 Hello, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our briefing about wildfires. I'm Dan Bresset, Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide science-based information about environmental energy and climate change topics to policymakers. More recently, we've also developed a program that provides technical assistance to utilities in rural areas interested in on-bill financing programs to help make energy efficiency, beneficial electrification, and renewable energy more accessible and affordable for their customers. EESI provides informative, objective, non-partisan coverage of climate change topics and briefings, written materials, and on social media. All of our educational resources, including briefing recordings, fact sheets, issue briefs, articles, newsletters, and podcasts are always available for free online at www.esi.org. If you'd like to make sure you always receive our latest educational resources, the best way to do that is to take a moment to subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. Today is part three of our briefing series, Living with Climate Change. Our first two installments have helped us learn about the climate adaptation and resilience challenges posed by the polar vortex and sea level rise. Our final briefing in the series will be Extreme Heat on June 24. Sign up for the last full-length briefing of our Living with Climate Change series on Extreme Heat by visiting us online at www.esi.org. We also have one final briefing to go and are scaling up innovation to drive down emissions briefing series, which is a companion to Living with Climate Change. In that series, we've covered green hydrogen, direct air capture, and electric vehicle charging infrastructure. On June 29, we'll look at the potential of offshore wind energy. To review presentation materials and summary notes and RSVP for what's coming next, check everything out online at www.esi.org. This week also marks another notch in our coverage of agriculture and rural topics with the 2023 Farm Bill in mind. On Thursday, please join us for Pathways to Regenerative Agriculture. This briefing will be presented in partnership with our friends at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who just released a great new report for Generative Agriculture Farm Policy for the 21st century. The report was informed by conversations with farmers and ranchers from 47 states as well as the District of Columbia. You will not want to miss this or the opening statement by Senator John Tester of Montana. Few images are as evocative of the urgency of the climate crisis as a wildfire raging out of control. Wildfires are dangerous to life and property and ecosystems and also extremely costly. Every year, we spend billions and billions of dollars fighting wildfires. And it seems like just as one is controlled in California, a new one sparks up in the Pacific Northwest or one of the Southwest states and takes over the new cycle. As wildfire season, which also seems to start earlier and earlier each year becomes worse and worse in terms of economic health and societal impacts, many policymakers and experts are looking at deploying new preventative steps to help keep wildfires from burning out of control. And that is the purpose of our briefing today. What are some of the leading proposals to improve our ability to live with wildfires made worse by climate change and begin to reverse the trend of bigger, more dangerous and more costly wildfires year over year. Let me remind everyone that after our panelists today, we will have some time for questions and we'll do our best to incorporate questions from the audience. If you have a question, you can send it to us online. You can do two different ways. One is you can send us an email. The email address to use is AskASK at EESI.org. Or even better, you can follow us on Twitter at EESI online and send it to us that way by responding to our live tweeting. And bonus points if you use the hashtag EESI talk. And we really do give bonus points. If there's a tie, if we get two questions, one email, one Twitter, we usually go with the Twitter one. It is my privilege today to introduce opening remarks by Representative Joe Ngoos. Representative Ngoos represents Colorado's second district in the U.S. House of Representatives. He was elected to his first term in November 2018, becoming the first African-American member of Congress in Colorado history. He serves as a member of the House Judiciary Committee, the House Natural Resources Committee, and the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. Additionally, he serves as chair of the subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands, and vice chair of the subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship. Welcome to our briefing today, Representative Ngoos. Hello, everyone. My name is Joe Ngoos, and I'm proud to represent Colorado's second congressional district in the United States House of Representatives. I wanna thank the Environmental and Energy Study Institute for hosting this important webinar. Today's topic, living with climate change, wildfires, has become increasingly important in recent months, and I appreciate you taking the time to educate yourselves. As I'm sure you're aware, in just the past two years, the state of Colorado has experienced three of the most devastating and record-breaking wildfires in our history. From the Cameron Peak and East Troublesome fires in 2020 to the devastating Marshall fire in December of 2021, our communities are facing the real and life-threatening consequences of a warming climate every day. Because of this, it's more urgent than ever that we take bold action to better protect our environment and better prepare future generations to thwart these real threats. I'm proud to be leading the charge in Congress as chair of the Bipartisan Wildfire Caucus and as a member of the select committee on the climate crisis. Through these positions, I've been able to help identify policies and practices that both state governments and the federal government can take to address increasing wildfires in this country. And I'd like to share just a few with you today. First, we have to start by taking an ambitious approach to conservation and climate action, adopting key measures that will ensure a more sustainable future. We have got to revamp the way that we pay, classify and support our federal firefighters to better assist the brave men and women who protect us from wildfires. As fires grow more intense and more dangerous, firefighters leave behind their lives and their families literally for months at a time. These individuals deserve to be recognized and compensated for the grueling conditions in which they work. To enact these changes, I introduced TIMS Act, a comprehensive piece of legislation that will push for long overdue changes that safeguard our federal firefighting workforce capacity and find ways in which we can work to adequately support these heroic individuals. We are pushing our federal firefighting workforce to a breaking point and it has got to change. With the summer heat fast approaching, I know that this issue will be at the forefront of everyone's minds. So I really appreciate all of you taking the time today to again attend this event and for your dedication to developing a better understanding of this issue. I wish that I could be there in person to answer all of your questions. Unfortunately, duty called business in Washington as we do the people's work, but please feel free to reach out to my office so that I can answer any lingering questions that you might have. Again, thank you so much for having me and please enjoy today's event. Well, thank you, Representative Ngoose and your staff for helping make your participation possible. It means a lot to have you join us today for this briefing on this really important topic. We have four excellent panelists and it is my privilege to introduce the first of them. Carly Phillips is a fellow with the Western States Climate Team, part of the Union of Concerned Scientists Climate and Energy Program where her work focuses on wildfires, land use and climate mitigation. Carly previously worked as a Kendall fellow Kendall fellow at UCS and a postdoctoral researcher at Woodwell Climate Research Center, formerly Woods Hole Research Center. She earned a PhD in ecology from the University of Georgia's Odom School of Ecology and a BA in biology from Occidental College. Carly, it's great to see you today. I'm really looking forward to your presentation. Hi everyone. Thanks, Dan. As Dan said, my name is Carly Phillips and I'm a fellow with the Union of Concerned Scientists. For those of you who aren't familiar with the Union of Concerned Scientists, we're a group of scientists, engineers, economists and analysts who are committed to using science to tackle some of our world's toughest problems, whether that be fighting climate change, building a healthier food system or reducing the threat of nuclear war. Today, I'll be talking about the intersection between climate change and wildfires, the impacts that occur at that intersection as well as opportunities to adapt to future risk. As everyone here in attendance knows, we are in a dangerous situation with regards to wildfires. While wildfires are a natural part of many ecosystems across North America, human activity and specifically climate change have modified just about every aspect of wildfire regimes, from how often fires occur to how severely those same wildfires burn. And the consequences of these changes are alarming. Congressman Ngoos highlighted record-breaking wildfires within the past year that have occurred in New Mexico and in Colorado. As another example in California, the five largest fires in state history have occurred within the last five years. The largest wildfire, the August complex, burned more than 1 million acres. And so to put these within a national context, you can see here, we've got year on the x-axis and number of wildfires per year on the y. You can see that the number of wildfires is increasing and also that they're burning more land. So by almost any metric, whether it's fire size, fire severity, or length of the fire season, wildfires around the world are getting worse. But to fully understand where we are, we have to understand how we got here. And specifically the central role that human-caused climate change has played, is playing and will play in the future of wildfires. So wildfires have historically been an important part of many landscapes, particularly in Western North America, where lots of ecosystems burned