Idaho hits $0 for wildfire suppression funding as governor claims state is prepared

Idaho officials said the state is prepared to respond to a forecast extremely active peak fire season, despite the state legislature’s funding for wildfire activities running dry.

Idaho Gov. Brad Little, at a June 16 press conference, joined state, local, and federal partners to say the state is prepared – with the state’s firefighting resources fully staffed and investments in forest management and federal partnerships. The preparation, however, was called into question when it was revealed just before the press conference that the state legislature’s funds for wildfire response had hit $0.

State lawmakers voted to transfer $32.8 million to the wildfire deficiency fund on July 1, the first day of fiscal year 2027, but Little said the state would “pretty much burn through” the funds, given that an active fire season would cost the state $70 million or more, according to the Idaho Capital Sun. Any funds spent over that $32.8 million would be paid using “deficiency warrants,” or bills applied to future sessions of the Idaho Legislature, that would worsen an already tight budget squeeze.

“If we have an above-average fire season, we’ll probably run out of (the funding),” Little said at the press conference. “We’re going to be okay for a while, as long as we don’t have an abnormal fire year.”

Idaho is expected to have an abnormally active fire year. The National Interagency Coordination Center’s wildland fire outlooks list Idaho as having “significant” wildland fire potential from July through September, set up by above normal temperatures and below normal precipitation worsening drought throughout the majority of the state.

PREVIOUS COVERAGE: Record-low water shortages expected ahead of very active US wildfire season

“Above normal fire potential is forecast for portions of northern Idaho and southwest Montana in July, expanding to all of north Idaho and southwest Montana in August,” the National Interagency Fire Center said during the June release of the report. “Above-normal fire potential will also expand to all the northwest, including all of Idaho, western Wyoming, and southwest Montana.”

Credit: NIFC

Significant wildfire activity heading into Juneteenth weekend drives National Preparedness Level increase

The National Interagency Fire Center increased the National Preparedness Level to PL3 on Thursday, marking a shift toward needed national support as the U.S. nears peak fire season.

The increase was driven by significant wildland fire activity across the country, with the potential of additional large fires remaining elevated in the days ahead, the NIFC said. Nearly 5,000 personnel are actively assigned to fires nationwide,

Over 33,000 fires have been reported and 2.6 million acres burned so far in 2026, far above the 10-year average year-to-date of 24,685 fires and 1.6 million acres burned.

“While current resource capability remains sufficient to sustain incident operations, geographic areas are increasingly utilizing national support to accomplish incident management objectives,” the Center said in its latest update. “The increase reflects growing demand for firefighting resources and heightened fire potential across several regions of the country.”

Fire activity is largely concentrated across the Northwest, Great Basin, Southwest and Rocky Mountain areas, Center officials said. Severe large fires recently triggered evacuations and threatened structures in both Washington and Oregon. New fires in Idaho, Nevada, Arizona and Nebraska are also rapidly growing.

Fire risk remains elevated throughout the western third of the U.S. due to persistent triple-digit heat, single-digit relative humidity, and breezy conditions, according to the Center’s report. Incoming thunderstorms with only spotty rainfall also heighten wildfire risk over the northern Sierra, southeast Arizona, southern New Mexico, and west Texas.

“Unprecedented” snow drought and record-low water shortages are expected ahead of what is forecast to be a very active fire season, according to federal officials.

“Many of the rivers are likely to experience well-below median streamflows, which may rival the lowest flows on record for the region,” the Service said in the Department’s most recent Water and Climate Update. “Water shortages are anticipated in many locations, especially for entities that rely on surface streamflow water, without the benefit of having access to stored reservoir water.”

PREVIOUS COVERAGE: Record-low water shortages expected ahead of very active US wildfire season

Wildland firefighter health should be treated as fire infrastructure, urges emerging research focus

The physiological and psychological stress that wildfire personnel are put under every fire season has quickly moved from the margins of fire research to the mainstream, with global pathways for funding increasingly expanding, according to International Journal of Wildland Fire Associate Editor Anthony White.

