Wildland Fire Management: Forest Service and Interior Need to	 
Specify Steps and a Schedule for Identifying Long-Term Options	 
and Their Costs (17-FEB-05, GAO-05-353T).			 
                                                                 
Over the past two decades, the number of acres burned by wildland
fires has surged, often threatening human lives, property, and	 
ecosystems. Past management practices, including a concerted	 
federal policy in the 20th century of suppressing fires to	 
protect communities and ecosystem resources, unintentionally	 
resulted in steady accumulation of dense vegetation that fuels	 
large, intense, wildland fires. While such fires are normal in	 
some ecosystems, in others they can cause catastrophic damage to 
resources as well as to communities near wildlands known as the  
wildland-urban interface. GAO was asked to identify the (1)	 
progress the federal government has made in responding to	 
wildland fire threats and (2) challenges it will need to address 
within the next 5 years. This testimony is based primarily on	 
GAO's report Wildland Fire Management: Important Progress Has	 
Been Made, but Challenges Remain to Completing a Cohesive	 
Strategy (GAO-05-147), released on February 14, 2005.		 
-------------------------Indexing Terms------------------------- 
REPORTNUM:   GAO-05-353T					        
    ACCNO:   A17916						        
  TITLE:     Wildland Fire Management: Forest Service and Interior    
Need to Specify Steps and a Schedule for Identifying Long-Term	 
Options and Their Costs 					 
     DATE:   02/17/2005 
  SUBJECT:   Land management					 
	     Public lands					 
	     Data integrity					 
	     Federal funds					 
	     Wilderness areas					 
	     Forest management					 
	     Interagency relations				 
	     Strategic planning 				 
	     Wildland fires					 
	     National Fire Plan 				 
	     Forest Service/Dept. of the Interior		 
	     LANDFIRE System					 
                                                                 

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GAO-05-353T

United States Government Accountability Office

GAO Testimony

Before the Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health, Committee on
Resources, House of Representatives

For Release on Delivery

Expected at 11:00 a.m. EDT WILDLAND FIRE

Thursday, February 17, 2005

MANAGEMENT

Forest Service and Interior Need to Specify Steps and a Schedule for Identifying
                       Long-Term Options and Their Costs

Statement of Robin M. Nazzaro, Director, Natural Resources and Environment

GAO-05-353T

Highlights of GAO-05-353T, a testimony before the Subcommittee on Forests
and Forest Health, Committee on Resources, House of Representatives

Over the past two decades, the number of acres burned by wildland fires
has surged, often threatening human lives, property, and ecosystems. Past
management practices, including a concerted federal policy in the 20th
century of suppressing fires to protect communities and ecosystem
resources, unintentionally resulted in steady accumulation of dense
vegetation that fuels large, intense, wildland fires. While such fires are
normal in some ecosystems, in others they can cause catastrophic damage to
resources as well as to communities near wildlands known as the
wildland-urban interface.

GAO was asked to identify the (1) progress the federal government has made
in responding to wildland fire threats and (2) challenges it will need to
address within the next 5 years. This testimony is based primarily on
GAO's report

Wildland Fire Management: Important Progress Has Been Made, but Challenges
Remain to Completing a Cohesive Strategy

(GAO-05-147), released on February 14, 2005.

In its report and this testimony, GAO recommends that the Secretaries of
Agriculture and the Interior provide the Congress with a plan outlining
the critical steps and time frames for completing a cohesive strategy that
identifies the options and funding needed to address wildland fire
problems.

www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-05-353T.

To view the full product, including the scope and methodology, click on
the link above. For more information, contact Robin M. Nazzaro at (202)
512-3841 or [email protected].