regularly due to fires ignited by lightning and those used by indigenous communities. Many of these fires burned as surface fires, meaning they stayed on the ground, didn't move up into the canopy. They burned off the understory, didn't kill very many trees. But this fire has been removed almost completely from these landscapes. Indigenous people were forcibly removed from their lands, meaning that the intentional burning and the beneficial fire that had existed there for millennia was gone. And further, after several large and destructive wildfires around the turn of the 20th century, fire suppression became the law of the land in the United States. This led to a buildup of vegetation, fuel in ecosystems, as well as a loss of the patchiness across a landscape mosaic that changed how fire flowed across landscapes. Fuel buildup increases the risk of these high severity fires that we're seeing, these catastrophic wildfires, which can kill whole stands of trees and really cause destruction throughout these ecosystems. In addition, humans have developed further into forested and other natural spaces, areas often referred to as the Wildland Urban Interface. This expansion has created more opportunities for human ignitions, but it has also put more property and human life at risk. However, despite all of these other factors, climate change has had a clear influence. In this figure here, we've got year on the X-axis and cumulative acres of forest fire burned on the Y. And this is from a study led by John Abatsoglu that showed how human-caused climate change has led to a more than doubling of burned area in Western forests since 1984, primarily due to very dry fuel, which is one of the ways that climate change can impact our forests and our landscapes. By drying out vegetation and soil, drought and high temperatures can create a tinderbox effect and prime ecosystems for fire. Many studies have predicted that this unprecedented dryness will contribute to future wildfires in systems that historically haven't experienced fire or experience it very infrequently. We also know that insect outbreaks, which are facilitated and worsened by moderate temperatures due to climate change can further add biomass and fuel to these forests, increasing the risk of high severity burns. And we've also seen an increase in extreme fire weather with consequences for fire behavior, how quickly fires can spread, but also it creates complications for managing and fighting those wildfires and being able to protect human life and property. And we also know, as Dan alluded to, that wildfire season is starting earlier and ending later, in some regions becoming a year round phenomenon. Earlier, snow melt and thaw gives vegetation more time to dry out or cure, and extended periods of higher temperatures and drought, combined with the late onset of rains, means that fires can start and burn further into the fall. And the impacts of these wildfires can cascade across ecosystems and across communities. Smoke exposure is a serious public health issue. It can lead to preterm birth, premature death, and a suite of other consequences. You can see in this image here from 2020, the Golden Gate Bridge, showing that orange sky that so many of us remember from that summer. And these effects aren't localized to where the fires are. Many of you may remember the period last year when wildfires in Western North America reduced air quality across the East Coast. We also know that there are biodiversity impacts. Wildfires can destroy and create habitat, but as wildfires burn more severely and areas adapted to that lower severity fire, we can see challenges with ecosystem recovery, and in some cases, ecosystem transition. So what was a forest and burned very severely won't return as a forest. It will return as a grassland, let's say. Wildfires also have important impacts on water quality. They can dramatically enhance and reduce stream flow, increase the load of sediments and toxins and rivers, and lead to the contamination of drinking water. Similar processes that reduce water quality can also cause infrastructure damage. By destabilizing soil, severe wildfires can heighten the risk of mudslides and debris flows, which can lead to road closures, other hazardous situations, and create barriers to recovery and areas that have been hit hard by wildfires. And while wildfires are made worse by climate change, they also drive it by releasing huge quantities of greenhouse gases as vegetation and soil burns. And to highlight one example of this greenhouse gas release, we know that in boreal forests of Alaska and Canada, there's a lot of carbon stored, and you can see the fire history in the interior of Alaska here. And we did some research at UCS a few years ago that quantified the expected contribution of boreal wildfires to overall climate emissions by mid-century, which you can see in the figure on the right. We found that over this time period, wildfires from only boreal Alaska and Canada could release the equivalent of the annual emissions of 2.6 billion cars. Our research also found that fire management could be a cost-effective strategy to limit those emissions, but our findings illustrate the extent and the magnitude of these emissions that are coming from wildfires. And we know that wildfire regimes are expected and projected to continue to worsen. Our work was anchored in numerous projections showing that the wildfire situation as climate change gets worse will also continue to worsen. A study that was released a few months ago focused on the contaminous US, the figure shown here, has date on the x-axis and burn area as a percent of land area per year. And you can see that in all the different climate change scenarios, even the most moderate one, we're seeing a near-doubling and burned area by the end of the century, which just underscores the gravity of this situation from the risk to public health and air quality to further warming, fueled by greenhouse gas emissions from wildfires. But we do have an opportunity to intervene. But as is often the case, there aren't easy or silver bullet solutions to our wildfire problem. But there are steps we can take to protect communities and lower the likelihood and the impact of these catastrophic wildfires. First, we can reduce our reliance on fossil fuels to slow climate change overall. We can also take a proactive approach to forest management by removing excess fuel from forests that has built up as a result of fire suppression and work to restore something close to these historical wildfire regimes. And that can be done by prescribed burns, managing wildfires, and also processes like mechanical thinning by taking biomass out of the forest. And these strategies, like I said, are proactive measures that we can take to reduce fire severity and change fire behavior. And they also allow firefighters to better protect communities and infrastructure. We can also promote and support indigenous fire stewardship so that beneficial fire can return to the landscape. We can invest in resilient infrastructure so that water resources, the materials for our home and our power grid are all resilient, not just in the face of climate change, but in the face of fire in particular. And from an adaptation perspective, we can provide community level support to allow people to protect themselves, their families and their communities. We can address housing challenges that have forced people and the skyrocketing cost of housing that has forced people to move into the wildland urban interface. We can support home hardening and building with fire resistant materials. And we can also provide individual capacity for air filtration and water filtration so that people can have clean water and clean air both during and after wildfires. Our current wildfire situation is dire. And scientific evidence suggests that it will continue to get worse. Now is the time to adapt, to help protect our communities and the future from the risk that these escalating wildfires present. Thank you. Thank you, Carly for that excellent presentation and your great slides, which is a great reminder to me to let everyone know in our audience that Carly's slides will be available to everyone online at www.esi.org. You can also go back and watch the webcast. There'll be some other materials and within the next couple of weeks, summary notes. So if you wanna go back and look up something from Carly's presentation one of our other panelists' presentations will make it easy to do that. So be sure to check out Carly's slides and the slides from our other presenters. Speaking of other presenters, that leads me to introduce Kimiko Barrett. Kimmy has managed Headwaters Economics Community Planning Assistance for a wildfire program for six years. She's worked with firefighters, land use and planning staff, government agency personnel and elected officials in more than 80 communities across the country, helping them devise community driven solutions to reduce wildfire risk and increase community resilience. Kimmy's partnerships with senior researchers, professors and policymakers help ensure that her work is science-based and relevant. Kimmy, welcome to the briefing today. I'll turn it over to you. Wonderful, thank you so much. Yes, my name is Kimiko Barrett and I am the lead wildfire researcher and policy analyst at Headwaters Economics. Thank you so much for letting me be part of this panel and to speak alongside such outstanding presenters. I was asked to talk about community planning for increasing wildfire risks. And there's two really important words here when we talk about this sentence, community and planning. Because very often in the natural disasters research, what we're actually talking about is well beyond community planning and is in fact, community adaptation. In other words, the explicit recognition that wildfire risks are increasing, as Carly just stated, that wildfires are also inevitable and that we must learn to live alongside increasing wildfires on the landscape. So how do we do this? That is the point of my presentation. But before I do so, let me quickly reintroduce myself. My name is Kimmy, I'm with Headwaters Economics and Headwaters Economics is an independent nonpartisan research group based in Bozeman. We surface and interpret data to help inform policy, research and locally driven solutions to help communities and people adapt to an increasingly changing world. I have three main objectives with this talk. First and foremost, describe how a home burns down in the first place. Because with this understanding, it actually enables identifying