White, in an editorial in the Journal, said he has seen an increased focus on firefighter health at many international wildfire conferences, including the 4th International Smoke Symposium in Tallahassee earlier this year. The growing focus led him to create a framework for researchers, agencies and decision-makers to integrate a health focus into how we manage fire and treat firefighter health as fire management infrastructure.

“This is not simply a matter of individual well-being: it influences operational capacity, how long crews can work safely, how reliably they can make decisions under pressure, how quickly they can recover between deployments, and whether they remain in the workforce,” White said in his editorial. “Yet in many jurisdictions, wildfire personnel still receive little or no coordinated, central monitoring and support.”

Through White’s lens, the health of wildfire crews isn’t a consideration after the fire is contained, but rather one of the many other considerations made when fire planning, like fuels, weather, logistics and equipment. White argues that the same logic should apply to people.

“If physical and mental health shape safety, effectiveness, and retention, then they belong in the core fire management framework, not at the periphery or as something to ‘follow up later,” White said. “The question, then, is what changes when we treat wildfire personnel health as infrastructure: something we prepare for before the season begins, manage actively during operations, and support intentionally during recovery.”

“The wildfire workforce is a precious resource. Sustaining it will require the same mindset applied to other infrastructure: plan early, manage actively, support recovery, and learn systematically, season after season.”

Anthony White is an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Wildland Fire. This editorial was written as part of IJWF’s initiative to spotlight emerging topics and foster discussion within the wildfire research community. White presented his research on wildfire smoke impacts on the brain at the 4th International Smoke Symposium in Florida, United States, earlier this year, and will speak again at the AFAC26 conference in Melbourne, Australia in August.

Click here to read White’s full editorial.

Wildfire Prevention Act becomes ‘Trojan Horse’ for Roadless Rule repeal

Support for a once bipartisan piece of wildfire-focused legislation has faltered after Republican lawmakers added a repeal of the Roadless Rule.

Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) proposed the amendment to the Wildfire Prevention Act, which would increase fuels treatments in federal forests and had support from both Democrats and Republicans before the amendment. The nullification of the rule dissolved that support.

The “Roadless Rule” prohibits new road construction and intensive logging in millions of acres of federal forest. The Trump administration has been targeting the rule for years, with the current Forest Service leadership announcing a draft proposal to rescind it in June 2025.

The inclusion of the Roadless Rule’s repeal triggered criticism from Democratic senators on the committee, with Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) saying the bill had become a “Trojan Horse” for the repeal.

“We took a previously, largely bipartisan, constructive wildfire effort, and now it has become a partisan pitched battle over repealing roadless areas,” Heinrich said. “That is a poster child for how not to get successful legislation done, and I am disappointed.”

Lee previously called the Roadless Rule an “environmental disaster” and claimed the rule hampers forest thinning and fire prevention. But the rule’s text does allow prescribed burning and fuel treatments.

The Wildfire Prevention Act passed the committee along party lines, 11-9, but Democratic lawmakers said the inclusion of the repeal guarantees the larger bill’s failure.

Numerous environment-focused organizations immediately condemned the repeal’s inclusion in the Wildfire Prevention Act, including Environment America, the National Wildlife Federation, the Sierra Club, the BlueRibbon Coalition, and the Defenders of Wildlife. The major proponents of the Roadless Rule’s repeal are timber associations, which said the rule is based on false and unscientific premises.

Research has repeatedly found that ending the roadless rule would likely make wildfires more common, rather than reducing the fires.

READ MORE: End to landmark roadless rule will make wildfires more likely

Elevated fire weather forecasted throughout the US this week

The “very active” fire season predicted for the U.S. since the beginning of the year may largely kick off this week, according to forecasts from the National Interagency Fire Center.

Elevated fire weather conditions are set across the Southwest and southern Great Basin regions due to strong winds, dry conditions and very warm temperatures, according to the Center’s forecasts. Much of the Southwest, Great Basin, and far north are expected to experience significant wildland fire potential throughout June, according to the Center’s outlooks.

