This article originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on Aug. 20, 2025.
The Trump administration recently identified a goal of increasing timber production on federal forests by 25 percent. It is hoping to do this largely by rolling back environmental reviews and expediting permitting of logging projects. Part of the impetus, as stated in a presidential order, is “wildfire risk reduction” and to “save American lives.”
Scott Stephens, a professor of fire ecology and forestry at UC Berkeley and a co-author of the new study, said setting numerical objectives for the amount of timber you want, instead of what is suited to forest conditions, is generally not the way to ward off damaging fires. Simply cutting down the biggest trees, which are generally the most fire-resistant, won’t increase resiliency, for example.
“You need to put fire mitigation upfront,” Stephens said. “Maybe you’re going to do a commercial harvest, maybe do some thinning, put in some shaded fuel breaks. But if you’re only going to go in there and give every forest a (harvest) target, that doesn’t work.”
The need to limit high-severity fire, which is characterized by killing large numbers of trees, is becoming increasingly evident. Such burns are harder to put out, cause sometimes irrevocable damage to forests, wildlife, and nearby communities, and result in landscapes that sequester less planet-warming carbon. In some cases, a whole new, treeless ecosystem of shrubs and grasses emerges.
The logging industry has cautioned against making broad claims about how its work affects fire risk.
George “YG” Gentry, senior vice president of regulatory affairs for the California Forestry Association, had not seen the latest study but said it’s hard for any single paper to capture all the factors that affect fire, from weather to elevation to terrain.
“Any one study that points to this or that, I’m kind of skeptical,” he said. “If you’re doing appropriate thinning, if you’re doing appropriate fuel management, you can really mitigate fire behavior.”
The new paper used the Plumas National Forest in the northern Sierra Nevada as the study site. The area was hit hard by five major wildfires from 2019 to 2021, including the 963,000-acre Dixie Fire, the second largest in state history.
It so happens that the Plumas National Forest and surrounding property, including private timber parcels, had been surveyed by overflights using airborne light detection and ranging, or LiDAR, in 2018 — providing a baseline of forest conditions before the fires.
By analyzing the changes, the researchers determined that private timberlands were 1.45 times more likely to experience high-severity fire than the federal holdings, which consisted largely of areas that had been leased for logging, though with more restrictions than the company-owned sites.
The study points out that the federal lands also often saw high-severity fire and were not a model for sound forest management. It was just that the private forests were less fire resilient because of their denser, more uniform makeup.
Identifying what was making the fires worse, the authors say, enables improvements to be made on both private and public lands. Certain forestry practices that seek to decrease density, according to the study, will help temper the severity of even the most extreme fires, which bodes well for the future as wildfires become increasingly intense.
“We’re not just fighting this losing battle automatically because of climate change,” Levine said. “As fire weather gets worse and worse with climate change, we can still implement management that reduces severity.”
Several studies over the past decade, and even earlier, have found that wildfires have often burned more intensely in areas where logging has occurred.
Some research, including a 2016 paper that analyzed 1,500 fires and found that burning was worse in places with more cut trees, suggests completely rethinking logging as a fire-mitigation tool. The wind and heat from the sun that get into an exposed logging site, some say, regularly exacerbate fires. Other research has underscored the need to reduce tree density, after decades of fire suppression, but only with selective logging practices.
The authors of the study say the timber industry and all consumers of wood products stand to benefit when forests are better protected from massive blazes.
“Logging is an important industry,” Levine said. “I don’t want to vilify timber companies, by any means, but I’m not sure the raw focus on timber production is the way we want to go about reducing fire severity.”
This article originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on Aug. 20, 2025. Whiskey Complex Fire banner photo courtesy of J. Erwert / Umpqua National Forest.
Kurtis Alexander is an enterprise reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, with a focus on natural resources and the environment. He frequently writes about water, wildfire, climate and the American West. His recent work has examined the impacts of drought, threats to public lands and wildlife, and the nation’s widening rural-urban divide. Before joining the Chronicle, Alexander worked as a freelance writer and as a staff reporter for several media organizations, including the Fresno Bee and Bay Area News Group, writing about government, politics, and the environment.