the appropriate solutions much easier. Secondly, what can a community do with this information? And then thirdly, but perhaps most importantly, what needs to happen in order for communities across the country to be better equipped and responsive to increasing wildfire risks. So let's get started. How does a community or a home burn down in the first place? This is really important because as I stated earlier, understanding this can then ask ourselves and perhaps answer the more important question of how do we keep a home from burning down? So let me walk you through a theoretical situation here, a likely scenario that plays out in many places, particularly here in the West. As I was stating earlier, this is a hypothetical community in the high wildfire risk area, likely where I live in Montana, other places here, particularly in the American West. And a wildfire breaks out here in, let's see, now they're not advancing. Okay, and the wildland urban interface as Carly referenced earlier, it's either called a wildland urban fire at this point or a wooey fire. But I wanna take a step back and really focus in on this scene right here that I've just highlighted. Because in all actuality, what we're looking at during an actual wildfire event, particularly where those structures are most adjacent to the forest or to the wildland vegetation, looks much more like this during a wildfire. It's an amber storm. It's millions and millions of fireballs being hurled through the air far in advance of a wildfire front. And if they land on any flammable surface, they have the potential to grow in size and intensity to ignite the home and nearby burning structures. So unlike common media narratives where we think of a massive wildfire wave or tsunami coming down a mountainside or as a community, it's actually these embers, these balls of fire, flying one to four miles ahead of a wildfire that lands on these flammable surfaces to burn a home down. And in fact, embers account for 90% of all home loss during a wildfire. So I want you to step back and think for a moment what your home is comprised of. You're largely dealing with a structure made of wood with a bunch of petroleum-based products inside, and then you gotta think about what's on and around the home itself. You're dealing with perhaps a wooden roof or wood siding, a deck that's made of wood. Around it, you have bark mulch with some junipers or some plants up against the home. You start going out a little bit and you have more shrubs, grasses, under trimmed trees, other vegetation that can be highly flammable. And then think what's on top of the house. You have pine needles, dead debris, vegetation along the roof valleys or in the gutters. Sometimes you might store your firewood on the deck or wicker-based furniture, a propane tank from your barbecue. And then you stick that home in a really dry overstocked forest, guaranteed it is highly flammable to those embers and other sources of ignition. And you see this evidenced over and over in post-fire analysis with which the home is still burning amidst green vegetation and canopy. In other words, those embers have launched themselves far ahead of a wildfire and burned down the combustible or flammable surface area while the non-combustible surface area has survived. So what's my point? My point is, is that if we're trying to protect communities and homes from a wildfire, you need to start reducing the flammability in and around the home itself. So I'm gonna talk you through a quick scenario here, a video demonstration that was done in partnership with some friends of ours at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety. So what you're looking at here is in their hangar, they've constructed a duplex. The left-hand side, you're seeing a version of it, but with really traditional building materials common throughout the Intermountain West, highly flammable. On the right-hand side, you're seeing the same version of that duplex but built with wildfire resistant building products. The same time, both sides of the duplex are being exposed to embers being launched out of this ember chamber with the equal speed and velocity. So let's see what happens here. We're about four minutes into the scenario already. And what you can see on the left-hand side is that bark mulch has quickly ignited, not surprising. It's a large surface area, it's chemically treated wood. The flames are starting to grow and propagate, moving both vertically and horizontally now. They move up the side of the home that has cedar siding and into that open attic venting space, quickly penetrating into the interior of the home through those attic vents. The same time, the flames are moving horizontally underneath the decking material, also made of wood and burning it on fire from underneath. This will quickly expose the door, made of wood to ignition, as well as the windows, which are single pane, meaning that they'll easily burst under any intense prolonged heat. At the same time, the right-hand side of the house isn't having a lot of action here. That's because it got pea gravel around it for mulch, doesn't have any vegetation up against the home. The deck is made with fire retardant wood. The fiberglass door keeps it from being penetrated quickly and the windows are all dual pane tempered glass, meaning that they are meant to survive and withstand that high intense heat. They repeated this experiment four different times. And every time the home on the left was consumed in flames within 10 minutes, all the home on the right survived. So we do know how to build better, smarter, safer homes and wildfire prone areas. So what are communities doing with this information? There's a lot actually being done. So at the federal level, communities across the country are engaging with federal land management agencies to reduce that hazardous field buildup as Carly referenced earlier. In addition to that, there's statewide initiatives, such as statewide building codes or vegetation management public resource codes that again, address the flammability component in and around communities. At the county and the local scale, things like zoning ordinances, subdivision design standards, open space initiatives and other efforts aligned that county and local scale can explicitly integrate wildfire mitigation into the longterm vision of how a community plans to live alongside these increasing risks. And of course, all of this is heavily supported and subsidized by government funding and resources, the local, state and federal level. So let's look at some examples here. Building codes, perhaps the most ambitious and aggressive tactic at a statewide level, sometimes at a local jurisdiction to address new construction and high wildfire risk areas. The best and most robust example is California's chapter 7A supplements the building code for the state, requires the highest wildfire resistance standards and high risk areas. Similarly, the city of Austin has adopted a wildland urban interface code, the largest metropolitan area to do so that integrates wildfire mitigation and high construction standards in their high hazardous areas. Vegetation management can be regulated through landscaping regulations and other guidelines such as what the city of Vale has done. Every year they release a plant species that identifies the appropriate species and plants that can be planted by a homeowner for landscaping. These are plants that have been identified as having a higher tolerance to wildfire ignition over other plant species. And then the only ones allowed. Again, reducing the overall flammability of the property and structure. There's ordinances, such as a home hardening ordinance adopted by Petola Valley, California, building off of chapter 7A. It's the most restrictive interpretation of high construction standards in wildfire risk areas. Similarly, ordinances can control things and regulate fencing material so that the first five to 10 feet of a fence up against the home are built with non-combustible materials. Makes sense, right? A wooden fence acts like a wick from the point of ignition directly to the home. So the Summit County, Colorado, for example, adopted an ordinance that prevents that. They can also adopt things like regulating what kind of materials are on a deck. Firewood, for example, has to be located at least 30 feet away from the primary residence. These are examples of what can be done through land use planning tools. Then there's private public partnerships, really unique opportunities to collaborate between homeowners, insurance providers, local planning departments and fire departments to integrate and incentivize and encourage homeowners to adopt these very important mitigation measures. So what needs to happen for these to be scaled up across the country? Well, our ultimate goal is to reduce risk to communities and neighborhoods. We have to invest in communities and neighborhoods. Examples of this include providing subsidies for homeowners to offset the cost for some of these home hardening construction features. Defensible space programs is what I just mentioned with the wildfire partners program in Colorado, working with insurance providers and homeowners, outreach and education to increase the awareness of some of these increasing risks. Community development plans that explicitly integrate wildfire mitigation into the planning and vision of a community growing alongside these risks. Stock capacity and technical assistance so that communities and local governments already burdened by these concurrent challenges can address wildfire risk proactively. And then very importantly, providing resources and directing funding to disadvantaged communities and other populations adversely impacted by wildfires over others. Because we know that upfront investment yields long-term benefits. One of more recent studies done by the National Institute of Building Sciences and FEMA indicated that for every dollar we spend in upfront wildfire mitigation, we receive $4 back in long-term benefits. And yet I want it to be noted that given all the science, the data and the evidence that we know about homes and neighborhoods mitigating wildfire risk, like home hardening features and infrastructure resilience, that there is no money out of the $4 billion dedicated within the wildfire budget in the upcoming Infrastructure Act being directed towards home mitigation measures. Again, there's no money in the upcoming infrastructure bill to mitigate wildfire risk to homes. This is a huge oversight and a missed opportunity to address the crux of the wildfire problem. Because