Leah Douglas

(Reuters) – Tuesday’s announcement by the Biden Administration outlined a 10-year strategy to maintain and treat millions more acres of forest land in the west United States. This will help reduce wildfires during the summer.

“We’re not going to stop fires,” U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said at a press event in Arizona alongside Forest Service chief Randy Moore. “But what we can do is begin the process of reducing the catastrophic nature of those fires.”

The plan, called the “wildfire crisis strategy,” aims to make some 50 million acres (20 million hectares) of forests healthier and more resilient to fires through treatments like thinning, pruning, and prescribed burning, they said.

According to the report, wildfire season conditions have been worsening in America in recent decades, as a result of decades-old federal policy of immediately extinguishing wildfires, rather than letting them continue in controlled manner.

The American West has seen a rise in temperatures and dryness due to climate change. This makes fires easier to light, as well as brush that is more flammable.

According to the report, up to 2,000,000 acres have been treated by the U.S. Forest Service in the west United States each year.

In accordance with the plan, the Forest Service will be working in partnership with the Department of the Interior to treat additional National Forest System acres and additional 30,000,000 acres of Federal, State, Tribal, and Private land throughout the Western United States within the next 10 year.

It will prioritize the areas of Arizona and Washington most vulnerable to wildfires.

With nearly $3 billion of funds provided by the infrastructure law, the U.S. Department of Agriculture will fund the effort. A USDA official stated that the additional $50 billion needed to reach the 50-million-acre goal will be required over time.

In 2020, a record wildfire season ravaged over 10 million acres of the United States. Half of this area was Forest Service property. The USDA is home to the Forest Service.