Much of Arizona, Utah and southeast Nevada specifically are at high risk of wildfire ignitions this week, mainly due to windy conditions, data from the Center’s daily forecasts showed.

“Minimum relative humidity will fall to 5-15% across Arizona, Utah, and Nevada, with southwest winds 10-20 mph and gusts to 30-35 mph across exposed terrain and ridges, with the strongest winds in southern Nevada, southwest Utah, and northwest Arizona,” Center officials said.

Wildfire crews have already been busier than usual this year. More than 31,511 fires have burned almost 2.5 million acres nationwide, which are above the 10-year averages of 22,270 fires and 1.27 million acres, according to the Center.

Credit: NIFC

Peak wildfire season nears as Western states are expected to face water shortages due to extremely low streamflows throughout the spring, according to the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service.

“Many of the rivers are likely to experience well-below median streamflows, which may rival the lowest flows on record for the region,” the Service said in a previous Water and Climate Update. “Water shortages are anticipated in many locations, especially for entities that rely on surface streamflow water, without the benefit of having access to stored reservoir water.”

PREVIOUS COVERAGE: Record-low water shortages expected ahead of very active US wildfire season

The low streamflows were blamed primarily on record-low snowpack during the winter months, which also melted weeks earlier than normal. The “unprecedented” snowpack levels were the lowest in 40 years, and researchers said the only way extreme fire chances could be reduced was through a “major switch” in circulation patterns. So far, there’s nothing in season forecasts or weather models that indicate such a switch is on its way.

US Wildland Fire Service partially funded from significant EPA cuts

It’s been nearly half a year since the U.S. Wildland Fire Service was formally launched, but the new agency has gone without funding since. Lawmakers may soon change that.

The U.S. House Committee on Appropriations submitted its funding plan for the Department of the Interior, the environment and related agencies this week, with a specific focus on the fire service. Lawmakers said the funding was in line with the Trump Administration’s proposal to unify the DoI’s firefighting activities.

The nearly $1.2 billion in proposed funding for the Wildland Fire Service is a fraction of the original $6.5 billion proposed for the service in the 2026 appropriations act, which was blocked by a bipartisan group of Senators. Lawmakers were allegedly only able to get the $1.2 billion by significantly cutting the funding of the Environmental Protection Agency.

“In order to fund these priorities at necessary levels, the Committee has reduced funding for the majority of accounts in the bill,” lawmakers said in their funding report. “This includes a reduction of $1,781,584,000, or 20 percent, reduction to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) below the fiscal year 2026 enacted level.”

The Republican and Democratic Senators who previously blocked the funding said they couldn’t endorse the consolidation of federal wildland firefighting forces from both the Department of the Interior and the U.S. Forest Service, which manages more than two-thirds of the nation’s firefighting resources, into a single agency. They said such a combination of resources could only be approved by an act of Congress, and ordered the agency to conduct a study on the feasibility of such a consolidation.

The House Committee’s members acknowledged the study, and said the Trump Administration is in the process of contracting with an independent research organization to complete the study.

The funding proposal addressed numerous other wildland fire subjects, including:

  • $2.6 billion for wildland fire management under the U.S. Forest Service.
  • $185 million for hazardous fuels management activities, including $18 million for the Community Wood Energy Program’s sawmilling equipment.
  • $5 million for forest restoration and seedling replanting activities, specifically in the Pacific Region.
  • $3 million for Wildland Urban Interface fire research.
  • $2.5 million for purchasing generators for Tribal Health Programs to mitigate issues for de-energization protocols during wildfires.
  • $1.6 million to the Forest Service for AI wildfire modeling research near the National Interagency Fire Center.

Click here to read the full report and the full funding bill.

Global wildfire report for 2025 notes drop in area burned, as USAID cuts threaten future reports

Disastrous wildfires in Manitoba leave indigenous tribes without help.

Wildfires filled the headlines of 2025 from the US to South Korea to Spain and beyond, but an annual report shows that last year was actually one of the lowest fire years of this century.