February 2005

WILDLAND FIRE MANAGEMENT

Forest Service and Interior Need to Specify Steps and a Schedule for Identifying
Long-Term Options and Their Costs

Over the last 5 years, the Forest Service in the Department of Agriculture
and land management agencies in the Department of the Interior, working
with the Congress, have made important progress in responding to wildland
fires. The agencies have adopted various national strategy documents
addressing the need to reduce wildland fire risks; established a priority
for protecting communities in the wildland-urban interface; and increased
efforts and amounts of funding committed to addressing wildland fire
problems, including preparedness, suppression, and fuel reduction on
federal lands. In addition, the agencies have begun improving their data
and research on wildland fire problems, made progress in developing
longneeded fire management plans that identify actions for effectively
addressing wildland fire threats at the local level, and improved federal
interagency coordination and collaboration with nonfederal partners. The
agencies also have strengthened overall accountability for their
investments in wildland fire activities by establishing improved
performance measures and a framework for monitoring results.

While the agencies have adopted various strategy documents to address the
nation's wildland fire problems, none of these documents constitutes a
cohesive strategy that explicitly identifies the long-term options and
related funding needed to reduce fuels in national forests and rangelands
and to respond to wildland fire threats. Both the agencies and the
Congress need a comprehensive assessment of the fuel reduction options and
related funding needs to determine the most effective and affordable
long-term approach for addressing wildland fire problems. Completing a
cohesive strategy that identifies long-term options and needed funding
will require finishing several efforts now under way, each with its own
challenges. The agencies will need to finish planned improvements in a key
data and modeling system- LANDFIRE-to more precisely identify the extent
and location of wildland fire threats and to better target fuel reduction
efforts. In implementing LANDFIRE, the agencies will need more consistent
approaches to assessing wildland fire risks, more integrated information
systems, and better understanding of the role of climate in wildland fire.
In addition, local fire management plans will need to be updated with data
from LANDFIRE and from emerging agency research on more cost-effective
approaches to reducing fuels. Completing a new system designed to identify
the most costeffective means for allocating fire management budget
resources-Fire Program Analysismay help to better identify
long-term options and related funding needs. Without completing these
tasks, the agencies will have difficulty determining the extent and
location of wildland fire threats, targeting and coordinating their
efforts and resources, and resolving wildland fire problems in the most
timely and cost-effective manner over the long term.

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee:

I am pleased to be here today to discuss the status of the federal
government's efforts to address our nation's wildland fire problems. The
trend of increasing wildland fire threats to communities and ecosystems
that we reported on 5 years ago has been continuing. The average number of
acres burned by wildland fires annually from 2000 through 2003 was 56
percent greater than the average amount burned annually during the 1990s.
Wildland fires are often necessary to restore ecosystems, but some fires
also can cause catastrophic damages to communities and ecosystems. Experts
believe that catastrophic damages from wildland fires probably will
continue to increase until an adequate long-term federal response,
coordinated with others, is implemented and has had time to take effect.

My testimony today summarizes the findings of our report released this
week that discusses progress the federal government has made over the last
5 years and key challenges it faces in developing and implementing a
long-term response to wildland fire problems.1 This report is based
primarily on over 25 reviews we conducted in recent years of federal
wildland fire management that focused largely on the activities of the
Forest Service within the Department of Agriculture and the land
management agencies in the Department of the Interior, which together
manage about 95 percent of all federal lands.

Summary In the past 5 years, the federal government has made important
progress in putting into place the basic components of a framework for
managing and responding to the nation's wildland fire problems, including

o  establishing a priority to protect communities near wildlands-the
wildland-urban interface;

o  increasing the amount of effort and funds available for addressing
firerelated concerns, such as fuel reduction on federal lands;

o  improving data and research on wildland fire, local fire management
plans, interagency coordination, and collaboration with nonfederal
partners; and

1GAO, Wildland Fire Management: Important Progress Has Been Made, but
Challenges Remain to Completing a Cohesive Strategy, GAO-05-147
(Washington, D.C.: Jan. 14, 2005).

o  refining performance measures and results monitoring for wildland fire
management.