not only are we not seeing the forest through the trees, we're not seeing the people within the forest. And as long as we continue to only focus on the wildland, within the wildland-urban interface and overlook the urban as part of the solution, then we're only going to address half of the problem. Because we know how to solve this if we redefine the problem as one involving communities. This is a home built to high wildfire resistant standards in Paradise, California. It survived while 19,000 of its neighbors burned. We do know how to do things better to build smarter, safer homes and communities adapted to wildfires. We also know that there are tens of thousands of communities at risk to these increasing threats. They cannot do it alone. They need your help. Thank you. Thank you, Kimmy, for that great presentation. I really like your animations as well. So thank you very much for that. I'm just gonna mention a quick reminder that if you have questions based on what you've heard from Carly and from Kimmy, you have two options to ask us questions. First, you can send us an email. The email address to use is ask at EESI.org. That's A-S-K at EESI.org. You can also always follow us on Twitter at EESI online and ask a question that way. Our third panelist is Margo Robbins. Margo is a UROC tribal member, co-founder and executive director of the Cultural Fire Management Council, co-lead and advisor for the Indigenous Peoples Burn Network and board member for the Indigenous Stewardship Network. Margo graduated from Humboldt State University in 1987 and she resides on the UROC Reservation in Far Northern California. Margo, welcome to our briefing today. I'm really looking forward to hearing your perspectives. Thank you so much. I equate Nick now Margo Robbins. Let me get my slide show going here. Today I would like to talk a little bit about the Cultural Fire Management Council. We are a community-based 501C3 nonprofit organization located in Far Northern California on the UROC Reservation. We have been in existence since 2013. We became non-profit in 2015. We have been doing cultural burns on the upper UROC Reservation for nine years without any escapes. Cultural burns differ from prescribed burns in regards to the purpose for doing them and who is doing them. Cultural burns are to restore or enhance culturally important species. They are led by the Indigenous people from that place who have an intimate knowledge of the land and the elements that affect the fire behavior. A byproduct of cultural burns is wildfire prevention. So when we are out there burning to restore our homelands and to increase the culturally important species, we are also reducing the hazardous fuel load. These are some of the species that in our homelands we are taking care of using fire on the land. We are burning for traditional foods, medicine, and basket materials. So here are some examples of those. You'll see in the top middle a big buck. So that's one of our traditional meat sources which we continue to harvest from the land. For many years, we very seldom saw deer on the reservation. However, since we have brought fire back to the land, we see deer in all of the areas that we've burned. Some of our traditional foods are benefit from fire, while others are fire dependent. So another one of our staple foods is acorns, and that requires fire underneath the trees in order to rid it of the weevils that get into the acorns themselves. Berries benefit from fire because they will be able to get more sunshine and water when you are reducing the other competing vegetation, same with the medicine plants. You'll see on the bottom right some, and middle some basketry materials. These baskets are made with hazel and in Urock territory as well as our neighbors, hazel is what we use for the frames of our baskets, but it is only useful if we burn it. It must be burned in order to send up new shoots. And so in our territory, the art of basketry was dying out because of the fire suppression and our inability to burn because those rights were taken away from us. But we have found a way to restore them and we do have a robust basket weavers in the community again. The top right or left, you'll see a young man pulling a fish out of a net on the Klamath River. Fish is one of our main things that we eat. And you might wonder what that has to do with fire because it's in the water, right? Well, fire improves the quality and quantity of water. So when we are reducing the amount of fuel on the land, all that vegetation, then it's not sucking up all the water and then that water reaches the creeks, which then reach the river. And so our water in the river is threatened every summer by low flows and warmth, warm water temperatures. And so it's really important for us to put fire on the land at a landscape level. What you see here is one of our first burns. It was done in a traditional hazel gathering area. You can see the flames are low, just creeping along the ground. In the foreground, you'll notice that there are these plants growing up with limbs on them. And that's the hazel. This is a hazel burn that we are taking care of the land to produce hazel shoots. And so once the fire goes through the following spring, the hazel will send up new shoots, straight single shoots. That's what we use for our basket tree. We have several different strategies for returning fire to our homelands. And I would like to share those with you because they are strategies that can be replicated in other places and are currently, that is currently happening in some places, but we could up the number of people who utilize in these strategies. What you see here is a cultural burn training exchange. So you'll notice that this does not look anything like a traditional way of burning. Everybody's in their yellows and greens with hard hats and we're using fire engines and hose lays. But what makes it a cultural burn is that we are burning for cultural species. Native people of this land, Elizabeth and I and others, Europe tribal members are leading this burn in terms of choosing where we're gonna burn, how hot it's gonna burn, what time of the year it's going to be burned and what time of the day. So these are qualified, everybody in this picture is qualified firefighters. They're from across the United States, sometimes from other countries. And they are here to increase their firefighter qualifications. It's a training, it's conducted as an incident, it has an incident number, and the participants are training each other. So for example, the nature conservancy often provides a burn boss for us. And then so if somebody wants to be a burn boss, then they will be training under the qualified burn boss for a few days. And then on a couple of the other days, then they would be training somebody else. So, but before we actually put fire on the ground, we walk the units we intend to burn and we point out the culturally important species so that they know that what they're doing is much more than just reducing fuel, that they are helping us really keep our culture alive. So this is a picture of a young man who came to burn. This was his first burn, he's a fire lighter and you can see how happy he is that he gets to participate in this amazing training exercise. This gentleman's from the Robinson Rancheria. He came with a crew of four people and when he went back to his homelands a few months later, they conducted a burn in their homelands using what they had learned when they came here. So we live in really, really steep territory. You can see how steep this is and it's also very, very, very brushy. We put a fire line around the entire area, we're gonna burn, we start at the top of the slope and slowly back the fire down the hill and that's what keeps it under control. Once we have the top burned and the sides and we're down near the bottom, then we can light from the bottom because it will only burn up to where it's black right up above. So that is the strategy that we use here in our home territory. This is a picture of a pre and post burn. On the top left is pre burn and this picture doesn't really show how brushy most of our land is. This particular area has already had, I believe, two entries into it before so that this was our third entry and then we had a little post burn cleanup and you can see what that looks like on the right. In the bottom is some of the results of our burn. On the left is soap root which is used as to get rid of poison oak. We also use it to make little brushes to clean our baskets. In the middle is bracken fern. You can eat those little fiddlehead tops. We bring students out to harvest them and eat them. On the right is wild iris which we use for fiber. In addition to the trex burns, we also do cooperative burns with the Urock tribe so it is just the tribal personnel as well as the cultural fire personnel and we do smaller burns sometimes around elders homes. You can see this elder has come out to help with the finishing part of the lighting and this fire we brought down the hill to within about eight feet of his house. His wife is inside watching TV. They're not worried about what's going on because they know that we know what we're doing, that we have had no escapes, that we have all the safety precautions in place. Once we burned behind their house, we came around and burned in the front. Again, we started from the top of this slope and brought the fire down the hill. So now his place is greatly reduced. We have greatly reduced the risk of wildfire. We have recently instituted demonstration burns. They're smaller burns like two to three acres and we're bringing in people who want to learn how to burn but have not had the opportunity. We're teaching them all about how to do hose lays, how to do firing, how to run the little flip on fire engine, all the things that they need to do to conduct a burn and then on the second day we burn. So this is our way of widening the group of people that know how to burn safely. Finally, we do small family burns, support small family burns when Cal Fire doesn't have any fire restrictions. These are less than an acre burns, the family burns. I would like to end my presentation showing this picture. On the left side is, this whole picture of a wildfire came through. On the left, the land was treated with thinning only. In the middle, it was treated with thinning and prescribed fire. And on the far right, where parts of it are moonscaped, there was no treatment at all. I think this speaks for itself, the need to up the pace and scale of wildfire, excuse me, of prescribed and cultural burning. So thank you for your