Wildland Fire Management: Timely Identification of Long-Term	 
Options and Funding Needs Is Critical (14-JUL-05, GAO-05-923T).  
                                                                 
Wildland fires are increasingly threatening communities and	 
ecosystems. In recent years, these fires have become more intense
due to excess vegetation that has accumulated, partly as a result
of past management practices. Experts have said that the window  
of opportunity for effectively responding to wildland fire is	 
rapidly closing. The federal government's cost to manage wildland
fires continues to increase. Appropriations for its wildland fire
management activities tripled from about $1 billion in fiscal	 
year 1999 to nearly $3 billion in fiscal year 2005. This	 
testimony discusses the federal government's progress over the	 
past 5 years and future challenges in managing wildland fires. It
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, Jan. 14, 2005).	 
-------------------------Indexing Terms------------------------- 
REPORTNUM:   GAO-05-923T					        
    ACCNO:   A29937						        
  TITLE:     Wildland Fire Management: Timely Identification of       
Long-Term Options and Funding Needs Is Critical 		 
     DATE:   07/14/2005 
  SUBJECT:   Data integrity					 
	     Emergency preparedness				 
	     Environmental monitoring				 
	     Federal funds					 
	     Forest conservation				 
	     Forest management					 
	     Interagency relations				 
	     Land management					 
	     National forests					 
	     Strategic planning 				 
	     Wilderness areas					 
	     Fuels						 
	     Accountability					 
	     Performance measures				 
	     Cost effectiveness analysis			 
	     Wildfires						 
	     Wildland fires					 
	     Fire Program Analysis System			 
	     Forest Service/Dept. of the Interior		 
	     LANDFIRE System					 
                                                                 
	     National Fire Plan 				 

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GAO-05-923T

United States Government Accountability Office

GAO Testimony

Before the Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies,
Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives

For Release on Delivery

Expected at 10:00 a.m. EDT WILDLAND FIRE

Thursday, July 14, 2005

MANAGEMENT

    Timely Identification of Long-Term Options and Funding Needs Is Critical

Statement of Robert A. Robinson, Managing Director Natural Resources and
Environment

GAO-05-923T

Highlights of GAO-05-923T, a testimony before the Subcommittee on
Interior, Environment and Related Agencies, Committee on Appropriations,
House of Representatives

Wildland fires are increasingly threatening communities and ecosystems. In
recent years, these fires have become more intense due to excess
vegetation that has accumulated, partly as a result of past management
practices. Experts have said that the window of opportunity for
effectively responding to wildland fire is rapidly closing.

The federal government's cost to manage wildland fires continues to
increase. Appropriations for its wildland fire management activities
tripled from about $1 billion in fiscal year 1999 to nearly $3 billion in
fiscal year 2005.

This testimony discusses the federal government's progress over the past 5
years and future challenges in managing wildland fires. It 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, Jan. 14, 2005).

In its report, GAO recommended that the Secretaries of Agriculture and of
the Interior develop a plan for completing a cohesive strategy that
identifies options and funding needed to address wildland fire problems.
The agencies agreed with GAO's recommendation and expect to develop such a
plan by August 2005.

www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-05-923T.

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

July 14, 2005

WILDLAND FIRE MANAGEMENT

Timely Identification of Long-Term Options and Funding Needs Is Critical

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. Most notably, the agencies have adopted various national strategy
documents addressing the need to reduce wildland fire risks, established a
priority to protect 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.

Despite producing numerous planning and strategy documents, the agencies
have yet to develop a cohesive strategy that explicitly identifies the
longterm options and related funding needed to reduce the excess
vegetation that fuels fires in national forests and rangelands. Reducing
these fuels lowers risks to communities and ecosystems and helps contain
suppression costs. As GAO noted in 1999, such a strategy would help the
agencies and the Congress to determine the most effective and affordable
long-term approach for addressing wildland fire problems. Completing this
strategy 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 cost-effective 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 costeffective 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.
Wildland fire is a natural process that plays an important role in the
health of many fire-adapted ecosystems, but it also can cause catastrophic
damage to communities and ecosystems. The trend of increasing wildland
fire threats to communities and ecosystems that we reported on 5 years ago
has continued. 1 The average acreage of lands burned by wildland fires
annually from 2000 through 2004 was about 62 percent greater than the
average amount burned annually during the 1990s. Experts have noted that
catastrophic damage from wildland fires probably will continue to increase
until an adequate long-term federal response is implemented. They stated
that efforts to resolve the growing threats of catastrophic wildland fires
are in a race against time and the window of opportunity is rapidly
closing.

My testimony today summarizes the findings of our January 2005 report,
which discusses the 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.2 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 in 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-called
the wildland-urban interface;

1GAO, Western National Forests: A Cohesive Strategy Is Needed to Address
Catastrophic Wildfire Threats, GAO/RCED-99-65 (Washington, D.C.: Apr. 2,
1999)

2GAO, 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  	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

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.

In our January 2005 report, we recommended that the Secretaries of
Agriculture and of 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. The departments of Agriculture and the
Interior have said that they will produce such a plan by August 2005. In
these times of limited resources, we believe it is critical that the
agencies develop and implement this plan in a timely fashion so that they
and the Congress,

Background

especially this Subcommittee, have the best information available to make
informed decisions in addressing the nation's wildland fire problems.

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 provide program
direction for 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 cost-

effectiveness 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.3 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 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.

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

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 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

3GAO/RCED-99-65.

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 more than quadrupled by fiscal year 2005. 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, fuel
reduction, and suppression, tripled from about $1 billion in fiscal year
1999 to nearly $3 billion in fiscal year 2005.

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: Better Performance Measures and a Results
Monitoring Framework Have Been Developed

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

Accountability for the results the federal government achieves from its
investments in wildland fire management activities also has been
strengthened. The agencies have adopted a performance measure that
identifies the amount of acres moved from high-hazard to low-hazard fuel
conditions, replacing a performance measure for fuel reductions that
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 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 the assessment of the
costeffectiveness 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

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

Conclusions

this effort have been completed and an initial report is expected in July
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
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 2001.4 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.

In conclusion, Mr. Chairman, 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. As yet, however, there is no clear single answer about how best

4Report to the Western Governors on the Implementation of the 10-Year
Comprehensive Strategy, Western Governors' Association Forest Health
Advisory Committee (Denver, Colo.: 2004).

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 trade-offs in order to make informed policy
and appropriations decisions on this 21st century challenge.

This is the same message we provided in 1999 when we first called for
development of a cohesive strategy identifying options and funding needs.
But it 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
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 recommended that the Secretaries of Agriculture and of
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.

In an April 2005 letter, Agriculture and Interior said that they will
produce by August 2005, for the Wildland Fire Leadership Council's review
and approval, a joint tactical plan that will identify the steps and time
frames for completing a cohesive strategy. We look forward to the agencies
completing this important step. However, as noted at the outset of this
testimony, the window of opportunity for effectively addressing wildland
fire is rapidly closing. Thus, developing a cohesive strategy should not
wait until 2009, when LANDFIRE and the Fire Program Analysis are fully
developed. As we have noted, the 2002 interagency analysis of long-term
options and costs is a good starting point that can serve as a basis for
providing the Congress with interim updates on options and funding needs
to respond to wildland fires.

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.

  GAO Contacts and Staff Acknowledgments

(360613)

For further information on this testimony, please contact Robert A.
Robinson at (202) 512-3841 or [email protected], or Robin M. Nazzaro at
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