While this progress has been important, many challenges remain for
addressing wildland fire problems in a timely and effective manner. Most
notably, the land management agencies need to complete a cohesive strategy
that identifies the long-term options and related funding needed for
reducing fuels and responding to wildland fires when they occur. A recent
Western Governors' Association report also called for completing such a
cohesive federal strategy. The agencies and the Congress need such a
strategy to make decisions about an effective and affordable long-term
approach for addressing problems that have been decades in the making and
will take decades more to resolve. However, completing and implementing
such a strategy will require that the agencies complete several
challenging tasks, including

o  developing data systems needed to identify the extent, severity, and
location of wildland fire threats to the nation's communities and
ecosystems;

o  updating local fire management plans to better specify the actions
needed to effectively address these threats; and

o  assessing the cost-effectiveness and affordability of options for
reducing fuels.

We are recommending that the Secretaries of Agriculture and the Interior
provide the Congress, in time for its consideration of the agencies'
fiscal year 2006 wildland fire management budgets, with a joint tactical
plan outlining the critical steps the agencies will take, together with
related time frames, to complete a cohesive strategy that identifies
long-term options and needed funding for reducing and maintaining fuels at
acceptable levels and responding to the nation's wildland fire problems.

Background Wildland fire triggered by lightning is a normal, inevitable,
and necessary ecological process that nature uses to periodically remove
excess undergrowth, small trees, and vegetation to renew ecosystem
productivity. However, various human land use and management practices,
including several decades of fire suppression activities, have reduced the
normal frequency of wildland fires in many forest and rangeland ecosystems
and have resulted in abnormally dense and continuous accumulations of
vegetation that can fuel uncharacteristically large and intense wildland

fires. Such large intense fires increasingly threaten catastrophic
ecosystem damage and also increasingly threaten human lives, health,
property, and infrastructure in the wildland-urban interface. Federal
researchers estimate that vegetative conditions that can fuel such fires
exist on approximately 190 million acres--or more than 40 percent--of
federal lands in the contiguous United States but could vary from 90
million to 200 million acres, and that these conditions also exist on many
nonfederal lands.

Our reviews over the last 5 years identified several weaknesses in the
federal government's management response to wildland fire issues. These
weaknesses included the lack of a national strategy that addressed the
likely high costs of needed fuel reduction efforts and the need to
prioritize these efforts. Our reviews also found shortcomings in federal
implementation at the local level, where over half of all federal land
management units' fire management plans did not meet agency requirements
designed to restore fire's natural role in ecosystems consistent with
human health and safety. These plans are intended to identify needed local
fuel reduction, preparedness, suppression, and rehabilitation actions. The
agencies also lacked basic data, such as the amount and location of lands
needing fuel reduction, and research on the effectiveness of different
fuel reduction methods on which to base their fire management plans and
specific project decisions. Furthermore, coordination among federal
agencies and collaboration between these agencies and nonfederal entities
were ineffective. This kind of cooperation is needed because wildland fire
is a shared problem that transcends land ownership and administrative
boundaries. Finally, we found that better accountability for federal
expenditures and performance in wildland fire management was needed.
Agencies were unable to assess the extent to which they were reducing
wildland fire risks or to establish meaningful fuel reduction performance
measures, as well as to determine the costeffectiveness of these efforts,
because they lacked both monitoring data and sufficient data on the
location of lands at high risk of catastrophic fires to know the effects
of their actions. As a result, their performance measures created
incentives to reduce fuels on all acres, as opposed to focusing on
high-risk acres.

Because of these weaknesses, and because experts said that wildland fire
problems could take decades to resolve, we said that a cohesive, longterm,
federal wildland fire management strategy was needed. We said that this
cohesive strategy needed to focus on identifying options for reducing
fuels over the long term in order to decrease future wildland fire risks
and related costs. We also said that the strategy should identify the
costs

  Important Progress Has Been Made in Addressing Federal Wildland Fire
  Management Problems over the Last 5 Years

associated with those different fuel reduction options over time, so that
the Congress could make cost-effective, strategic funding decisions.