time. This is my email if anybody is interested in contacting me. That was a great presentation, Margot. Thank you so much. And I love those aerial shots where you can really appreciate the scale of the landscape and also how different methods and different approaches to how they affect, I guess, the susceptibility of the landscape to wildfires. Thank you very much for sharing that. I'm going to introduce our fourth panelist, Steve Bowen. Steve is Managing Director and the Head of Catastrophe Insight at Aeon. His background is in meteorology and business analytics and his role is broadly focused on helping global clients and stakeholders better understand and develop strategies around various hazard risks posed by natural perils, extreme weather, climate change and other socioeconomic factors. Steve, welcome to our briefing today. I'll turn it over to you. Great, thank you very much. And thank you very much for having me. Has been some really great, I wouldn't say provocative but very informative and very important messaging that has already been presented by the previous speakers. And some of what I'm going to present is a little bit of overlap, but I think hearing the repetitive nature of this, especially coming from more of the business side, the insurance sector really kind of shows how collectively we're all moving towards the same goal and trying to limit risk, identify risk and really try to help minimize what is continuing to be a really increasingly important, expensive and damaging peril across the entire United States. So with that in mind, let's just go ahead and state the obvious that in fact, when you do put the financial loss numbers behind it, it's getting costlier. This is a peril which historically, if you had a year with a multi-billion dollar industry loss or any type of multi-billion dollar economic loss, that was considered a very devastating year, but really everything has really changed over the course of the last five to 10 years. You can see the huge spikes in 2017, 2018, 2020 and then last year again as well, where losses have just exponentially grown at a very alarming rate, to be honest with you. Of course, on the right-hand side here, I have the breakout in terms of California. This is a state that remains ground zero in terms of where we've seen the highest frequency of these billion dollar events. You can see here just 15 throughout its history, but then 11 alone just over the last couple of years. When you break that down into individual dollar amounts, you can see prior to 2015, the state had roughly $14 billion of insured loss from wildfires. And since 2015, we have seen nearly $50 billion of the industry loss alone from this peril, which is really highlighting the overall costs of these events we're getting much more expensive. Of course we know people are moving into these really high risk areas as well. And then of course we have the overall climate influence which is really allowing for conditions in place to really enhance these fires to really behave much more unusually than they have before in the past. So with that in mind, there's a little bit of further background science here looking at what has traditionally been the typical wildfire season between the months of May and November. But as we've already heard a couple of folks already mentioned where we're now getting to the point where in some parts of the country, the whole concept of a fire season is largely irrelevant where we're seeing full calendar year risk is now emerging across the majority of the West. Of course we've seen more extreme drought conditions across the Southern Southwest for the majority of this century. But that has really amplified fire conditions and you combine that with temperatures which are continuing to become much, much warmer and hotter, not just at the maximum level, but also your minimum temperatures, those low temperatures are also actually rising at a faster rate than the extreme, than the maximum temperatures. And because of that, we're not allowing our environments to cool down during the non-sun hours. And that really is just elevating the potential opportunity for more fire conditions at the surface to become much more conducive from just an overall environmental perspective, excuse me. Now as we put wildfire risk, and this has already been alluded to quite well by my co-panelists, but when we're talking about wildfire risk as part of the broader climate change feedback loop, we can see here all these different metrics, all parts of the spoke are all working together to really increase our wildfire risk. And that's leading to, as I said, longer fire seasons in some parts again, it's a full calendar year deal at this point. It's also leading to more greenhouse gas emissions as we saw in Kimmi's and Carly's presentation where there's just a lot more flammability and you burn these fuels and that's just putting more gases into the atmosphere, which of course just feeds this feedback loop and making things a bit more uncomfortable and certainly environmentally more unusual types of weather behavior. So it's all one gigantic loop and it's really a wheel of consequence, so to speak, because one thing is really amplifying the other. And that's why we're continuing to see at least on the wildfire side, from the hazard perspective, things continue to get more severe. Now, when we're putting all of this together in terms of the fire behavior, there's definitely some correlation based on fires becoming larger on a per event basis. And you try to create some type of correlation analysis that's pretty obvious to see, at least going back over the course of the last 30 plus years, that the years in which we've had the highest number of losses or the highest costs of losses have also correlated to years in which we've had the largest average per fire. So that's just really sort of a blinking red light, which is indicating that as fire behavior changes, as fires continue to get bigger, as they continue to move much faster and behave more unusually and really putting a tremendous strain on firefighting as they're trying to handle these fires, that is definitely leading to more loss as well. Now, this is not inherently put in here, but it's not just the fire itself, which is leading to higher losses, the bigger perimeters higher, the bigger fires leading to bigger flames and more smoke. And the smoke component is also another component, which is really leading to more losses just outside the perimeter and beyond. So just because a home is close to a fire, it looks okay, but you really got to get inside and make sure that there isn't any smoke inhalation within a lot of the indoor contents or anything else, because that's an additional component, at least from the insurance industry, which we're also taking a much deeper look at as well. So from the federal level, this graphic here is really trying to emphasize that we need to do a much better job of planning, not just for fire disasters, but also any type of natural disaster. So on the left-hand side, this is in today's dollars, the federal disaster relief appropriations, that the lighter color is what's actually annually funded, and then the red is the supplemental, which is meant to pass through emergency funding. So we can really see that there is a, we are completely underestimating the risk on an annual basis, because in most years, we are seeing double, triple, quadruple, or in the case of 2005, just off the charts, more money required to account for the physical damage and beyond that has happened to life and property infrastructure, you name it. So we need to be taking this more seriously as we saw in Kimmi's presentation, you spend more money upfront. Of course, we need to be talking about this as more of an investment as opposed to just spending, because that's certainly how we're phrasing it is a really important way of how we sell this to folks. But the upfront spend, it might have a high dollar cost, but it's gonna save you a lot more money in the longterm, as we're certainly seeing on the right-hand side here, major disaster declarations coming down at the presidential level, definitely more of an increase of these wildfire declarations that are happening. Again, not just in California, but other places across the West as well, as we continue to need to expand our viewpoint in terms of where fire risk exists. It's not just California. In fact, it's not just part of the West. It's all across the United States where we have to be thinking about this. There was a billion-dollar fire in Gatlingburg, Tennessee a couple of years ago. So this is something we have to be thinking about not just regionally, but nationally at the same time. So insurance specifically, and how are we actually thinking about this peril? So there's a few really important points here that hopefully I'll be able to quickly go over. So initially, we have to do the obvious and properly identify risk. And this has been alluded to again by other speakers, but we really have to strengthen the tools we have available to really identify where the risk profile continues to be evolving. We need to be doing a better job of identifying that, whether that's through different types of mapping or modeling to really identify at a granular level where things are changing, where we need to be perhaps investing more money to try to limit the risk as it continues to spread. And a lot of that work is critical in terms of how we're working and engaging public sector stakeholders. And that's at the federal level, it's at the state level, and it's a local level as well. I mean, we have to be talking to the emergency managers who know their communities better than anybody else. And they're gonna tell us exactly where people are moving, how they're living, where there needs to be more investment into prescribed burns as we just heard in the previous presentation to really try to limit the level of risk that exists there. But we also have to really think about from an insurance standpoint, affordability and availability of insurance coverage. And we're all very aware of the significant risk, have that continues to the well-plots putting, creating some real challenges for the insurance industry in terms of how we move forward. And it's gonna be critical to really engage the federal level, the local level, the state level to really get a better hold in terms of how we're gonna be properly pricing and making sure that people who can't afford insurance that they have access to enough money to be able to reinforce their homes and really be just as protected as those that have