California Fast-Tracks 400 Wildfire Prevention Projects, Expands Prescribed Fire, and Unveils Draft Five-Year Action Plan

California Governor Gavin Newsom announced on Friday unprecedented results in preventing catastrophic wildfires and protecting communities. Following his March 2025 emergency proclamation to mitigate catastrophic wildfire risks, state agencies fast-tracked more than 400 projects across nearly 100,000 acres.

At the same time, the state has advanced prescribed and cultural burning through coordinated action, streamlined processes, and expanded partnerships. The Governor’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force today released a draft five-year action plan to guide California’s next phase of work protecting communities and restoring landscapes.

“California is moving with more urgency than ever to protect communities from growing wildfire risks. We’re cutting red tape to get critical projects on the ground faster, expanding the use of prescribed and cultural fire, and charting a science-based path forward through a new statewide action plan that will help make our communities and natural landscapes more resilient for decades to come,” said Governor Gavin Newsom.

Following the emergency proclamation, California fast-tracked more than 400 priority wildfire prevention projects, including over 220,000 activity acres of treatments across nearly 100,000 footprint acres. This has helped move critical fuel reduction, forest restoration, and community protection projects from planning to implementation faster, saving a year or more of review and red tape for more complicated projects.

Partners across the state have been able to complete work more efficiently while maintaining strong environmental protections.

Notable projects include: a 600+ acre fuels reduction collaborative project protecting communities in the Los Angeles area near the Palisades footprint, led by the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority; a 450-acre Prosper Ridge Community Wildfire Resilience Project incorporating cultural burning and prescribed fire for community protection in Humboldt County; a nearly 3,000-acre Scott Valley/Callahan Fuels Reduction Project to restore ecosystem health and protect vulnerable rural communities in Siskiyou County; a 302-acre project to assist senior and disabled WUI residents in Tuolumne County with removing vegetation and creating defensible space; a 520-acre Calforests supported disaster recovery project of private lands in Santa Cruz County impacted by the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex Fires; and a 240-acre project in San Diego County to protect the Sycuan Reservation from wildfire by reducing fire hazard with the use of 300 grazing goats.

In response to Governor Newsom’s executive order directing state agencies to reduce red tape and expand tools to deploy safe beneficial fire, including prescribed and cultural burning, California has moved quickly to accelerate the use of this proven wildfire prevention tool across the state. State agencies have cleared the path for local governments and fire practitioners to expand beneficial fire use through expanded partnerships with Native American tribes, strengthened alignment with air quality entities, streamlined processes, training initiatives, and updated policies.

“California is expanding safe, controlled fire as one of our most effective tools to protect communities and restore the health of our landscapes,” said California Secretary for Natural Resources Wade Crowfoot. “Since time immemorial, tribal communities used fire to steward California’s lands, and today we are working together to bring these practices back at the scale needed to confront the wildfire crisis and build long-term safety and resilience.”

Governor Newsom has made wildfire resilience and the expansion of beneficial fire a priority of his administration, releasing California’s Strategic Plan for Expanding the Use of Beneficial Fire in March 2022. Following this roadmap, prescribed fire treatments in California have nearly doubled since 2021.

Building on these efforts, the Governor’s executive order on beneficial fire has empowered agencies and partners to take full advantage of the most recent fall and spring prescribed burn windows. CAL FIRE has treated nearly 20,000 acres with prescribed fire, and State Parks has rapidly expanded its prescribed fire program—treating over 1,300 acres, seizing key burn windows to complete high-priority projects in iconic parks, and strengthening capacity through new leadership and training for hundreds of staff and partners.

“Expanding prescribed fire is essential to protect communities, restore forest health, and help to prevent catastrophic wildfire,” said Joe Tyler, Director and Fire Chief of CAL FIRE. “CAL FIRE works with and supports partners across the state to safely increase the use of this important prevention and mitigation tool.” Recent state actions are helping remove barriers that historically limited the use of prescribed and cultural fire.

These efforts include improving smoke management coordination, updating permitting processes, expanding workforce development and training programs, and strengthening partnerships with tribes, Resource Conservation Districts, and local burn associations.

Today, the Governor’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force released its draft Wildfire and Landscape Resilience Action Plan (2026-2031), a plan to accelerate action to confront California’s wildfire challenges. Guided by the latest scientific research and shaped by extensive collaboration among state, federal, tribal, local, and private partners, the draft plan builds on California’s progress to date to protect communities and landscapes from wildfire, prioritizing actions that will make the greatest impact on the ground.

A new scientific synthesis, also released today, provides a strong science-based framework for the action plan, including the importance of home hardening and defensible space, strategically placed fuel breaks, and thinning and prescribed fire across the state’s landscapes and wildfire-prone communities.

“California has made major progress over the past several years through an unprecedented level of funding, commitment to a science-based approach, and a collaborative effort among the key agencies and land managers,” said Task Force Director Patrick Wright. “This plan builds on that progress by providing a framework to work faster and smarter across larger landscapes and communities, and to sustain that work over time.” Members of the public—including tribes, local governments, community organizations, and partners across California—are encouraged to review the draft plan and provide feedback during the partner review period, which closes August 7, 2026.

A final version of the plan will be released in fall 2026.

As part of the state’s ongoing investment in wildfire resilience and emergency response, CAL FIRE has significantly expanded its workforce over the past five years by adding an average of 1,800 full-time and 600 seasonal positions annually – nearly double that of the previous administration. Over the next four years and beyond, CAL FIRE will be hiring thousands of additional firefighters, natural resource professionals, and support personnel to meet the state’s growing demands.

Governor Newsom has invested millions of dollars to protect communities from wildfire, with $135 million available for new and ongoing prevention projects and $72 million going out the door to projects across the state. This is part of over $5 billion that the Newsom administration, in collaboration with the legislature, has invested in wildfire and forest resilience since 2019.