Here’s how California can prevent meaningful climate progress from going up in smoke

In the quest to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in California, these are heady times.

The Legislature recently wrapped up what the head of California Environmental Voters called “a breakthrough year on climate action,” investing billions in clean energy and requiring the state to reach carbon neutrality by 2045. Meanwhile, the California Air Resources Board took action to mandate that all new cars and light trucks sold in the state produce zero emissions by 2035. And President Joe Biden this year signed legislation that is projected to reduce emissions nationwide by 40% by 2030.

All told, these plans will reduce California oil consumption by 91% over the next two decades.

And yet there is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions that is out of the reach of all these plans. Emissions from climate-driven mega-fires in California have spiked, and only determined steps to reduce the dry fuels that drive them can diminish their severity and the damage they cause.

The state has committed significant resources to lowering these emissions, but it must act faster to deploy the tools that can help: clearing brushland, thinning forests, expanding grazing and conducting controlled burns. We are rightly focused on suppressing fires in the summer months, but we need to apply the same enthusiasm to preventive practices year-round. With this week’s rains expected to end this fire season, such measures can help prevent future seasons’ fires from becoming uncontrolled conflagrations that consume tens of thousands of acres.

Preventive efforts are vital not only to protect the health and safety of communities in harm’s way but also to prevent the release of millions of metric tons of greenhouse gases. Carbon emissions can soar when fires that start in grasslands spread uncontrolled to forests. As the California Air Resources Board has noted, “redwood forests can release 100 times more CO2 than shrublands.”

Carbon released from wildfires has become a major component of greenhouse emissions in California, and the frequency and intensity of these fires have become more worrisome. In 2020, fires produced more than 100 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, more than all the industrial emissions in the state that year and enough to erase years of progress on pollution. In 2018, wildfires produced more emissions than all in-state electricity generation.

Historically, scientists have regarded wildfire emissions as less concerning than emissions from fossil fuels. The rationale has been that plants absorb carbon as they grow, so the net effect is less severe. But that rationale applies only to the way fire used to navigate our landscape, not the way it does now.

As vegetation burns or dies from excessive heat and drought, California’s living carbon stock is projected to decline. There is a chance that our forests could become a net source of emissions in the coming decades.

The state has to increase efforts to improve California’s fire resilience tenfold. Only about 250,000 acres of range and forest lands are now being treated per year; if that were increased to 2.3 million acres, wildfire emissions could be significantly reduced over time.

On many fronts in California, we’re making progress toward sharply reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We must do whatever we can as quickly as we can to prevent all this progress from going up in smoke.