more means as well. And that's really critical as we try to bring down what we call the protection gap that's the portion of the economic damage which is not covered by insurance. As you see in the statistic here, then in some events, you can have roughly 20 to 50% of losses to property end up going uninsured depending on the makeup from an insurance standpoint within an individual community. So we have a long way to go. And the final bullet here, which I have is probably most near and dear to my heart is how we're communicating the risk to our stakeholders. Folks that live in these high-risk areas may not necessarily understand fully the risk that they have living in their individual communities. Myself and many others in the industry, we do post-event damage surveys and we have a chance to get on the ground and really talk to folks who have been through pretty significant suffering. And the number one thing to hear from folks is I had no idea my house could burn down. Now that may be amazing to hear for those, for scientists and folks that study this for a living, but even people that are living in these very wild land areas that are historically prone to fires, the folks that living there are just simply not fully aware of the risk that is around them. So we have to be moving forward which is how we're communicating the risk so people really understand what they are facing. Now in terms of communicating this, I'll quickly go over this, but there's a phrase that I have started using called the totality of hazard risk. We really need to be explaining to people the full scope of what we should be expecting and what we should be looking at and we're trying to piece all of these things together. Of course, hazard frequency is very important trying to understand just how often these things are going to occur. But when it comes to the actual physical damage perspective, behavior is changing, climate change is amplifying just simply how fires are just interacting with the fuels that are available is really changing and challenging how firefighters are able to handle fires. The location of the fires and the readiness, these things, two things can be looked at together, how well communities are aware of the risk, how well they're building, are they talking to local homeowners associations to make sure they don't have things in the bylaws which are really horrible in terms of wildfire preparedness. There's an example in the Marshall fire where there's some HOAs which are actually staying in the bylaws and had to have wood or cedar roofs or siding and that's just kind of unbelievable to hear but these are the things that are on the ground and we have to be understanding how vulnerable some of these areas are. When you put everything together that's really getting a full sense of understanding the totality of the risk from these individual events. You've already heard about the wooey, the interface that is the transition region between forested areas and urbanization then the intermix like say a paradise for example where you have the developments directly within the forested areas and we have seen a substantial increase in not just the number of people but the number of housing units and other structures that are within these regions which has really contributed to the increased losses we've seen over the past five to 10 years and this trend is going to continue especially as we've already heard and we've seen folks are trying to find cheaper places to live and some of these areas tend to be much riskier. So if we're gonna continue to see this evolution and change in behavior we have to be at least communicating to these folks what it is that they're moving into and what we can do to help try to limit that risk. Now one thing that we're really excited about that we're doing in the private sector a much more of is having academic collaborations really trying to bridge that private public or excuse me private sector and academic outreach where we're trying to work directly with the scientists for developing the research on the climate side on the simple weather side trying to really understand where things are evolving and build that into different types of modeling that we have within the insurance industry and then turn around and talk to our stakeholders at the government level with others in the private sector basically anyone that's willing to have a conversation around where risk is changing I really think this is a really important way to move forward this research is all peer reviewed it really has a level of credibility to it which we think is gonna lead to better quality results in the future to really hopefully try to identify a much more granular location and level in terms of how we're viewing the risk as we move forward. And this is another example very similar to what Kimmy showed in terms of how we need to be moving forward from a building standpoint she showed an example from Paradise I'm gonna show you one here from the Marshall fire the red dots or homes in this neighborhood that all burned down completely but you'll notice there was one yellow dot which had very minimal damage and on the right you can actually see that home this is a home that was built to the IVHS standard so it had the proper clearing, proper elevation the trees were removed away and there was no brush and you can see that the home had very, very little damage whatsoever so while we know just to wrap up we cannot fully eliminate risk we can certainly take meaningful steps to minimize it and that is key we can bring things down to zero but if we're gonna save a life, save a community that really should be our end goal here where we have seen enough examples now we can really do a lot of great things to create the awareness and also save lives in the end so thank you very much and I look forward to sharing questions with the rest of the panel. Thank you Steve, really great panel really great presentation and actually four really great presentations like to just make a quick reminder or share a quick reminder with our audience we still have time for Q&A so if you have a question for one of our panelists or all of our panelists send us an email at ASK at EESI.org or follow us online at EESI online on Twitter also Steve's presentations everyone's presentations will be available at EESI.org and along with summary notes other materials that have been referred to let me invite Carly and Kimmy and Margo to turn on your videos and we will dig in to the Q&A and thanks again for four excellent presentations I'm really looking forward to learning more about this issue. Kimmy I'm gonna start actually I'm gonna start with Carly because she went first it's been a while since we've heard but I'm somewhat inspired Kimmy by one of your slides and you mentioned that there was not a lot of resources in the bipartisan infrastructure law for the kind of work that we've talked about on the panel today and Carly I'd like to start with you and then we'll go through the panel sort of in order but where are the most effective ways if we had additional federal resources where are some of the more effective places we could deploy them to address the risks of firefighters or excuse me of wildfires and where might our investments go the furthest the bang for the buck type of investments that we could be making? Thanks for that question I think there's a real opportunity to invest in forest management some of the pictures that Margo showed in her presentation were really compelling to show what a difference those types of treatments can make and so I think that's really important for thinking about the landscape holistically but I also think that there's an opportunity to adapt as well and to provide resources and funding and investment for communities so that they can protect themselves whether that be air filtration capacity water filtration capacity those types of things so that individuals can really take ownership of that and still have the resources that they need Kimmy? Yeah so building off of I think what Carly just said too is I think given the scale of risk and the level that we are seeing these increasing disasters at we really have to deploy everything we have at our disposal and hitting it on all fronts so that includes the unbuilt vegetation the forested landscape and then complimenting it with the unbuilt or sorry the built mitigation measures and so by that we're referencing home hardening is what it's often referenced this is utilizing building materials and wildfire resistant design and landscaping features in our property and in our structures and so what I referenced in the upcoming infrastructure act is that there is no money for home hardening and property level, parcel level built mitigation in that funding piece within the wildfire provisions and a lot of this is simply because it's not within the expertise of federal land management agencies who are receiving this wildfire money to know how to deploy it for built environment pieces they work on the public lands they work within their silo of their knowledge and understanding and so it's not hugely surprising that they haven't addressed or provided funding for the home hardening piece yet given that it's a huge missed opportunity and it's disappointing to see that there isn't any money yet being distributed towards the home hardening piece from my understanding this is year one they're gonna see how it folds out for year two up through year five it's $1 billion over five years specifically within the community wildfire defense grant program and so they hope to revise this I think they're leaning right now heavily on FEMA and HUD to provide expertise on this but that's also not within their real house explicitly with respect to wildfires so I think until some of this can get figured out and some knowledge pulled from outside the federal land management agencies we won't see that funding going towards very much needed gaps in home mitigation. Thanks, Kimmy. Margo, where do you see the opportunities for making the most of investments in the kind of work that your organization's doing? So I would like to just build a little bit on what Carly and Miko mentioned about communities protecting themselves and to employ everything we have at our disposal and if we would widen the circle of who is allowed to do fires if we provided opportunities for private landowners to learn how to burn their own properties and give them incentives for taking care of their property with fire it would make a huge difference there are people you know that own anywhere from five acres, maybe one acre