At the global scale, land area burnt by wildfires in 2025 was nearly 828 million acres, which was the second-lowest on record since 2002 and around 16% below the average burned area of 2002 to 2024, according to the updated annual report published in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment. Last year also had the third-lowest total carbon dioxide emissions since 2002, around 12% below the 2002-2024 emissions average. And yet, wildfires killed more than 90 people and forced over 300,000 evacuations.

Researchers said the low burned area total in the midst of persistent extreme wildfires is a hallmark of our current era, especially in areas of social and economic inequality. The key points of the report included:

  • Emissions from Canada’s boreal forest wildfires from between 2023 and 2025 exceeded the combined emissions of the preceding 15 years
  • Los Angeles’ wildfires in January ranked as the fifth most costly natural disaster in world history
  • The United Kingdom experienced its first “megafire” exceeding 25,000 acres as wildfires throughout Europe were fueled by widespread drought and heat extremes

“A catalogue of extreme wildfires in 2025 continues to demonstrate that devastating consequences are not governed by area burned alone…Although the year’s most damaging events did not always coincide with exceptional total area burned, they produced acute societally disastrous outcomes,” the researchers said in the report. “Overall, the frequency of extreme fires in fuel-rich temperate and high-latitude systems, drought-driven fire activity in Europe, and disproportionate human impacts when extreme fires intersect with exposed communities are expected to further increase under continued warming.”

Researchers also warned that the database used in the report to establish the economic costs of major wildfires faces an “urgent finding crisis” following the cuts to USAID funding, according to the report’s lead author Matt Jones, from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia, UK. Scientists who rely on the database warn that the consequences of its loss would be practical, immediate, and damaging, and are asking the public for support through the signing of an open letter.

“In an era of intensifying climate extremes, cascading risks, and compounding crises, reliable data are not a luxury,” the scientists said. “They are the infrastructure for informed decision-making. Disaster risk reduction, early warning systems, anticipatory action, and climate adaptation all require credible historical baselines.”

Click here to read the full petition.

Save the environment, and the economy, with prescribed burning, researchers say

The environmental benefits of fighting bad fire with good fire have been documented for decades, but researchers are now working to show just how much economic good prescribed burning brings.

A study recently published in the journal Science integrated and analyzed U.S. Forest Service data from 285 wildfires that intersected with prescribed burning and other fuel treatments across 11 western states from 2017 to 2023 to measure how much damage was averted due to the treatments. Researchers specifically used data on wildfire perimeters, locations of fuel treatments, suppression effort, fire simulation outputs, and key determinants of fire behavior.

They found that prescribed burning, along with other forest fuel treatments, avoided the staggering costs of large and severe wildfires. The study specifically found that every dollar the U.S. Forest Service spent on the tactics yielded $3.73 in benefits, saving over $2.7 billion between 2017 and 2023.

“A century of wildfire suppression policies has disrupted fire-adapted forest ecosystems, allowing fuel loads to accumulate, driving larger, more severe, and costlier wildfires,” the researchers said in the study. “Our findings demonstrate that fuel-reduction treatments are a cost-effective strategy to mitigate these impacts.”

Numerous commitments have been made to accelerate the pace and scale of fuel treatments across the United States, but they remain largely underutilized due to public pressure and risk aversion skewing toward fire suppression rather than prevention, according to the study. So, researchers worked to figure out how much of an economic benefit, if any, prescribed burn treatments created.

“The value of fuel treatments is often underappreciated by the public and policymakers, leading to persistent barriers in their broader implementation, including regulatory, funding, and capacity constraints,” the researchers said. “These dynamics reflect a classic public goods problem: despite their broad societal benefits, there are insufficient incentives to invest in prevention measures without clear, credible evidence of their benefits.”

Click here to get access to the full paper.

Power agency that destroyed Pacific Northwest wildfire evidence ‘completely rewrites’ mitigation plan for 2026

The Pacific Northwest’s federal power agency, recently found guilty of destroying evidence that may have tied it to a disastrous 2020 wildfire, has released its latest fire mitigation plan.

