U.S. Forest Service Meets 2014 Forest Restoration Goals

On December 16, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that more than 200,000 tons of biomass in federally-owned forests have been removed through the Biomass Crop Assistance Program (BCAP) to be used as renewable energy in 19 facilities across 10 states.  These diseased and dead trees – often referred to as ‘hazardous fuels’ due to their ability to fuel some of the most dangerous forest fires, have accumulated in National Forests and lands controlled by the Bureau of Land Management following decades of fire suppression rather than controlled burning.  Prolonged heat, drought, and increased pests are making the situation ever more pressing.  The BCAP program allows the Forest Service to partner with farmers, ranchers and foresters to deal with forestry residues that would otherwise be costly to remove. According to the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), under the BCAP program (which provides $12.5 million annually for biomass removal), USFS has met its forestry restoration goals for fiscal year 2014. 

Due to a warming climate and lower precipitation levels, wildfire season lasts two months longer and burns twice as much land as compared to 40 years ago.  The U.S. National Climate Assessment predicts that for every 1.8 degrees of surface temperature rise, the Western wildfire area may quadruple. According to the USDA, fire suppression has grown “from 13 percent of the agency’s [U.S. Forest Service] budget just 10 years ago to over 40 percent in 2014.”  This has caused the damaging practice of ‘fire borrowing,’ where money for critical forest restoration is re-appropriated to meet wildfire cost shortfalls. Overall cuts to USFS during the sequester and Congressional borrowing from the fund for unrelated purposes during calm fire seasons have led to further deficits.

The bipartisan Wildfire Disaster Funding Act (S. 1875) would create a separate emergency disaster fund, to be administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).  The FEMA funds would be tapped once wildfire treatment costs had passed a benchmark of 70 percent of a 10-year average, similar to how other disaster recovery efforts are funded.  According to the Forest Service, the worst one percent of wildfires account for 30 percent of agency spending. The Wildfire Disaster Funding Act would free up precious dollars at the Forest Service to do what it is already well-equipped to do -- manage forests through thinning, controlled burns, public-private forestry partnerships and other stewardship practices.   While the 113th Congress left without addressing wildfire spending, either through WDFA or through the omnibus process, forestry advocates are hopeful that the 114th Congress will again take up the issue.

Under the BCAP program, farmers, ranchers and foresters receive an offset to assist in the cost of harvesting forest and agricultural residues. According to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, "In just three months, working with private partners across the country, the program helped to reduce fire, disease and insect threats while providing more biomass feedstock for advanced energy facilities." The Forest Service reports that 1.7 million acres in the wildland urban interface were treated under the hazardous fuels management program in 2014; watershed conditions were addressed on an additional 2.9 million acres of land.  These activities resulted in the sale of 2.8 billion board feet of timber.  Despite the recent successes, funding for the BCAP program was cut by $2 million in the recently passed 2014 CRomnibus package.

For more information see: 

USDA Improves Forest Health by Harvesting Biomass for Energy, USDA

USDA Tallies Costs of Fire Borrowing and Urges Congress to Pass Wildfire Disaster Funding Act, EESI