The federal government has made important progress over the last 5 years
in improving its management of wildland fire. Nationally it has
established strategic priorities and increased resources for implementing
these priorities. Locally, it has enhanced data and research, planning,
coordination, and collaboration with other parties. With regard to
accountability, it has improved performance measures and established a
monitoring framework.

    Progress in National Strategy: Priorities Have Been Clarified and Funding
    Has Been Increased for Identified Needs

Over the last 5 years, the federal government has been formulating a
national strategy known as the National Fire Plan, composed of several
strategic documents that set forth a priority to reduce wildland fire
risks to communities. Similarly, the recently enacted Healthy Forests
Restoration Act of 2003 directs that at least 50 percent of funding for
fuel reduction projects authorized under the act be allocated to
wildland-urban interface areas. While we have raised concerns about the
way the agencies have defined these areas and the specificity of their
prioritization guidance, we believe that the act's clarification of the
community protection priority provides a good starting point for
identifying and prioritizing funding needs. Similarly, in contrast to
fiscal year 1999, when we reported that the Forest Service had not
requested increased funding to meet the growing fuel reduction needs it
had identified, fuel reduction funding for both the Forest Service and
Interior quadrupled by fiscal year 2004. The Congress, in the Healthy
Forests Restoration Act, also authorized $760 million per year to be
appropriated for hazardous fuels reduction activities, including projects
for reducing fuels on up to 20 million acres of land. Moreover,
appropriations for both agencies' overall wildland fire management
activities, including preparedness, suppression and rehabilitation, have
nearly tripled, from about $1 billion in fiscal year 1999 to over $2.7
billion in fiscal year 2004.

    Progress in Local Implementation: Data and Research, Fire Management
    Planning, and Coordination and Collaboration Have Been Strengthened

The agencies have strengthened local wildland fire management
implementation by making significant improvements in federal data and
research on wildland fire over the past 5 years, including an initial
mapping of fuel hazards nationwide. Additionally, in 2003, the agencies
approved funding for development of a geospatial data and modeling system,
called LANDFIRE, to map wildland fire hazards with greater precision and
uniformity. LANDFIRE-estimated to cost $40 million and scheduled for
nationwide implementation in 2009--will enable comparisons of conditions
between different field locations nationwide, thus permitting better
identification of the nature and magnitude of wildland fire risks
confronting different community and ecosystem resources, such as
residential and commercial structures, species habitat, air and water
quality, and soils.

The agencies also have improved local fire management planning by adopting
and executing an expedited schedule to complete plans for all land units
that had not been in compliance with agency requirements. The agencies
also adopted a common interagency template for preparing plans to ensure
greater consistency in their contents.

Coordination among federal agencies and their collaboration with
nonfederal partners, critical to effective implementation at the local
level, also has been improved. In 2001, as a result of congressional
direction, the agencies jointly formulated a 10-Year Comprehensive
Strategy with the Western Governors' Association to involve the states as
full partners in their efforts. An implementation plan adopted by the
agencies in 2002 details goals, time lines, and responsibilities of the
different parties for a wide range of activities, including collaboration
at the local level to identify fuel reduction priorities in different
areas. Also in 2002, the agencies established an interagency body, the
Wildland Fire Leadership Council, composed of senior Agriculture and
Interior officials and nonfederal representatives, to improve coordination
of their activities with each other and nonfederal parties.