The Bonneville Power Administration released this year’s updated plan on Wednesday, with officials saying the plan had been “completely rewritten” to elevate the agency’s risk modeling improvements and operational changes. The agency was created by Congress in 1937 to deliver power from federally owned hydroelectric dam projects to the region. The 2026 plan is the fifth iteration since 2020.

The 2026 plan’s mitigation hierarchy is structured as follows:

  • Transmission system maintenance and hardening
  • Situational models and analysis focused on mitigation strategies
  • Operational settings to ensure grid reliability and provide quick responses
  • Power shutoffs during extreme weather to minimize ignition risks

The agency is currently facing major federal lawsuits for its alleged role in the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire in Oregon, which destroyed over 500 homes and left one person dead. A judge ruled in February that the agency intentionally destroyed evidence that could have tied it to the fire’s ignition, including moving trees off power lines after being told by wildfire investigators to stay out of the area.

“BPA willfully spoiled evidence because it moved trees of interest and allowed its contractors to materially disturb the ignition site without preserving evidence it knew it should, and could, preserve in reasonable anticipation of litigation,” the judge wrote.

Part of the agency’s new plan includes a restructured governance structure, which officials said fosters “agency wide coordination” and relies on external collaboration and accountability.

“BPA established a governance structure for wildfire mitigation that includes a cross-functional team to discuss and recommend strategies, a steering committee to provide approval authority and a sponsor advisory group to foster communication with executive level personnel,” the agency said in its new plan.

Click here to read the agency’s full 2026 plan.

Water pollution lasts for years after a wildfire burns, new research shows

Beach Fire Lake Havasu City

Contaminants from wildfires can create long term water quality concerns in areas far from the fire-impacted zones as drifting smoke plumes and rainfall runoff challenge standard water filtration techniques.

A recently published analysis of 23 studies across 28 watersheds determined that the concentrations of numerous pollutants in waterways experienced significant increases for five years after a wildfire burns. Researchers found that the presence of heavy metals and other toxic chemical compounds in affected bodies of water was up to 66,000-fold above environmental standards.

“Most wildfires leave behind a barren, blackened landscape, and within this changed environment, important impacts can leave their mark,” the researchers said in a piece published in The Conversation. “Streams, rivers and water reservoirs receive a sudden pulse of ash, sediment and fire-suppressant chemicals washed off the land. For communities that depend on those waters for drinking water, wildfires can quickly become a long-term water-quality problem.”

The extent of water contamination depended on numerous factors, including burn severity, the types of soil and vegetation present, and how close the burned area was to nearby streams and reservoirs. But, the researchers also found that water contamination can extend far past where a fire burned. They looked data from watersheds in Canada, the US, Australia and Portugal.

Most of the toxic chemicals produced during wildfires are transported to nearby waterways during runoff from rain and other precipitation, but the study determined that smoke plumes also transport compounds to other water sources distant from the fire’s perimeter. One of the studies analyzed by researchers said certain toxic chemicals were transported 54 miles from a wildfire, while another study said waterways over 400 miles away could be contaminated by smoke plumes.

“Conventional treatments, such as coagulation and flocculation, sedimentation, rapid sand filtration, and, occasionally, granular activated carbon adsorption, are not designed to handle simultaneous spikes in turbidity, organic matter, trace metals, and other wildfire-derived contaminants, resulting in health risks to the inhabitants.”

“Unlike direct runoff from burned areas, the combined mechanism of atmospheric deposition followed by hydrological transport in unburned watersheds remains poorly quantified,” the researchers said in the analysis. “Despite their long-term persistence and toxicity, post-wildfire concentration variations of trace metals, PAHs, POPs, and WFFCs have not been studied extensively, especially concerning their persistence in sediments and possible remobilization, indicating that further research is required to understand their long-term effects on surface water bodies and aquatic environments.”

Click here to read the full analysis.