting fire implementers’ perception of risk and necessitating an update to how they operate.
Returning fire to fire-adapted - and starved - landscapes is a balancing act, one that requires land managers “be clear about the risk of conducting prescribed burning operations as well as the cost of delaying or avoiding treatments.” The National Prescribed Fire Program Review provides guidance for that necessary update to the prescribed burning Modus Operandi.
Immediate changes to the Forest Service’s approach to prescribed burning include:
1. Improved decision-making processes
An Agency Administrator is the individual who represents a specific agency on a fire. While this person may be in an assigned position, such as the District Ranger or Forest Supervisor, other employees, such as fire staff, can also complete training and a task book which gives them the AA qualification.
Instead of authorizing a broad window of time (say a 1- to 2-week period) for a planned prescribed fire, agency administrators (the official responsible for the management of a functional area) will authorize ignitions only for the Operational Period (24 hours) for the day of the burn. For prescribed fires requiring multi-day ignitions, agency administrators will authorize ignitions on each day. Moderate and high complexity burns now require that an agency administrator to be present on-site.
Burning at the upper end of the prescription comes with heightened risk and should be avoided. Some practitioners start burning earlier in the day to avoid bumping up against the upper end of the prescription (a set of conditions that considers the safety of the public and fire staff, weather, and probability of meeting the burn objectives), but burn parameters have generally been reaching the upper prescription limits earlier as the air and fuels (duff, grass, twigs, logs, etc.) dry out faster than expected.
Recognizing the challenges presented by climate change. As temperatures rise and precipitation patterns shift across the United States, conditions for prescribed fire will change and the potential for fire escapes will grow. Extreme heat events, along with droughts that are more prolonged and severe, will bring less soil moisture, drier fuels, and more potential for undesirable fire behavior. The agency is working to update necessary trainings more broadly, but one essential training element will be the inclusion of the effects of climate change on fire and fuels, drought, and modeling tools.
Go/no-go decision-making inflection points will be standardized across the agency for crews making the call on whether or not to proceed with prescribed burns.
Existing and future burn plans will be reviewed prior to putting fire on the ground and a technical reviewer must re-approve that the plans reflect current conditions and burn complexity. Additionally, the individuals responsible for organizing and leading burns (burn bosses) will evaluate landscape, weather, and crew conditions immediately prior to ignitions to document that they still meet burn plan specifications.
2. Standardizing practices
Communication and reporting, both before and after the burn, will be standardized across the agency to ensure consistency and to minimize the chance of miscommunication or lack of mutual understanding.
Briefings, which happen immediately prior to a prescribed burn being lit, will now follow a standard procedure. The review of and report on incidents which are declared wildfires will now be standardized, improving current tracking systems and access to recommendations.
3. Investing in technology for improved planning
The Forest Service aims to incorporate PODS (Potential Operational Delineations) as a modeling tool for both wildfire response and vegetative/fuels management planning.
4. More precise risk analysis
“After more than a century of fire exclusion and under a rapidly changing climate, fire behavior has changed, and damage from wildfire is increasing. With more than a century of forest and fire science to build on, scientists, managers, and communities are refining management options for reducing risks to communities and ecosystems.”
Fuel conditions on adjacent lands will be considered, as this can reduce a practitioner’s ability to control a fire that moves (escapes) beyond the planned burn area.
More consideration will be given to the impact of long-term drought on prescribed fire behavior since the resulting conditions from drought have been cited as a contributing factor in several reviews of escaped prescribed fires. Learn more about the relationship between climate change and wildfire in this peer-reviewed article or through the associated StoryMap by clicking on the picture to the right.
5. More collaboration
Failure to communicate and coordinate with neighboring landowners carries it with significant risk. Building off of number 4, neighboring landowners may have good information that they can share on fuels or other environmental conditions which are relevant to prescribed burners. Working with neighbors also provides social license and improved local response in the event of an escape.
The review found that “current agreement policies and contracting laws can keep (USFS districts) from finding the resources they need to carry out complex, large-scale, or long-duration prescribed fires”. One solution to this shortfall is increasing avenues for external partners to implement prescribed fire across boundaries by reducing barriers to collaborative prescribed burning with State agencies and others.
6. Transparency
Public trust means public transparency, including coordinating with partners and communities and being upfront about why and where prescribed burns are conducted.
In response, the Forest Service aims to implement a large-scale messaging and education campaign highlighting the importance of prescribed fire, including transparent communication related to risk, uncertainty, and complexity.
Changing the Culture
Long-term initiatives to improve the culture of prescribed burning
In addition to the immediate recommendations laid out above, the Forest Service is pursuing initiatives which will provide better education, training, and improve the culture of the agency’s prescribed burning program.