Progress in Accountability: Accountability for the results the federal
government achieves from its Better Performance investments in wildland
fire management activities also has been Measures and a Results
strengthened. The agencies have adopted a performance measure that

identifies the amount of acres moved from high-hazard to low-hazard
fuelMonitoring Framework conditions, replacing a performance measure for
fuel reductions thatHave Been Developed measured only the total acres of
fuel reductions and created an incentive

to treat less costly acres rather than the acres that presented the
greatest

hazards. Additionally, in 2004, to have a better baseline for measuring

  Agencies Face Several Challenges to Completing a Long-Needed Cohesive Strategy
  for Reducing Fuels and Responding to Wildland Fire Problems

progress, the Wildland Fire Leadership Council approved a nationwide
framework for monitoring the effects of wildland fire. While an
implementation plan is still needed for this framework, it nonetheless
represents a critical step toward enhancing wildland fire management
accountability.

While the federal government has made important progress over the past 5
years in addressing wildland fire, a number of challenges still must be
met to complete development of a cohesive strategy that explicitly
identifies available long-term options and funding needed to reduce fuels
on the nation's forests and rangelands. Without such a strategy, the
Congress will not have an informed understanding of when, how, and at what
cost wildland fire problems can be brought under control. None of the
strategic documents adopted by the agencies to date have identified these
options and related funding needs, and the agencies have yet to delineate
a plan or schedule for doing so. To identify these options and funding
needs, the agencies will have to address several challenging tasks related
to their data systems, fire management plans, and assessing the
cost-effectiveness and affordability of different options for reducing
fuels.

    Completing and Implementing the LANDFIRE System Is Essential to Identifying
    and Addressing Wildland Fire Threats

The agencies face several challenges to completing and implementing
LANDFIRE, so that they can more precisely identify the extent and location
of wildland fire threats and better target fuel reduction efforts. These
challenges include using LANDFIRE to better reconcile the effects of fuel
reduction activities with the agencies' other stewardship responsibilities
for protecting ecosystem resources, such as air, water, soils, and species
habitat, which fuel reduction efforts can adversely affect. The agencies
also need LANDFIRE to help them better measure and assess their
performance. For example, the data produced by LANDFIRE will help them
devise a separate performance measure for maintaining conditions on
low-hazard lands to ensure that their conditions do not deteriorate to
more hazardous conditions while funding is being focused on lands with
high-hazard conditions.

In implementing LANDFIRE, however, the agencies will have to overcome the
challenges presented by the current lack of a consistent approach to
assessing the risks of wildland fires to ecosystem resources as well as
the lack of an integrated, strategic, and unified approach to managing and
using information systems and data, including those such as LANDFIRE, in
wildland fire decision making. Currently, software, data standards,
equipment, and training vary among the agencies and field units in ways

that hamper needed sharing and consistent application of the data. Also,
LANDFIRE data and models may need to be revised to take into account
recent research findings that suggest part of the increase in wildland
fire in recent years has been caused by a shift in climate patterns. This
research also suggests that these new climate patterns may continue for
decades, resulting in further increases in the amount of wildland fire.
Thus, the nature, extent, and geographical distribution of hazards
initially identified in LANDFIRE, as well as the costs for addressing
them, may have to be reassessed.

    Fire Management Plans Will Need to Be Updated with Latest Data and Research
    on Wildland Fire

The agencies will need to update their local fire management plans when
more detailed, nationally consistent LANDFIRE data become available. The
plans also will have to be updated to incorporate recent agency fire
research on approaches to more effectively address wildland fire threats.
For example, a 2002 interagency analysis found that protecting
wildlandurban interface communities more effectively-as well as more
costeffectively-might require locating a higher proportion of fuel
reduction projects outside of the wildland-urban interface than currently
envisioned, so that fires originating in the wildlands do not become too
large to suppress by the time they arrive at the interface. Moreover,
other agency research suggests that placing fuel reduction treatments in
specific geometric patterns may, for the same cost, provide protection for
up to three times as many community and ecosystem resources as do other
approaches, such as placing fuel breaks around communities and ecosystems
resources. Timely updating of fire management plans with the latest
research findings on optimal design and location of treatments also will
be critical to the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of these plans.
The Forest Service indicated that this updating could occur during annual
reviews of fire management plans to determine whether any changes to them
may be needed.