if 10,000 people burn one acre that's 10,000 acres that are burned but they need to have opportunities to learn how to do it safely so those are two things that money could be allocated for we need to add money to the liability fund that's currently been established it's not near enough the funding that is provided for fire organizations to implement prescribed in cultural burns needs to be long term funding currently when we get a grant it's good for like three years and some of them less so it's really hard to keep staff on board when you can't ensure them that they have a long term employment with your firm and finally I would like to put in a plug for the training centers that there was money established for training but we need to have more than one training center we need to have several across the state of California and they need to be co-managed by Cal Fire and indigenous people so we have a broader perspective of cultural burning and prescribed burning thank you thank you Steve where do you see these opportunities the most? Well I think from the insurance side working with the federal government state governments to really come up with a proper way of incentivization especially when we're talking about insurance availability insurance products Kimmy's done a brilliant job highlighting what needs to be done from the building side and that's not just future build but that's also current build and what do we do with the structures that are already there? So that would be one thing I would reference we have to also subsidize the folks that simply are not gonna be able to afford making these changes and that's a very real challenge here is that a lot of folks just simply can't pick up and move somewhere else they can't retrofit their home to meet the IBHS standards on their own and they need some help so that would be the number two I would say number three is what I said during my talk is around the identification of the risk and if you buy a home in a flooded area you have to get and show something through the bank that you have purchased flood insurance and there's some parts of California where you actually do have to identify you have coverage to be able to live in certain areas to identify at this higher risk but we really need tools things like mapping to really very granularly identify folks this is where historical fire hazard has been this is where it's going this is where the growth continues to be from a population standpoint then also from a field growth standpoint so there's a lot of things we can be doing on the awareness and the incentivization side so I think again we can't eliminate risk we can definitely take steps to try to mitigate it. Great thank you for that. I'd like to explore a little bit more of the sorts of collaborations and partnerships that are currently ongoing or that there's a potential to create new collaborations and partnerships that could be established to help reduce wildfire risk. Carly maybe we'll start back at the top of the panel and we'll go through again but could you help us understand sort of the landscape of collaborations and partnerships around wildfires? Yeah I think there's a real opportunity to have state agencies and federal agencies collaborate with local officials because those local officials are the ones who know the risks to their communities they know how to communicate with their communities and they're the ones that are really tuned in to what's possible and so I think having those multi-level collaborations is gonna be really key. I also think that there's benefit to having scientists and other forest professionals also collaborate with local communities. We've got to socialize things like prescribed burns which are incredibly effective but which people understandably so are cautious about given what we are seeing in New Mexico right now that was partially from an escape prescribed burn but there are lots of prescribed burns that happen all the time that no one hears about and so I think trying to socialize that idea of burning through those partnerships is gonna be key as well. I'll pause and let Kimmy share. Yeah thank you Carly I think you set that up really well for what I'll build off of and just that I do genuinely believe that if change is going to come it will come from the ground up it's the communities as Carly said that are experiencing these impacts they realize them in a reality that few federal decision makers can really relate to and so to rely on them to answer this question for us I think it's a bit erroneous and that change will come the action will come from local ground up. The best example I can think of and I think it builds well off of Steve's presentation is called a wildfire partners program it's out of Boulder County Colorado and it was a really unique initiative that was done in public private partnership with the planning department, fire department and insurance providers with homeowners and homeowners had a set of mitigation measures they needed to meet they had a year to do so and if they completed those mitigation measures then they got a certificate for to help kind of galvanize neighborhood peer pressure but perhaps more importantly it was something that they could submit to their insurance providers and get a guaranteed retainment of coverage despite living in a high-risk area and so that kind of demonstration from all levels of this playing field from the insurance companies down to the individual homeowner along with local government just really demonstrates what can be done if you bring everybody to the table early on. Margo let's go to you next where do you see what are the collaborations and partnerships that facilitate your work and then where maybe are there new opportunities to bring people together around the issues? So we have established many really critical partnerships with people who have helped us get to where we're at today. One of the main ones is the nature conservancy specifically the fire learning network and then also as part of the indigenous peoples burn network. We also have a partnership with Cal Fire and other tribes such as the Yurok Kupon tribes. We have partnerships with for-profit and non-profit groups including Oregon Woods who's a for-profit in the Mid-Clamath Watershed Council. That's a non-profit. We have a partnership with our community in general. We're also building partnerships with the US Forest Service and the Park Service because they have authority over land within our ancestral territories. And we've also built a really great relationship with the air quality permitting people. So those taking time to establish those partnerships has been really critical. And I can't think of offhand I kind of feel like it's a really wide diverse group. And so I think that if the agency people would put additional time into building partnerships or additional partnerships with the kinds of groups that I mentioned, that would be good. To take advantage of that convening power of the agencies to bring different groups together. That's probably a lot of opportunity for that. Yeah, when we're all working together we can get so much more done than if we're each working in our separate little places. Thank you for that, Margo. Steve, from your perspective where are there some additional opportunities for collaborations and partnerships to build on the ones that we already have? Well, I think my three panelists have hit most of the points already. I think the biggest thing is we just all need to talk to one another. I mean, I'm very lucky to have a chance to speak to all different types of groups on the government side, private sector side, the academic side. And a lot of times we're not aware that we're all kind of doing some of the same things but we don't know it. And so I think the more we actually talk, the more we engage, I think there's more opportunity to realize we might be closer to figuring some of this stuff out than what it looks like initially on paper. So the more we're continuing to have these conversations and have these types of obsessions like today I think are just really helpful to reinforce what we know and that, hey, there's a lot more we have similar than perhaps we're apart. Well, I appreciate that it's hard to be the fourth person to answer a question after three other panelists. So we'll mix it up a little bit this time. Kimmy, we'll start with you on this one. Carly, sorry, but we'll mix it up even more as we go forward. Kimmy, what steps are needed to address or to ensure that wildfire risk reduction is carried about in an equitable way? And especially in a way that doesn't exacerbate inequalities that currently exist. And sort of if you were talking to a policy-making audience what are the types of issues that you would encourage them to be most attentive to? Sure, yeah. So I think, again, echoing the presenters already but identifying through tools, through mapping, modeling where are some of these populations? We do have that data available. That's kind of gonna give you a snapshot of where to start thinking. I'm not saying that that's your priority areas but it is a way to start thinking of, okay, what are some concerned points or geographies we need to focus on, things like mobility issues, elderly populations, populations perhaps who don't have proficiency in English or might be disabled, medical and adverse conditions that might limit them or provide an additional vulnerability to air quality. We do have that data out there. It's provided through census as well as American community survey information. So pulling that together, sleuthing it in a way to start getting decision makers to identify some areas that they need to think about directing resources accordingly is a huge first step. I think beyond that, it's very important to partner with community leaders on the ground who have knowledge about what those adverse impacts might look like in reality. So those are faith leaders sometimes or it's an elected official, it's a neighborhood ambassador, a champion, somebody who has that knowledge to ground truth what the data is saying. And then it's the role for the elected officials and other community leaders, whether that's the fire chief or all the way up to the state or federal level to direct resources and customize these to those populations, those neighborhoods that need that information so that they are better equipped to prepare for, respond to and recover from a wildfire. We do know long-term institutional, cultural, political, financial barriers play a huge role in limiting the ability for some people to respond to a wildfire. We