What could we do with just 0.88% of the Department of Defense’s annual budget ($850 billion) each year for the next eight years?

The answer: we could save our forests, water, ecosystems, and homes. Oh yeah, and create a lot of jobs, too.

If the US invested $60 billion over an eight-year period, we could fully fund the US Forest Service’s 2022 Wildfire Crisis Implementation Plan. This plan was created years ago — and it’s still read and waiting to go.

To explain my role in all this, I’m a fourth year PhD student studying wildfires, climate change, and snow. I have conducted research on this topic for four years and read more academic articles about fires, forests, and climate change than I care to admit. I have spent years teaching these topics and worked in conservation for over a decade. Most importantly, I really love our forests and feel passionate about saving them.

I try my best to follow the ethos of Rebecca Solnit: “It’s Not Too Late”. Yes, climate change is irreparably changing the world we live in, but it’s not too late. If we act now and take major steps towards saving our forests, water, and ecosystems instead of just treating them as a commodity, we can truly make a difference.

I don’t work for the Forest Service — I just know from my research that they made a really good plan that deserves more attention (and funding). So, I’m going to tell you about it…

We have a plan, we just need to fund it

So, what is the Forest Service’s Wildfire Crisis Implementation Plan? Well it would invest in thinning and prescribed burning, fire-adapted communities, reforestation, research, and continued forest management. This would protect us from large swaths of high severity fire.

The plan ensures landscape-scale approaches with an appropriate workforce to carry out the work. It emphasizes collaboration across jurisdictions with many partners, employing an all-government approach, including coordination between tribes, states, local communities, private landowners, and public and private sectors. It works with partners to identify risks to water, carbon, and wildlife in addition to socially disadvantaged and underserved communities, while incorporating indigenous and traditional ecological knowledge. They also plan to restore and reforest areas already impacted by fire and mitigate risks associated with postfire disaster events. Some of these risks include flooding, landslides and debris flow, erosion, and ecosystem shifts.

The plan calls for treatment of an additional 50 million acres on federal, tribal, state, and private lands in the West and development of a plan for long-term maintenance. ‘Treatment’ is the term for the removal of vegetation — whether through prescribed fire, by hand, or with machinery — to reduce heavy fuel loads that can increase the risk of extreme wildfire events. The goal is to increase fuels and forest health treatments across jurisdictions to match the actual scale of wildfires. For reference, in recent years, we have treated 2–3 million acres per year. To increase this to 50 million calls for major but necessary changes to how we treat and think about our forested lands in the western US.

The Forest Service Plan also intends to work with partners to determine where prescribed burning or mechanical thinning is more appropriate. In some areas prescribed burning is better because it’s cheaper and covers a larger area; while in others, mechanical thinning is better because it doesn’t threaten peoples homes and is less weather dependent. In both instances, the aim is to reduce hazardous fuels, change fire behavior, and create healthier forests, prioritizing municipal watersheds and communities.

The map below from the plan shows firesheds with the highest risk of community exposure. This map helps visualize the concept that less than 10% of fire-prone forests in the western United States account for roughly 80% of fire risk. Maps like this along with academic and traditional indigenous knowledge will aid in the prioritization of treatments across the West.

Backed by science

The plan for forest treatments isn’t just something that the US Forest Service thinks can help. It’s backed by a lot of science. While there are many papers out there that discuss this topic, there are two in particular that stand out to me:

A paper that I particularly like and highly recommend is called “Fire and climate change: conserving seasonally dry forests is still possible” by Stephens et al (2020). In this paper, the authors stress the need for urgent and widespread ‘restorative thinning’ (as opposed to the more popular commodity thinning). Restorative thinning involves selectively removing specific trees such as smaller suppressed or fire intolerant trees to reduce competition for resources of more fire adapted and larger trees. The primary goal of restorative thinning is ecological health, whereas commodity thinning is selectively focused on timber yield only.

It comes back to that “It’s not too late” mindset, again: taking immediate actions to promote positive ecological outcomes in these drier western US forests needs to take priority. This can shift the trajectory we are currently on to a more positive one.

