It’s a pleasure to be here to discuss future opportunities for forestry. Thank you for inviting me.
It can’t be said enough: The State Foresters are our closest partners at the Forest Service. We’ve been working together for more than a hundred years, and I want to thank you for that.
Fire Season
As you know, we’re having another horrendous fire season. The number of acres burned is roughly on par with 2006, when more than 9 million acres burned. Dozens of large fires are still burning here in the West, and the fire season promises to drag on well into the fall.
In August, we went to Preparedness Level 5. We mobilized help from the military, and we got the help of dozens of firefighters from overseas. As you know, we have cooperative agreements along those lines.
But thanks to our cooperative agreements with the states, we have gotten the bulk of the firefighters we needed. This year, we mobilized more firefighters than ever, about 27,000 firefighters in all, over and above the 5,000 firefighters reserved for initial attack. It has been 15 years since we had to mobilize more than 25,000 firefighters, but this year we set a record.
And that’s thanks to you—thanks to the tremendous help we got from the states. So I want to start by thanking the State Foresters for all your help during a very difficult fire season. And it’s not over yet!
Challenges Ahead
This fire season is typical of the growing challenges we are facing in managing wildland fire across the United States. Since 2000, at least ten states have had record fires, and some have had their records broken twice. In the last ten years, almost 6 million acres have burned on average each year. That’s almost twice the average number of acres burned annually in the thirty-year period from 1970 to 2000.
Fire and fuels constitute only one of several elevated stresses and disturbances we are seeing on the land. Others include regional drought … invasive species … epidemic outbreaks of insects and disease … all driven, in part, by a changing climate. The elevated stresses and disturbances we are seeing today raise tremendous challenges for forest management, particularly here in the West.
But the changes go beyond what we are seeing on the ground. Our nation has fundamentally changed from what it was even fifty years ago. Today, 83 percent of our population lives in metropolitan areas, and homes and communities have been shooting up in the wildland/urban interface. From 2010 to 2060, the United States is expected to lose up to 31 million acres of forest outright. That’s an area larger than Pennsylvania. Twenty-seven percent of all forest-associated plants and animals in the United States, a total of 4,005 species, are at risk of extinction. Many watersheds across the United States are in poor or declining health.
And the WUI, deprived of fire, has becoming increasingly prone to burning, making fire protection extremely complex. More than 46 million homes—about 40 percent of our nation’s housing units—are in fire-prone parts of the WUI. Almost 70,000 communities are now at risk from wildfire, and less than 15,000 have a community wildfire protection plan or the like. As wildland fire protection becomes more complex, the risks for firefighters and communities are growing. As you know, Yarnell Hill in 2013 is an extreme example of the tragic results.
Meanwhile, our costs have soared. Fire funding has gone from 16 percent of our budget in 1995 to 52 percent today. Unless something is done, fire alone will account for 67 percent of our budget by 2025. Two out of every three dollars we spend will go toward fire!
The results are appalling. Because our budgets haven’t kept pace with our rising suppression costs, funding and staffing for our nonfire programs are in steep decline. And we all know that fire transfers have hobbled our nonfire programs. Since 2000, our annual wildfire suppression costs have exceeded the ten-year average in all but three years.
In response, Congress is considering bipartisan legislation that reflects what we proposed in the President’s budget for fiscal year 2016. The new legislation would set up a mechanism to treat wildfires more like other natural disasters and put an end to fire transfers. Seventy percent of the rolling 10-year average wildfire suppression costs would be appropriated in the Forest Service’s suppression account. That would cover the cost of fighting up to 99 percent of the wildfires we face each year.
For the few fires that get huge and complex and cost enormous sums to control, the legislation would authorize the Forest Service to access a disaster cap fund specifically designed to pay for high-cost, catastrophic fires. This mechanism would pay for controlling the largest and costliest wildfires in the same way that FEMA pays for emergency management programs associated with hurricanes, floods, and other natural disasters.
We hope we can count on your support.
Framework for Collaboration
So the challenges before us are many: fire protection … keeping working forests working … protecting and restoring wildlife habitat … protecting and restoring watersheds. Fixing our funding mechanism for fire suppression is important, but we must do more to meet all the challenges we face. The question is, how do we do business differently by working together across shared landscapes to achieve our mutual goals?
Fortunately, we have a long history of working together through cooperative programs to meet shared goals on state and private lands … and federal lands. And now we have a new framework for doing so. That framework has two pillars: our new planning rule … and the state forest action plans.
As you know, we adopted a new planning rule in 2012 after an extensive process of engaging communities across the country. We listened to people from all walks of life, and we took what we heard to heart.
