Rising temperatures have made managing wildfires more difficult by lengthening the fire season and fueling faster-growing, larger blazes that severely impact air quality. Firefighting efforts prioritize protecting lives and property, especially as many communities have expanded into the wildland-urban interface in recent decades, leading to more aggressive fire suppression strategies.

A recent report, produced in collaboration between San Jose State University’s Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center and Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), highlights how decades of fire exclusion policies have contributed to the current wildfire challenges faced in California. Dr. Patrick Brown, a climate analyst and co-author of the study, explained that suppressing natural fires for the past century has allowed flammable vegetation—known as “fuels”—to accumulate across the landscape.

“With warming climate conditions on top of this fuel buildup, fires that do occur tend to be far more severe and difficult to control,” Brown said. “They generate much more smoke and have a higher chance of spreading into neighboring communities.”

The study emphasizes the need to shift toward managing more low-intensity fires through prescribed burns—controlled fires intentionally set to reduce fuel loads. Without such measures, California may continue to face increasingly intense wildfires, which not only threaten human settlements but also strain ecosystems that were historically resilient to fire.

Currently, California aims to treat around 1 million acres annually with prescribed burns and other fuel reduction techniques. However, the report suggests that increasing this effort by an additional 600,000 acres each year—reaching roughly 1.6 million acres—could significantly lessen future wildfire intensity, even as temperatures continue to rise.

Brown noted, “Scaling up prescribed burns to this level could lead to an overall reduction in wildfire severity, rather than simply mitigating an inevitable increase. This offers a hopeful path forward where wildfire impacts do not worsen despite climate change.”

If current fuel reduction efforts remain unchanged, the study projects wildfire intensity could increase by up to 25 percent in coming years. But with a substantially expanded prescribed burn program, the potential exists to reduce fire intensity by as much as 31 percent, even under warming conditions.

Many fire and climate experts are urging California policymakers to seriously consider boosting prescribed burning efforts to help safeguard communities and ecosystems from more catastrophic wildfires in the future.