Another paper by Jones et al (2025) discusses the influence large swaths of treated areas played on the Black Fire in southern New Mexico. They found that treated areas experienced 51% less high severity fire than untreated areas. Additionally, when a high severity fire encountered a treated area, it experienced a 21–55% decrease in burn severity. When comparing the Black Fire to the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire (the two biggest fires in New Mexico’s history that burned simultaneously in 2022) they found remarkable differences which they attribute to past treatment histories. While the area of the Black Fire had been extensively treated between prescribed and managed fires and mechanical thinning, the area burned by Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon had had very minimal treatment.

The Black Fire experienced only ~4% high severity burn while Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon was majority high severity. Something that Jones et al especially stress is the importance of scale of treatments. We need large swaths of treatments to truly make a difference. This is what the Wildfire Crisis Implementation Plan aims to do. They call for landscape scale treatments.

The US Joint Economic Committee found that climate-exacerbated wildfires cost the country $394–893 billion yearly. According to my back of the envelope calculations, it would cost the US about $60 billion dollars to fund the Wildfire Crisis Implementation Plan. So, a fraction (7–15%) of what we lose yearly to these fires could save our forests for generations. Not only would this money help prevent the spread of large high severity fires and reforest our most vital watersheds, but it would also save the country billions of dollars lost each year from fire.

A very brief history of wildfire

I want to be clear here: fire is GOOD. That is, low to moderate severity fire is good.

In fact, forests in the western US are very dependent on fire and need it to thrive. A major reason we are in this situation in the first place is because we as a country haven’t allowed fires to burn in the US since the early 1900s. This exclusion of fire caused forests to become overly dense, allowing many small shade-tolerant trees to grow. When these smaller trees catch on fire from the forest floor, they work as a “ladder fuel” allowing the fire to reach up into the taller overstory and turn from a low or moderate severity fire to a large high severity “crown fire”. When there are large swaths of crown fire, forests can’t regenerate. All of the trees and topsoil are completely burned, and in recovery the area often turns into a meadow instead of back into a forest.

While meadows can be great, that major loss of a “carbon sink” forest can increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, reduce soil water storage, and destroy habitats for many animals. In addition, these high-severity crown fires are the ones that create detrimental effects for humans. They are the fires that destroy towns, cause major debris flows, and kill many (people and wildlife).

When we add climate change on top of the issue of these overly dense forests, we get our current wildfire crisis. Area burned in the western US increased by 1150% from 1984–2017 and is projected to keep growing. Burn areas in the headwater regions of the Rio Grande and Colorado river basins are projected to increase an additional 300–700% with one degree Celsius of warming.

“Add climate change on top of overly dense forests, we get our current wildfire crisis.”

So what does a “good” fire look like? Well, good fires burn frequently and slowly, leaving much of the vegetation intact. In forests adapted for fire, many plants actually require fire for their seeds to germinate. Good fires clear out dead vegetation, return nutrients to the soil, and encourage biodiversity. When we have these frequent good fires, forest density is reduced, also reducing risk of disease and drought which ultimately lead to more dead trees and therefor more dry fuel. In addition, these thinner forest support snowpack, causing it to last longer and supply snowmelt and water later in the growing season. The Black Fire, discussed above, is a great example of a good fire.

So, what now?

We, as a country, need to learn to live with fire and even embrace it. The U.S. Forest Service’s Wildfire Crisis Implementation Plan would allow us to do that. Taking these steps to move forward as a community would allow us to thrive together in these changing ecosystems, climate, and world. With just a fraction of the Department of Defense’s yearly budget, we can turn this into a reality. Changes like this can change our world for the better.

The plan calls for broad community engagement across political boundaries in order to make this happen. Education is the first step. We, as humans, need to shift our mindset toward our environment. A healthy environment benefits all. It saves our homes, our water, and the communities we live in.

This Plan To Save Forests Would Cost Less Than 1% of the Defense Budget was originally published in The New Climate. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.