The Resilience Gap: Assessing California’s Wildfire Fuel Treatment Needs by Income Level
California faces catastrophic wildfires, making fuel reduction treatments necessary and urgent. In partnership with the Forest Business Alliance, we sought to understand the overlap between forest fuel accumulation and California’s most economically vulnerable communities. Our research highlights extreme poverty communities in need of fuel reduction treatments.
The Socioeconomic Disparities of Megafires
California is a biodiversity hub with forests, grasslands, chaparral and wetlands, all vital to the state’s ecology and economy. Its 33 million acres of forests are largely made up of fire-adapted mixed conifers like Douglas-fir, sequoia and ponderosa pine, along with oak woodlands. Although wildfires are a natural part of these ecosystems, human activities, land use changes, fire suppression and climate change have increased their frequency and severity. In 2023, 116,399 acres were burned but by midway 2024, wildfires have already blazed through 827,800 acres. Experts warn that this trend is giving rise to the “era of megafires”.
Those hit hardest by these wildfires are low-income and indigenous communities, which often lack resources for recovery. Studies have shown how these vulnerable communities face repeated wildfires, constrained by resources to suppress fires and prevent their recurrence. In addition to having high fire experience, low-income communities suffer the subsequent health impacts from persistent air pollution and higher daily cardiovascular hospitalization.
Fuel Treatment Needs and The Resilience Gap
To reduce the risk of catastrophic fires in the future, California has identified more than 20 million acres that need fuel treatments — including prescribed burning, selective harvesting and constructing fuel breaks — across various landscape types to reduce hazardous vegetation. But to-date, there has been no systematic assessment that measures the extent of fuel treatment needs by poverty level. Using spatial analysis, we mapped the CA fuel treatment data set with land ownership and poverty information, and found:
Of the 6.7 million acres of private forest land in need of fuel treatment, 4.0 million acres are concentrated in high poverty areas (poverty rates >20%).
Over 1.6 million acres of private forest lands in need of fuel treatment are concentrated in extreme poverty areas (poverty rates >40%).
3 out of 58 counties make up half of treatable forests in Extreme Poverty Zones. Mendocino, Humboldt and Tehama together have nearly 822,000 acres of private forest in extreme poverty lands that need fuel reduction.
Current treatment levels are falling woefully short. For counties experiencing extreme poverty and the largest private forest treatment needs, it will take another 95 years to meet fuel reduction goals at current treatment rates.
Learn More
Check out the FBA guidebook and our full assessment here. We hope that this is a step toward better aligning wildfire treatment investments with socioeconomic resilience needs. Please reach out for opportunities to continue this important work!