The U.S. Has to Get Serious About Wildfires

California’s wildfire season is off to a brutal start. Through August, this year already ranks as the second most destructive in the state’s history, with more than 1.6 million acres burned. Sparked by lightning strikes and record heat, fires in northern California have destroyed thousands of structures, wrecked air quality in the San Francisco Bay Area and carried smoke plumes as far away as Nebraska. With hot, dry weather likely to persist until November, the worst may be yet to come.

Looking farther ahead, the picture does not improve. As climate change worsens, wildfires are growing in number, scale and duration across the American West, overwhelming local firefighting capacities and putting property and lives in peril. Since 2017, fires have consumed more than 20 million acres of land and caused at least $50 billion in economic losses. The U.S. needs a coherent national strategy to address the threat.