Long-term changes to the Forest Service’s approach to prescribed burning include:
1. Development of a national strategic plan for prescribed fire implementation. The plan will include timing and command structure for ignitions and the logistics to prioritize and mobilize resources (crews, equipment, etc.) for both suppression and prescribed burning activities by December 15, 2022.
2. In collaboration with partners, identification of a strategy for dedicating crews to hazardous fuels work and mobilizing them across the country to support the highest priority hazardous fuels reduction work by December 15, 2022.
3. Establishment of a Western Prescribed Fire Training curriculum by January 1, 2023. This curriculum will be built with the interagency fire and research community, Tribes, and other partners to expand on the National Interagency Prescribed Fire Training Center (NIPFTC) headquartered in Tallahassee, Florida
The report’s findings may be summarized in the context of adaptive management: as a learning organization, the Forest Service can reduce risks by
intentionally incorporating learning from past escaped prescribed fires,
expanding available resources and tools for prescribed burning,
enhancing training opportunities, and
clarifying the use of reviews of prescribed burns that have become declared wildfires.
These risk-reduction actions will happen concurrently with agency use of congressionally-approved funding and resources to “scale up fuels and forest health treatments - including prescribed fire - in a way that is safe while also recognizing that risks cannot be fully removed from this land management activity.”
“Instead of creating a culture of risk avoidance, the U.S. Forest Service needs to move forward with clarity about what they can control.”
The recommendations outlined above could create more administrative hurdles which may make it harder for the agency to implement prescribed fire in New Mexico and across the West. While fire managers and decision makers are reevaluating the risk of prescribed burning and adopting the findings to increase their odds of success, the agency also recognizes that the “culture will need to change to elevate the priority of prescribed fire and adopt an all-hands approach to using this central tool for fuels reduction and forest resilience.”
Local Impacts
How the report’s recommendations will be felt across New Mexico
While the National Prescribed Fire Program Review refers specifically to changes within the USDA Forest Service, there are ripple effects beyond the federal sphere. Local communities, even those which previously supported the use of prescribed burning, have become more risk-adverse following recent escaped fires. State Land agencies have put their own holds on certification of prescribed burning on State Land Office or private lands. These changes to the greater culture of prescribed fire will take far longer than 90 days to settle, and land managers across all jurisdictions will have to win back public trust with both words and action.
What can be done in the Land of Enchantment to make “prescribed burns a safer and more effective tool”?
Build a robust multi-agency burn workforce
Use better planning and modeling tools
Adapt projects for a changing climate
Collaboration
These steps are dependent not just on incorporating lessons learned into future efforts, but on taking an ‘all-hands’ approach to prescribed fire by investing in partnerships across boundaries, organizations, and thought patterns. A collaborative approach to burning creates room for diverse perspectives, voices, and ability which serve to widen the lens of both capacity and situational awareness. Eytan Krasilovsky with the Forest Stewards Guild captured this sentiment when he stated that management of our forests comes down to “a community of practitioners. I think the events of this year just really solidify that we need to be communicating and working together.” One step in the right direction is that the agency now seeks to expand training not only for Forest Service staff but also local community members who could be certified to participate directly in prescribed burns.
“For the Forest Service to successfully confront the Wildfire Crisis Strategy, agency culture will need to change to elevate the priority of prescribed fire and adopt an all-hands approach to using this central tool for fuels reduction and forest resiliency.”
It is recognized that prescribed fire needs to change, given an increasing number of unprecedented weather events, such as the heat wave and extreme winds that caused the Gallinas-Las Dispensas prescribed burn to escape and become Hermits Peak Wildfire, which can be at least partially attributed to climate change. Prescribed and cultural burning is also still one of the best tools available to land stewards to reduce the hazard of future catastrophic wildfire.
As people across New Mexico, federal and otherwise, commit to active management of the West’s forests, our commitment needs to include returning fire to the landscape and working with the human communities who live there.
FACNM and the Greater Santa Fe Fireshed stand by these and other policy and practice changes that make prescribed burning safer and more effective. Prescribed fire remains the quintessential tool for reducing wildfire risk and creating resilient fire-adapted landscapes. While success stories are not always highlighted, there are plenty of examples of this tool working as intended.
How the report is being interpreted elsewhere
People across the West and the Nation at large are taking note of the Forest Service’s review and are talking about how it may change prescribed fire landscape culture and operations at large. Click on the articles below to jump into the discussion.
Read the article from the LA Times
Read or listen to the short Marketplace Report