need to overcome that by providing them the resources so that they can be better prepared because as Steve noted, it's just not fair to ask that everybody starts building a home to hire wildfire resistant standards when they may be working three different jobs. So there is a role there for government to provide some help, some assistance to offset what that burden might look like. Thanks. Margo, from your perspective, how can we do better to make sure that the wildfire risk reductions carried out in a more equitable way? So in my mind, wildfire risk reduction all has to do with reducing the fuel load on the land as well as that includes prescribed and cultural burns and thinning. And I think it's really important for the government and agencies to government agencies to respect the sovereign rights of tribes and the knowledge that tribes have about their homelands and fire. We should not have to get our burn permits approved by other agencies, whether that's Cal Fire or the Bureau of Indian Affairs. We should be exempt from having to get those permits. Cultural burns should be exempt from smoke permits and burn permits. And so I think that those are the things that would make a big difference. Also, tribes should be able to approve their own environmental compliance documents. Who knows better than us whether fire or something else is going to be detrimental to the environment. We have people making decisions about that who have never even been to our homelands. And so tribes should be the one to hold those powers. Thanks. Steve, you're in third position this time. Slowly moving up. I would say it's more about a change of a mindset where I think we are now and it's not just wildfire risk, all natural hazards or any type of disaster relief. It's very reactionary. Instead of being proactive and trying to do the disaster planning ahead of time. So when something actually does happen, we're ready to go. And a lot of that includes identifying communities which are higher risk, which may not have a really good say in evacuation plan. Keep going back to the paradise example. There was just a couple of ways in and out of the city. And that led to massive backlogs of folks trying to escape as the fire was raging within the community. So how we're planning and looking at various scenarios in these communities and they are critically important, especially as we continue to see expansion of where people are moving into these areas and the housing growth and everything else continues to happen concurrently. We just need to really feel like we're prepared. And a lot of times in most cases, it's the exact opposite where we're just reactionary and then we see the struggles of trying to see who is responsible for what in the aftermath. And that leads to prolonged periods of people being able to start getting their lives back. Now I'll finish this by saying that we need to stop trying to rebuild the exact same way things were before an event. The climate of yesterday is yesterday. I mean, we have to be building to what's coming in the future. So there's just a lot of really important conversations that need to be have but they need to be being had now as opposed to after the event has already occurred. Carly, let's give you the last word on this question. What can we do to make sure that our wildfire risk reduction is more equitable going forward? Yeah, thanks for the question. And Steve, it is tough going last. Thank you for doing it for so many of the previous questions. I agree with what other folks said. I think for me, there's also the aspect of preparation for the inevitability of these fires. We know that they are going to burn more. We know that the air quality is going to be poor. We know that there are going to be these cascading effects that come from these wildfires. And so I think, like Steve said, preparing and giving communities the tools they need to respond, but kind of on their own terms is gonna be critical to that equitable response. Thanks. We have time for one more and I'm gonna start Margo. I'm gonna start with you this time. And I'd like, and we'll sort of go through the regular panel order. So sorry, Kim, it's your turn. But Margo, help us understand if your organization sort of is successful according to your definition of what success would be. What does Indigenous Peoples Burn Network? What is the Cultural Fire Management Council? What does this look like in 10 years? Can you help us understand sort of what maybe your 10-year goals would be for the kind of work the organization is trying to do with cultural burns and prescribed burns? Yes, so success looks like tribal nations across the US having the right to burn at the right place at the right time that we're not required to get permits from other people that we have the right to take care of our homelands with fire on a landscape level. That we have liability coverage to cover us, that it is available with options because currently it's not available to anybody except government agencies and the larger tribes. So our vision is that our lands will be restored and healthy in the long term, not in 10 years, but we'll have gone along that spectrum. Thank you. Great, thanks. Steve, help us understand what 10 years from now should look like. Well, should look like or the ideal situation. I mean, ideal situation would be affordable insurance coverage or opportunities for anyone that wants it. Of course, that's a real challenge right now, given the current state of the market and we've heard about liability and litigation and all these other really concerning things that are putting additional strain on the industry. So hopefully we'll see continued collaboration between the insurance industry and then also the state, local, federal level to ensure that the money is getting into the hands of the people that needed most because that's the whole premise of insurance, right, is to help people on their time of need. So we need to be doing everything we can to work collectively together to ensure that people are in fact being helped when they need to be helped. Carly? I think for me, we'd be moving rapidly towards a net zero world with net zero emissions so that we're really fighting climate change itself. From the fire perspective, I think we're hopeful that we'll have fuel treatments, prescribed burns and cultural burns at scale. So, you know, not these piecemeal treatments that we have now, but really taking that broader landscape perspective. I mean, this gives you the last word. Yes, indeed. So what we call it firetopia. It's this idea that due to our preventative and planning mitigation efforts, like targeted fuel treatments or landscape treatments as Carly just noted, fuel breaks around a community, homes are hardened, infrastructure is protected, evacuation protocols are in place that when a wildfire ignites, it can actually do its ecological benefit, can go through a forest, clean up the undergrowth, do what it was intended to do, but because again, of preventative measures like prescribed burning and other efforts, it's mitigated fire to the effect that the community survives, firefighters lives are saved, costs are decreased, and the community is overall more resilient to not just wildfire, but all these other concurrent trends as well. Great, well, thank you so much for that. And thank you, Carly, Margo, Steve, thank you, Kimmy for being four tremendous panelists today, certainly learned a ton about wildfires and how we should be thinking about preventing them and sort of helping the Steve's to your points about helping those who may need a little bit of help. I had great presentations, I really was looking forward to this briefing all along and totally lived up to my expectations. So I appreciate it. Unfortunately, it feels like we might have a bad wildfire season this year and this information I think is really important for our policy-making audience to hear and to understand. So thank you so much for taking your time, taking time out of your busy days to join us. I'd also like to say thanks to Representative Ngoos and his staff for making his participation possible today. Thanks to his leadership, we're the select committee in the climate crisis and the other committees he's a part of are moving good ideas forward. So thanks to them. I'd like to also say thanks to all of my ESI colleagues who make these briefings possible. Thanks to Dan O'Brien, Omri, Emma, Allison, Anna, and Savannah for all their hard work. I'd also like to thank our interns, our summer interns, Christina, Stephanie, and Obby, and Nathan who's our newest intern just starting today. So welcome to the team Nathan and never fear, there will be lots and lots of briefings for you to help out with in the coming months. Speaking of upcoming briefings, we have lots on the slate, including one on Thursday, Pathways to Regenerative Agriculture, that's the briefing we're putting on with our partners at the Natural Resources Defense Council. We also have the next briefing in this series, Extreme Heat on July 24th, and the final briefing or the final full length briefing at least of our scaling up innovation to drive down admissions briefing series will be June 29th, Offshore Wind, really looking forward to that. And then this is not on the slide, but on July 25th, which is a Monday, is our Congressional Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Policy Forum. Really, really looking forward to that. So stay tuned. The best way to find out about these briefings and all of our other educational resources, of course, is to subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions, and you can do that by visiting us online at www.esi.org. My colleague, Daniel Bryan, will now put up a quick slide with a link to a survey. If folks in our audience have a few moments to take the survey to help us understand how today went, were there any video issues, audio issues? We're doing live transcription services now to help make our briefings more accessible. Was that working for you? Did you have any issues with that? Do you have ideas for upcoming briefings? We read every response we receive, and so it means a lot when people in our audience take time to share their feedback. We would really appreciate that. We will go ahead and wrap it up there. Sorry for going a couple of minutes over. I feel like we always go a couple of minutes over, but sorry for that. I think it was well worth it. And once again, thanks, Carly, Kimmy, Margo, and Steve. And we will see everybody back on Thursday for regenerative pathways to regenerative agriculture. Thanks and have a great Monday.