US President Joe Biden (C) and First Lady Jill Biden (R) tour a neighborhood destroyed by the Marshall Fire alongside Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle (L) in Louisville, Colorado, January 7, 2022.
The Biden administration this week unveiled a 10-year plan to spend billions of dollars to combat destructive wildfires on millions of additional acres of land and make forests more resilient to future blazes.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture said in a statement on Tuesday that its plan, called the "wildfire crisis strategy," targets dozens of areas in eleven Western states. The plan includes treatments such as thinning overgrown trees, pruning forests and conducting prescribed burns to minimize dead vegetation.
The administration's plan quadruples the government's fuels and forest health treatments. It comes after a year during which California experienced the second-largest fire in state history and Colorado endured its most destructive fire ever that ignited unusually late in the season.
"We're not going to stop fires," U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said at a press briefing in Arizona on Tuesday. "But what we can do is begin the process of reducing the catastrophic nature of those fires."
Hotter temperatures and more severe drought conditions fueled by climate change, along with expanding development in wildland-urban areas, have prompted more intense and prolonged wildfire seasons in the U.S. Researchers also say that decades of policies calling for all fires to be extinguished, rather than letting them burn in a controlled way, has caused a buildup of flammable brush that adds fuel to blazes.