California Assembly Considers Key Bills to Expand Beneficial Burns and Forest Resilience

Huge swaths of overgrown forests in California pose a risk for catastrophic wildfires, and today, the State Assembly will consider advancing two bills to promote intentional burns that lower the risk of disaster.

The Beneficial Fire Capacity Act would allocate 10% of the annual wildfire resilience portion of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund for beneficial fire capacity-building and training.

Colleen Rossier, senior research and policy adviser for the Karuk Tribe, said they’ll break ground this year on a Fire Resiliency Center in the Northern California town of Orleans, which will bring Indigenous knowledge to the premiere training center.

"Large-scale, high-severity wildfire is increasingly common in California, and it's not a question of if it's going to happen, it's where," she said. "That's where we're really hoping to address this, and there's no time to lose."

In recent years, the Los Angeles fires, the Camp Fire, the Slater Fire and more devastated communities, claimed hundreds of lives and caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. Last year, the California Natural Resources Agency reported beneficial burns on more than 125,000 acres of land. The agency’s goal is to reach 800,000 by 2030 and 1.5-million by 2045.

A second bill, the Good Fire Act, would clear away red tape that has hampered beneficial fire in the past.

Lenya Quinn Davidson with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources department said that among other things, that bill would make permanent a pilot program called the Prescribed Fire Liability Claims Fund that provides insurance coverage for beneficial fire projects.

"It has been such a critical piece of this whole puzzle and has really allowed for a lot more of this work to happen," she said. "We've had literally hundreds of projects enrolled in the fund, and we've never had any claims on the fund."

Paul Mason, vice president for policy and incentives at the Pacific Forest Trust in Sacramento, said California must be more proactive in this fight.

"If you can choose between having a fire on the best possible day or the worst possible day, we get to prevent a lot of really bad damage," he said. "It's part of a continuum of embracing more beneficial fire."

The Good Fire Act codifies many of the elements of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 2025 executive order promoting beneficial fire. For example, it would enable Cal Fire to assist on tribal or community-led burns without triggering an automatic environmental review.