Advocacy Platform

California’s forests are at extreme risk. Decades of fire suppression and lack of management —coupled with drier, hotter conditions, have resulted in the recent tree mortality epidemic and has created unhealthy,  highly flammable forests. As a result, when fires inevitably occur, they are often larger, more destructive, and difficult to control.

Fortunately, there are better ways to manage our forests and restore them to health. Ecologically-based thinning and controlled burns are proven, cost-effective preventative strategies for reducing the risk of high-severity wildfire, and serve as the first steps towards establishing forests that are more resilient to wildfire and other disturbances.

CAFWA’s unique partnership joins diverse constituencies to seek new solutions to promote proactive, science-based, and ecologically sound forest management practices that will reduce the risk of uncharacteristic, destructive megafires.

Destructive megafires do not discriminate what or where they burn. The impacts on our water, energy, environment, and economy are felt throughout the state, in rural and urban areas.  It is time to take a serious look at current forest management policies, to further reduce forest fuels, and to expand programs for forest health.  We must work collaboratively to accelerate the pace and scale of forest management and restoration, and we must start now—each day of delay is another day of risk.

CAFWA’s recommendations emphasize the importance of healthy forests by highlighting the multiple values that they provide.  These recommendations include: 

• Increasing funding and creating new funding sources for forest management from federal, state, local, and private sources;

• Crafting policy and legislative reforms that will promote improvements to and expansion of ecologically sound forest restoration activities; and,

• Advancing monitoring and research to improve the state of scientific knowledge to better direct future land management decisions.