    Ongoing Efforts to Assess the Cost-Effectiveness and Affordability of Fuel
    Reduction Options Need to Be Completed

Completing the LANDFIRE data and modeling system and updating fire
management plans should enable the agencies to formulate a range of
options for reducing fuels. However, to identify optimal and affordable
choices among these options, the agencies will have to complete certain
cost-effectiveness analysis efforts they currently have under way. These
efforts include an initial 2002 interagency analysis of options and costs
for reducing fuels, congressionally-directed improvements to their budget
allocation systems, and a new strategic analysis framework that considers
affordability.

The Interagency Analysis of Options and Costs: In 2002, a team of Forest
Service and Interior experts produced an estimate of the funds needed to
implement eight different fuel reduction options for protecting
communities and ecosystems across the nation over the next century. Their
analysis also considered the impacts of fuels reduction activities on
future costs for other principal wildland fire management activities, such
as preparedness, suppression, and rehabilitation, if fuels were not
reduced. The team concluded that the option that would result in reducing
the risks to communities and ecosystems across the nation could require an
approximate tripling of current fuel reduction funding to about $1.4
billion for an initial period of a few years. These initially higher costs
would decline after fuels had been reduced enough to use less expensive
controlled burning methods in many areas and more fires could be
suppressed at lower cost, with total wildland fire management costs, as
well as risks, being reduced after 15 years. Alternatively, the team said
that not making a substantial short-term investment using a landscape
focus could increase both costs and risks to communities and ecosystems in
the long term. More recently, however, Interior has said that the costs
and time required to reverse current increasing risks may be less when
other vegetation management activities-such as timber harvesting and
habitat improvements-are considered that were not included in the
interagency team's original assessment but also can influence wildland
fire.

The cost of the 2002 interagency team's option that reduced risks to
communities and ecosystems over the long term is consistent with a June
2002 National Association of State Foresters' projection of the funding
needed to implement the 10-Year Comprehensive Strategy developed by the
agencies and the Western Governors' Association the previous year. The
state foresters projected a need for steady increases in fuel reduction
funding up to a level of about $1.1 billion by fiscal year 2011. This is
somewhat less than that of the interagency team's estimate, but still
about 2-1/2 times current levels.

The interagency team of experts who prepared the 2002 analysis of options
and associated costs said their estimates of long-term costs could only be
considered an approximation because the data used for their national-level
analysis were not sufficiently detailed. They said a more accurate
estimate of the long-term federal costs and consequences of different
options nationwide would require applying this national analysis framework
in smaller geographic areas using more detailed data, such as that
produced by LANDFIRE, and then aggregating these smaller-scale results.

The New Budget Allocation System: Agency officials told us that a tool for
applying this interagency analysis at a smaller geographic scale for
aggregation nationally may be another management system under
development-the Fire Program Analysis system. This system, being developed
in response to congressional committee direction to improve budget
allocation tools, is designed to identify the most cost-effective
allocations of annual preparedness funding for implementing agency field
units' local fire management plans. Eventually, the Fire Program Analysis
system, being initially implemented in 2005, will use LANDFIRE data and
provide a smaller geographical scale for analyses of fuel reduction
options and thus, like LANDFIRE, will be critical for updating fire
management plans. Officials said that this preparedness budget allocation
systemwhen integrated with an additional component now being
considered for allocating annual fuel reduction funding-could be
instrumental in identifying the most cost-effective long-term levels,
mixes, and scheduling of these two wildland fire management activities.
Completely developing the Fire Program Analysis system, including the fuel
reduction funding component, is expected to cost about $40 million and
take until at least 2007 and perhaps until 2009.