Our new planning rule calls for science-based planning that involves everyone interested in revising our forest plans. It calls for an integrated approach to forest plan preparation and revision, partly to address climate change. The new rule calls for landscape-scale restoration—call it resilience, if you will. It also calls for adaptive management and for monitoring and assessment across shared landscapes.
We finalized the planning directives for the new rule in January of this year. Our units can now revise their forest plans based on the new rule and the new directives. Nineteen units are now bringing their plans up to date by addressing the needs of the 21st century, including the need to work across shared landscapes to restore forests that are healthy, resilient, diverse, and productive.
So I think the new planning rule will strengthen our framework for working together across shared landscapes. The state forest action plans constitute another pillar in our collaborative framework. These plans can help us match up on what is needed to achieve the outcomes we all agree on for the landscapes we all share. The forest action plans let us identify the highest priority forested landscapes and focus our mutual resources on those landscapes. We are using the forest action plans in revising our forest plans and in preparing projects under our various programs, including our Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program and our Forest Legacy Program.
A good example is the Four Forests Restoration Initiative in Arizona, or 4FRI. It involves restoration treatments across nearly 600,000 acres of dry pine forest on four national forests. These areas have been identified in Arizona’s forest action plan as high-priority landscapes from a variety of perspectives, including people, fire, air, water, ecosystem, and economics.
Our Good Neighbor Authority gives us other opportunities for using the state forest action plans to address our mutual priorities. Thank you for working with us to get the Good Neighbor Authority into the last Farm Bill. The Good Neighbor Authority allows us to work together to restore high-priority watersheds and landscapes across state/federal boundaries. We have already used the authority on national forests in Colorado and elsewhere, mainly to reduce hazardous fuels in the WUI.
Cohesive Strategy
And we have other opportunities for working together across borders and boundaries, including our joint long-term National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy. As you know, we brought together federal, tribal, state, and local governments and nongovernmental organizations to develop a shared national approach—a national blueprint for building synergies in wildland fire management. Our strategy has three main goals:
1.First, to restore fire-adapted natural communities—forests that can withstand the elevated stresses and disturbances we are seeing today, including those associated with climate change.
2.Second, to create fire-adapted human communities that know how to live with fire through firesafe building and other techniques.
3.Third, to make safe, effective, risk-based fire management decisions. That includes using fire for management purposes where it is safe and beneficial.
Our joint strategy is about breaking down stovepipes and coming together to address wildland fire challenges across the landscapes we all share. Our strategy is about addressing the fire-related challenges we face from a holistic, well-integrated perspective. This is a truly cohesive effort that reflects the best thinking of all of our partners.
Cooperative Forestry
Our State and Private Forestry mission area gives further opportunities to work together to achieve our mutual goals. State and Private Forestry exemplifies our roots—our core values, our commitment to community-based cooperative work. Conservation begins where people live; healthy landscapes and healthy communities are closely linked. Protecting working forests is key. By working with partners, including private forest landowners, we help to disseminate the knowledge, tools, and resources that Americans need to conserve their forests and sustain the communities that depend on them.
In that connection, this year is the 25th anniversary of the 1990 Farm Bill. That Farm Bill first authorized three key Forest Service programs: Forest Stewardship, Forest Legacy, and Urban and Community Forestry.
The Forest Stewardship and Forest Legacy Programs both focus on high-priority landscapes identified through the state forest action plans. Under the Forest Stewardship Program, private landowners are using forest stewardship plans on more than 22 million acres, an area the size of Indiana. Under the Forest Legacy Program, the states have worked with willing private forest landowners to protect almost two-and-a-half million acres of critical forest land.
The Urban and Community Forestry Program plays a vital role in protecting over 136 million acres of urban and community forest land, where 83 percent of our population lives. As you know, urban forests provide central benefits to Americans, including energy conservation, flood and pollution control, and open space for a higher quality of life.
Partnerships are key. All three of these forestry programs work through partnerships with the states, with private forest landowners, and with others to protect America’s forests, both now and for generations to come.
Wildlife Conservation
Another area of opportunity for working together across shared landscapes is in wildlife conservation. All of us here share a reverence for America’s wildlife … for America’s great traditions of hunting, part of our national heritage … for conserving the habitat that America’s wildlife needs to survive and to thrive.
America is an exceptional place. Other cultures have their great castles and cathedrals, their Great Walls, their great works of art and architecture, sometimes thousands of years old. We have our great works of nature, our mountains and plains, our great forest cathedrals. We have a rich native wildlife in settings that still resemble what the American Indians and Alaska Natives maintained over thousands of years.
