Restoring Beneficial Fire
Forests are naturally fire-adapted for low and moderate fires, but unnatural, high-intensity fires are amongst the gravest threats to our forest landscapes. Almost a century of fire suppression, combined with significant changes in forest structure to becoming unnaturally dense, young, and homogenous has inadvertently led to more fire risk rather than lowering it. Pacific Forest Trust is at the forefront in restoring safer, more natural fire regimes in our forest landscapes, enhancing community safety as well as forest climate resilience and ecological function.
We restore beneficial fire through practice, policy, and persistence!
PFT is leading the shift toward more fire management rather than suppression only. Through our innovative policy work and our demonstration and practice of putting “good fire” back on the landscapes we manage, as well as our work with communities, we provide working demonstrations of how to expand “good” fire while reducing fire risks. We carry out prescribed burns and restore a fire adapted forest structure to mimic the low-intensity fire impacts that previously cleared out excess fuel loads and promoted healthy forests. Fewer but larger trees, a more open canopy, less dense understory vegetation are all signs of fire adapted forests
Restoring these forests to be able to safely burn in natural fire cycles provides multiple benefits. It decreases the likelihood of the catastrophic megafires that devastate communities. It also improves biodiversity by creating conditions that fire-adapted plant and animal species need to thrive. Additionally, periodic fires recycle nutrients into the soil, provide fine charcoal which holds water in soils and promote the regeneration of native grasses, as well as maintaining forest density at a desirable level—all the more important as drought intensifies.
By reintroducing beneficial fire through careful forest management and prescribed burning while engaging communities in the process, Pacific Forest Trust creates healthier, more resilient forests that can withstand wildfires while providing valuable ecological services like wildlife habitat, clean water, and carbon storage. Our work helps prevent severe wildfire destruction while allowing fire to play its important natural role.
“We hope that other private landowners will take Pacific Forest Trust’s lead and start to deploy fire not just as a tool not just for community protection and habitat restoration, but also as a tool for forest management — Jack Singer, Stewardship Director, RPF #3247 Pacific Forest Trust.
How We Promote the Restoration of Beneficial Fire
Through Advocacy
Education and engagement of diverse stakeholders, as well as collaboration with policymakers on authoring nature-based solutions, are core to our advocacy for the restoration of beneficial fire regimes.
We have united with individuals and organizations from across the political and stakeholder spectrum to develop pioneering and comprehensive policies that incentivize the implementation of “good fire” management at the pace and scale needed to prevent catastrophic wildfires. These include making insurance available for prescribed burning, gaining significant funding for prescribed first and other fuels management, increased training for burn specialists and licensing for “Burn Bosses”, expanding the labor force needed to manage fire and other regulatory enhancements. Our policy helps to streamline procedures and facilitate collaboration among state, federal, tribal, and local entities, making large-scale prescribed burns more feasible and effective. PFT-sponsored initiatives also promote a unified effort to integrate fire management with other environmental and climate initiatives, ultimately working towards safer communities and more robust, sustainable ecosystems.
We also created an educational video series that documented the preparation, execution, and early results of our large-scale prescribed burn on the McCloud Soda Springs Working Forest in Siskiyou County—part of the largest private forestland burn in California in over 20 years. Filmed on-site, the series highlighted how beneficial fire, grounded in science and policy, can reduce wildfire risk, restore forest health, and build public understanding of climate-resilient fire management.
Through Coalition
Pacific Forest Trust recognizes the importance of building broad coalitions to advocate effectively for the restoration of beneficial fire regimes and the creation of fire-resilient landscapes and communities. To this end, we have forged a strategic partnership with the Resource Legacy Fund Foundation (RLFF), made possible by a generous grant from the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation.
Through this collaboration, we have expanded the number of engaged stakeholders advocating for a new approach to fire management and the increased investment needed to achieve fire resilience at a landscape scale. Our efforts involve bringing together diverse voices, including tribal representatives, county government organizations, public health advocates, and environmental justice groups. By broadening the coalition beyond the traditional science and conservation communities, we amplify the calls for actions in more ways, and in more arenas, and capture the multifaceted impacts of fire on various sectors and communities.
Our work within this coalition has already yielded significant results, enabling massive increases in state spending for immediate action toward fire resilience, thereby safeguarding both ecological integrity and community safety in the face of increasing wildlife risks.
Through Practice/Management
PFT “walks the talk” of putting good fire back on the ground, recognizing the critical importance of reintroducing prescribed fire as a management tool to restore ecological vitality, fire resilience, and restore the natural diversity and complexity that fire historically maintained. Reintroducing low-intensity fire to forests reduce the risk of high-intensity fire by almost 75%%.
On PFT-managed forestlands, across very different forest types from Ponderosa Pine to Redwood to Mixed Conifer forests, we are demonstrating how to use and scale beneficial fire for all its benefits. In all these forest types, we use controlled burns to promote forest health, increase the safety of surrounding communities, and bolster critical habitat values degraded by past management practices, drought, climate change, and fire suppression.