The Colville National Forest is selected for prioritzation in the Wildfire Crisis Strategy

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Alishia Orloff, NEWFC Board Member; Colville Forest Coordinator for Conservation Northwest. Mobile: 509-900-6067. Email: alishia@conservationnw.org

In January 2022, the Forest Service launched a robust, 10-year strategy to address the wildfire crisis in the places where it poses the most immediate threats to communities. The strategy, called “Confronting the Wildfire Crisis: A Strategy for Protecting Communities and Improving Resilience in America’s Forests,” (leer en español) combines a historic investment of congressional funding with years of scientific research and planning into a national effort that will dramatically increase the scale and pace of forest health treatments over the next decade. Through the strategy, the agency will work with states, Tribes and other partners to addresses wildfire risks to critical infrastructure, protect communities, and make forests more resilient.

Ten Initial landscapes were selected to receive funding for collaborative partnerships in addressing wildfire risk to infrastructure and communities. In early 2023, the USDA Forest Service added 11 additional landscapes including the Colville National Forest. “It is no longer a matter of if a wildfire will threaten many western communities in these landscapes, it is a matter of when,” said Agriculture Secretary Vilsack. “The need to invest more and to move quickly is apparent. This is a crisis and President Biden is treating it as one. [This] announcement will bring more than $490 million to 11 key landscapes across the western United States, and will be used to restore our national forests, including the restoration of resilient old-growth forest conditions.”

Overgrown forests, a warming climate, and a growing number of homes in the wildland-urban interface, following more than a century of rigorous fire suppression, have all contributed to what is now a full-blown wildfire and forest health crisis. 

Though the Forest Service has been working to manage the health of millions of acres of national forests across the American West for decades, the scale, pace and methods of work on the ground have not matched the need. With the support of NEWFC, partners, states, Tribes and local communities, the Forest Service is collaboratively implementing this new strategy across jurisdictions and landownerships to protect communities, critical infrastructure, watersheds, habitats, and recreational areas.

The Forest Service is working with partners to focus fuels and forest health treatments more strategically and at the scale of the problem, using the best available science as a guide. Through investments from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, wildfire risk reduction work will occur on 21 landscapes across 134 firesheds in the western U.S. where projects are ready to begin or to expand.