The New Strategic Analysis Effort: In May 2004, Agriculture and Interior
began the initial phase of a wildland fire strategic planning effort that
also might contribute to identifying long-term options and needed funding
for reducing fuels and responding to the nation's wildland fire problems.
This effortthe Quadrennial Fire and Fuels Reviewis
intended to result in an overall federal interagency strategic planning
document for wildland fire management and risk reduction and to provide a
blueprint for developing affordable and integrated fire preparedness,
fuels reduction, and fire suppression programs. Because of this effort's
consideration of affordability, it may provide a useful framework for
developing a cohesive strategy that includes identifying long-term options
and related funding needs. The preliminary planning, analysis, and
internal review phases of this effort are currently being completed and an
initial report is expected in March 2005.

The improvements in data, modeling, and fire behavior research that the
agencies have under way, together with the new cost-effectiveness focus of
the Fire Program Analysis system to support local fire management plans,
represent important tools that the agencies can begin to use now to
provide the Congress with initial and successively more accurate
assessments of long-term fuel reduction options and related funding needs.
Moreover, a more transparent process of interagency analysis in framing
these options and their costs will permit better identification and

  A Recent Western Governors' Association Report Is Consistent with GAO's
  Findings and Recommendation

Conclusions

resolution of differing assumptions, approaches, and values. This
transparency provides the best assurance of accuracy and consensus among
differing estimates, such as those of the interagency team and the
National Association of State Foresters.

In November 2004, the Western Governors' Association issued a report
prepared by its Forest Health Advisory Committee that assessed
implementation of the 10-Year Comprehensive Strategy, which the
association had jointly devised with the agencies in 2001.2 Although the
association's report had a different scope than our review, its findings
and recommendations are, nonetheless, generally consistent with ours about
the progress made by the federal government and the challenges it faces
over the next 5 years. In particular, it recommends, as we do, completion
of a long-term federal cohesive strategy for reducing fuels. It also cites
the need for continued efforts to improve, among other things, data on
hazardous fuels, fire management plans, the Fire Program Analysis system,
and cost-effectiveness in fuel reductions--all challenges we have
emphasized today.

The progress made by the federal government over the last 5 years has
provided a sound foundation for addressing the problems that wildland fire
will increasingly present to communities, ecosystems, and federal
budgetary resources over the next few years and decades. But, as yet,
there is no clear single answer about how best to address these problems
in either the short or long term. Instead, there are different options,
each needing further development to understand the trade-offs among the
risks and funding involved. The Congress needs to understand these options
and tradeoffs in order to make informed policy and appropriations
decisions on this 21st century challenge.

This is the same message we provided to this subcommittee 5 years ago in
calling for a cohesive strategy that identified options and funding needs.
But it still has not been completed. While the agencies are now in a
better position to do so, they must build on the progress made to date by
completing data and modeling efforts underway, updating their fire

2Report to the Western Governors on the Implementation of the 10-Year
Comprehensive Strategy, Western Governors' Association Forest Health
Advisory Committee (Denver, 2004).

  Recommendation for Executive Action

management plans with the results of these data efforts and ongoing
research, and following through on recent cost-effectiveness and
affordability initiatives. However, time is running out. Further delay in
completing a strategy that cohesively integrates these activities to
identify options and related funding needs will only result in increased
long-term risks to communities, ecosystems, and federal budgetary
resources.

Because there is an increasingly urgent need for a cohesive federal
strategy that identifies long-term options and related funding needs for
reducing fuels, we have recommended that the Secretaries of Agriculture
and the Interior provide the Congress, in time for its consideration of
the agencies' fiscal year 2006 wildland fire management budgets, with a
joint tactical plan outlining the critical steps the agencies will take,
together with related time frames, to complete such a cohesive strategy.

  GAO Contacts and Staff Acknowledgments

(360541)

Mr. Chairman, this concludes my prepared statement. I would be pleased to
answer any questions that you or other Members of the Subcommittee may
have at this time.

For further information about this testimony, please contact me at (202)
512-3841 or at [email protected]. Jonathan Altshul, David P. Bixler, Barry
T. Hill, Richard Johnson, and Chester Joy made key contributions to this
statement.

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