Wildfire Strategies for a Warming Planet

Climate change fuels more dangerous wildfires by creating higher average temperatures and longer-lasting droughts. Here’s a closer look at how those environmental conditions make our planet more flammable.

• Across the United States, rising temperatures and lengthening droughts have driven longer and more active wildfire seasons since the 1980s, with all 10 of the largest recorded burned-area years occurring after 2004. Canada is warming at roughly twice the global average, driving hotter, drier summers that strip moisture from forests and soils and, in 2023, more than doubled the likelihood of extreme fire-weather conditions in eastern Canada.
• Rising temperatures are changing how “thirsty” the air is. Known as the vapour pressure deficit (VPD), it is the difference between how much moisture the air could hold when it’s fully saturated and how much it actually contains. When VPD is high, the dry air pulls moisture out of surfaces—like plant leaves or soil—more aggressively. This dries out and withers vegetation, which can ignite more easily in fire‐prone landscapes.
• Analyses by the USDA Forest Service and Natural Resources Canada both show that less summer moisture and longer dry spells enable fires to burn longer, spread farther, and become harder to suppress than in historic norms. Places where there is less winter snowfall (or where the snowpack melts faster and earlier) and/or less spring precipitation are also experiencing increased frequency of wildfire-prone days. Fire seasons have become longer and more severe, and the time between wildfires is shortening.
• Increasing wildfires across North America create a self‑reinforcing cycle: They release massive amounts of heat, smoke, and carbon, which warm and dry forested ecosystems even further—making future fires more likely, larger, and harder to control. This feedback loop is especially intense in Canada and the western United States, where hotter temperatures and worsening drought conditions amplify each other.

Wildfire plays varying roles in the ecological functioning of different forested ecosystems. For example, in North America, dry ponderosa pine forests (which span from southern British Columbia, through the western United States, and into northern Mexico) can experience frequent, low-intensity fires. These are a natural part of the pine forest’s life cycle: clearing out built-up fuel, promoting regrowth, and releasing essential nutrients back into the soil. 

In coastal temperate and interior wetbelt rainforests, wildfires tend to happen on much longer time frames. Boreal forests—including those found in parts of Alaska and across northern Canada—have a mixture of wet, lowland forests and dry, upland forests, which vary in wildfire frequency, intensity, and intervals between wildfires. 

Eliminating wildfire is not possible, nor is it desirable in many forest ecosystems. This complexity means there is no universal way to minimize wildfire risk to communities. However, across forest ecosystems, we cannot afford to focus solely on disaster response and recovery. Instead, we must manage the increasing threat by embracing an array of strategies.

Scientific understanding, community protection, and environmental integrity—not commercial motives—should drive wildfire-management decisions. Privileging such motives substantially risks prioritizing financial targets over people and nature. This is not to say, however, that minimizing and mitigating wildfire risk should not create economic opportunities, and many solid climate adaptation initiatives do. 

Yet in many parts of North America, forest managers have pursued practices that have likely exacerbated wildfire risk. In Canada, for example, the logging industry has advanced extensive clearcut logging across many forest types, which tends to leave vast open areas that can contribute to accelerating wind speeds and fire spread. It is also often followed by the planting of dense rows of conifers to bolster future wood supply. These, too, can be very flammable, particularly when these younger, more homogenous forests have branches close to the ground (also known as “fire ladders,” which are capable of pulling flames up into the forest canopy). 

And the practice of herbicide spraying to suppress species that are not commercially valuable, such as deciduous trees and shrubs, can also exacerbate wildfire risk, as these targeted species tend to be less fire-prone and more capable of increasing forest moisture. 

In the United States, a long history of extensive fire suppression, poorly planned development near forests, forest degradation from industrial logging practices like clearcutting, inappropriate thinning practices, forced displacement of Indigenous communities, and the replanting of more flammable (and commercially valuable) species after logging have decreased forest resilience to disturbances like wildfire. 

In addition to ecologically oriented forest management, the growing threat of wildfire will require more investments in communities. Decision-makers should focus wildfire resources and interventions primarily on wildland-urban interface (WUI) communities—i.e., those where development creeps up and into the forest. Forests immediately adjacent to communities or critical infrastructure (such as power lines) should be the subsequent priority. And lastly, decision-makers should look to backcountry areas, emphasizing the preservation or restoration of natural fire processes and maintaining forest complexity, unless community safety is at risk. More about this prioritization scheme below.

