Forest fuel treatments across the Western United States returned US$3.73 in benefits for every dollar invested, with prescribed burns and forest thinning preventing 2.7 million tons of carbon dioxide, almost 60 premature deaths and US$2.8 billion in wildfire damages across the six years between 2017 and 2023.
That is according to a University of California, Davis study published in Science, which analysed 285 wildfires across 11 Western US states where the blazes interacted with US Forest Service fuel treatments and found that the work also prevented more than 25,000 tons of fine particulate pollution from being released into the air.
Lead author Frederik Strabo, an assistant professor at the University of Alberta and a postdoctoral scholar at UC Davis’s Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, said the research closed a long-standing gap between the ecology and economics of fuels management. The study, supported by the US Forest Service and the University of California’s Giannini Foundation for Agricultural Economics, drew on six years of federal treatment and wildfire interaction data to put a dollar figure on prevention work that has historically been measured in hectares and tonnes alone.
“There’s been a lot of ecological research on fuels management, but less so on the economic side,” Strabo said.
The findings come as fire agencies across the American West prepare for an extremely active 2026 wildfire season, with record-low snowpack, drought-stricken land and extreme heat already pushing the burn total above the 10-year average. More than 25,000 wildfires had burned across 1.8 million acres nationwide by 8 May, well ahead of the long-run pace recorded by the National Interagency Fire Center.
John Battles, a forestry and sustainability professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who reviewed the study without involvement in its design, said the methodology stood up to scrutiny and that the aggregate findings aligned with the place-based analyses his own team had tracked over time. Battles, who has served on the California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force for eight years, said prescribed fire remained the most effective treatment available but was also the most difficult to carry out at the scale Western forests now demand.
“It’s not a half-baked conclusion — strong statistics behind the methodology,” Battles said.
Fuel treatments span prescribed burns, biomass removal and combinations of the two, with prescribed burns referring to blazes planned and intentionally set to clear dangerous accumulations of vegetation, and biomass removal covering forest thinning operations carried out with chainsaws and heavy machinery. Wildfires produce roughly 83 per cent more fine particulate matter than prescribed burns across the same area, according to figures cited by the US Forest Service in the underlying research.
The UC Davis team found that treatment in the analysed fires reduced the total burn area by about 152,000 acres compared with a counterfactual scenario without preventative work, with the researchers writing that the treatments remain underutilised because public pressure and risk aversion skew wildfire management resources towards suppression rather than prevention. Short-term suppression by state and local agencies is often favoured over long-term prevention because immediate response is more visible and politically safer.
The findings feed into the 2022 update of the US Forest Service’s Wildfire Crisis Strategy, which committed the agency to treating more than 50 million acres of forest across the coming decade — an area roughly the size of Utah. Wood Central understands the strategy is now under pressure to scale up the volume and pace of treatment work as the 2026 fire season builds across the American West.
Will Barrett, the assistant vice president for nationwide clean air policy at the American Lung Association, said the ALA backed prescribed fires under managed conditions as a tool to reduce wildfire risk, with the organisation’s latest State of the Air report finding nearly half of US children live in areas with dangerous levels of air pollution as extreme heat and wildfires reverse decades of air quality gains achieved since the 1970 Clean Air Act.
“Prescribed burns need to be planned and carefully managed to limit smoke exposures,” Barrett said.
Battles said the high-severity wildfire crisis facing California and much of the American West would need to be tackled at scale across the coming decade, with the US Forest Service now committed to treating 50 million acres of forest through to 2034 under its Wildfire Crisis Strategy.