Those traditions come with values that we have inherited as Americans, including the value of hunting and fishing … of sustaining our native wildlife … of caring for the land. America’s wildlife is a great public trust, and it is up to us working together to protect it for future generations.
That’s why the Forest Service is working with partners to restore healthy, resilient forest ecosystems—ecosystems that are resistant to climate-related stresses such as drought … ecosystems that recover from disturbances such as fires, floods, and insect attack … ecosystems that can support habitat for a wide variety of native fish, plants, and wildlife..
But times are hard, and we have limited budgets for restoring resilient ecosystems and addressing wildlife habitat loss. With our limited funding, we need to work together and get smarter about the investments we make, more focused and collaborative, leveraging new funds with multiple partners.
Watersheds
Finally, water is another critical area of opportunity for working together to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Few forces are more important than water in shaping the human condition. Water is a central organizer of ecosystems. Water shapes the physical landscape and governs its vegetation, laying the very basis for human life and civilization. Water is critical to life—without it, we have no hope for food security.
Yet more than a billion people worldwide lack sufficient clean water. According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in 2005, up to 25 percent of global freshwater use exceeds sustainable supplies, and global water quality is deteriorating. By 2025, 40 percent of the world’s population could be living in water-scarce regions, especially as the climate changes.
Forests and water are connected, as conservationists have long understood. A hundred and fifty years ago, George Perkins Marsh wrote this, and I quote: “[W]hen the earth was covered with the forest, perennial springs gushed from the foot of every hill, brooks flowed down the bed of every valley.” Conversely, deforestation brought flooding, and it dried up perennial water sources.
In fact, 53 percent of our nation’s surface water supply originates on forest land, even though forests cover just 29 percent of our surface area. Public and private forest lands combined furnish water supplies for more than 180 million Americans.
The national forests and grasslands are the single most important source of water in the country. These lands have over 400,000 miles of streams, over three-and-a-half million acres of lakes and wetlands, over half the nation’s hydroelectric power supplies, and almost a fifth of the nation’s surface water supply. These lands furnish drinking water to about 60 million Americans living in about 3,400 communities, including great cities like Atlanta, Georgia; Denver, Colorado; and Portland, Oregon.
For more than a hundred years, a critical part of our mission has been sustaining the health of our nation’s forests to protect the quantity and quality of our nation’s water supply. We have a platform for protecting water quality and water supplies based on two principles: sound watershed stewardship in partnership with states, municipalities, and others; and the advancement of science-based knowledge and understanding.
We have taken a number of steps to implement sound watershed stewardship. For example, we have developed a national program of best management practices for protecting water quality from ground-disturbing activities on the National Forest System. Our scientists have developed a water balance model called WaSSI to track streamflow, evapotranspiration, and soil water moisture across more than 80,000 watersheds in the continental United States. We also developed a process and set of tools called GRAIP for analyzing the impacts of roads on forested watersheds so we can better manage them.
Working with our scientists, we developed a national Watershed Classification Framework. Based on a core set of indicators, we classified watershed conditions across the National Forest System. In May 2011, we finished classifying more than 15,000 12-digit subwatersheds.
Based in part on the state forest action plans, we identified 300 watersheds for high-priority treatment, and we have developed 260 watershed restoration action plans in partnership with local communities and other cooperators. The plans outline activities needed to restore degraded watersheds, including road improvements, culvert replacements, hazardous fuels reduction, and other restoration work. Nearly 20 percent of the funding will come from our partners and cooperators. So far, we have moved 34 watersheds to an improved condition class.
Fuels and forest health treatments are key to protecting and restoring watersheds, and the Forest Service is committed to working with partners to pick up the pace of restoration. So far, we’ve had some success. Our projection for 2011 was to complete 3.7 million acres of restoration and hazardous fuels treatments, but we actually accomplished 4.2 million acres. And last year, we increased that by 9 percent to 4.6 million acres.
Partnerships Are Key
The challenge is pulling our partners together around a set of common priorities. I think our new planning rule can help … our revised forest plans can help … the state forest action plans can help. These are pillars of a collaborative framework of working together across shared landscapes.
Coming up at this meeting are dialogues on three key topics: cooperative forestry; wildlife; and water. As you consider each topic, I would ask you to think about how we can broaden our perspective to work on an all-lands, cross-boundary basis toward shared goals.
As we look to the future, we will need to adapt to change—changes on the ground … changes in our society and in what people want and expect from their forests. And that includes adapting the way we function by broadening our horizons and working together across our changing landscapes to achieve our mutual goals.