Wildland-adjacent communities (aka wildland-urban interface communities)

• Interventions should focus on encouraging wildfire-resistant communities. While wildfires are often beyond a community’s control, homeowners can harden their homes by creating what’s known as “defensible space”—the area and vegetation around a structure that’s designed and maintained to reduce the flames spreading to and from the building. Municipal policies can even incentivize such measures (NRDC’s issue brief on fireproofing in California delves into this further).
• Alongside these direct interventions, decision-makers should allocate resources to mitigate the downstream effects of wildfire, such as exposure to harmful smoke. This could encompass improved smoke monitoring or offering assistance to individuals with respiratory challenges. A community might provide smoke shelters for residents in public buildings like libraries, schools, and community centers or distribute air filters to the elderly and other high-risk individuals.

Forests immediately adjacent to communities or adjacent to critical infrastructure (aka “wildland-urban interface forests”)

• In forests beside or interspersed within communities or critical infrastructure, interventions should focus on the core drivers of fire impacts to communities that are within our control. Key tactics include hardening energy infrastructure (e.g., burying power lines); clearing small trees and brush and ladder fuels while retaining large trees (generally the most fire-resistant within a forest); setting prescribed fires to decrease the risk of larger, out-of-control wildfires; increasing space between tree crowns; and maintaining evacuation routes.
• Federal, state, provincial, and territorial governments should elevate and integrate Indigenous wildfire stewardship and knowledge. We must support Indigenous Peoples across North America (e.g., Tribes in the United States as well as First Nations, Inuit, and Metis in Canada) to reintegrate cultural burning into the management of local forests.

• Ecologically sound forest management requires the appropriate disposal of woody by-products (e.g., small tree stems, branches, small brush, needles). In the first instance, such by-products should be reincorporated into the forest ecosystem wherever feasible. Chipping and spreading woody waste, for instance, can transfer important nutrients into forest soil without exacerbating fire risk. Beyond that, disposal of woody by-products should be done in a responsible manner that avoids creating perverse economic incentives, in which the potential economic return on by-products encourages activity that degrades forest ecosystems.

Backcountry and primary forests

• Landscape managers must proceed carefully with interventions in the backcountry, given the ecological role of wildfire in many forested landscapes and the often counterproductive effects of extensive wildfire suppression.
• The priority in backcountry regions should be the protection of high-integrity forests, including primary and old forests. Managers should also prioritize reintroducing site-appropriate fire regimes, especially via beneficial fire (i.e., prescribed fire or cultural burning). Research shows that fire-oriented interventions like these are critical to reducing fire risk and restoring fire resilience.
• Mechanical interventions should be judicious, focusing on where and how such action is necessary to support restoration of desired fire regimes or will clearly help restore degraded ecosystem functions, structures, and processes. For example, thinning small trees and ladder fuels or encouraging regeneration of fire-resistant species could be more critical in frequent-fire forests.

We’re advocating for solutions that reduce health hazards and environmental damage, protect communities, and enhance the resiliency of our forests while fighting for stronger climate and clean energy policies to reduce the extreme heat and drought that are driving longer and more intense wildfire seasons. We center equity and vulnerable groups by emphasizing the protection of children, older adults, people with chronic health conditions, outdoor workers, and frontline communities with fewer resources. We are also promoting support for Indigenous-led land and wildfire stewardship.

• Advancing policy advocacy to tackle root causes: We advocate for policies that support the resiliency of our forests, including policies that focus on:
  • protecting healthy, natural forests
  • returning ecologically appropriate fire regimes to forests via prescribed fire and cultural burning
  • restoring degraded forests
• Increasing public awareness on the health threats of wildfire: We provide communities and other stakeholders with critical information on the health risks from wildfire smoke, who is most vulnerable, and practical steps to reduce exposure and for making a wildfire evacuation plan.
• Supporting preparedness and response: We advocate for investments in community preparedness, such as home hardening, public health systems, and air quality monitoring so officials can protect at-risk populations in wildfire events.
• Increasing public awareness on the role of forest management and wildfire risk: We work in the United States and Canada to ensure that wildfire risk is not used to justify more counterproductive logging in primary, old-growth and other high conservation value forests. This includes increasing scrutiny of how certain types of forest management degrade the wildfire resilience of forests and how the threat of wildfire can be used to justify increased extraction of forest biomass for large-scale electricity. And we collaborate with scientists and advocate for transparent accounting of carbon emissions associated with logging and the wood products sectors.
• Mobilizing consumers to push back on projects and products that degrade forest ecosystems and increase wildfire risk: We share our findings with the public on activities that reduce forests’ resilience to wildfire, such as expanding large-scale biomass projects and unsustainable tissue paper industry practices.
• Leveraging regulatory and legal pressure: We undertake policy campaigns and litigation where needed to hold polluters and regulators accountable for actions that exacerbate wildfire risk and worsen air quality and health outcomes.