Viewpoint: What actually works — and what doesn’t — when managing wildfires

The good news is that we know what to do. Thin the understory. Conduct prescribed burns. Update building codes and zoning. Create real defensible space around homes. These are not partisan positions — they are the accumulated findings of decades of peer-reviewed research and on-the-ground experience.

The bad news is that more and more intense wildfires are coming regardless of what we do about carbon emissions in the next decade. We cannot apply 20th-century solutions to 21st-century fire. The forests around us are changing, the climate is changing, and our policies need to change with them — guided by evidence rather than ideology.