How many people will it take to treat 1.5 million acres a year in California with beneficial fire by 2045?
CEPP releases a new study projecting an increase in the burn boss workforce of three to eight times as many as are currently qualified in order to accomplish the state’s wildfire resilience goals.
Increasing the pace and scale of beneficial fire use has become a pillar of California’s wildfire resilience and climate adaptation strategy. Almost all of California’s landscapes are either fire-adapted or fire-dependent, meaning that fire is a necessary and regular feature of the ecosystem. For millennia, significant portions of the state’s lands burned each year through a combination of natural ignitions and Indigenous fire use. Over the last two centuries, California’s fire regimes have changed dramatically, in large part because fire’s natural role on the landscape has been suppressed. This has resulted in a greater frequency of large, high severity, and catastrophic wildfire, the impacts of which have prompted growing recognition of and investment into the re-introduction of fire to the landscape. In the last decade in particular – through a combination of state and federal mandates, state legislation, and interagency agreements – the State has adopted ambitious fuels treatment targets to incentivize and track wildfire risk reduction efforts. These include:
In 2020, the United States Forest Service (USFS) Region 5 and the state of California, through the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE), signed a Shared Stewardship Agreement that committed each party to carrying out 500,000 acres of fuels treatments a year, for a combined total of one million acres treated annually by 2025.
In 2022, California’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Taskforce released California’s Strategic Plan for Expanding Beneficial Fire Use which called for the treatment of 400,000 acres with beneficial fire annually by 2025.
In 2024, Governor Newsom’s Administration released California’s Nature Based Solutions Targets, as required by Assembly Bill 1757 (Garcia, 2022), which set targets in order to reach California’s goal of carbon neutrality by 2045. The beneficial fire treatment goals were:
800,000 acres/year by 2030.
1.2 million acres/year by 2038.
1.5 million acres/year by 2045.
Despite these ambitious long-term objectives, current levels of beneficial fire implementation remain far below the stated goal, which is almost eight times the acres currently treated. In 2021, agencies and other stakeholders burned a combined total of 117,768 acres. By 2024, 188,881 acres were burned which, though an improvement, remains just 47% of the goal to burn 400,000 acres with beneficial fire by 2025. Moreover, 2024 represented a decrease in acres treated relative to 2023, perhaps due to the more active 2024 wildfire season in California. While the complete 2025 treatment data has yet to be released, early reports indicate that the numbers of acres burned by beneficial fire may be even lower than previous years.
Workforce capacity is often cited as a barrier to more widespread beneficial fire use, yet no effort to date has attempted to quantify how the state’s acres target translates to workforce needs now and in the future. In our latest study, Scaling California’s Prescribed Fire Workforce, we estimate the workforce needed to meet the goal of treating 1.5 million acres with beneficial fire by 2045. Because most prescribed broadcast burns in California are implemented under supervision of a qualified burn boss, the paper uses burn boss as a proxy to understand workforce needs as a whole. Currently, there are just over an estimated 300 qualified burn bosses in the state of California, including federal RXB2 and RXB1s, CAL FIRE Burn Bosses, and California State-Certified Burn Bosses.
We used this number alongside current treatment levels to create upper- and lower-end estimates for the number of burn bosses needed to treat 1.5 million acres, when considering factors such as number of burn days, average size of burn, and number of burns implemented per burn boss. We find that to treat 1.5 million acres with beneficial fire by 2045:
341 burn bosses would be required if the number of burn days and average burn size stays the same, and each burn boss burns on every burn day.
243 burn bosses would be required if the number of burn days stays the same, each burn boss burns on every burn day, but the proportion of large burns increases.
417 burn bosses would be required if the number of burn days decreases at the rate forecasted by climatic trends, but average burn size stays the same and each burn boss burns on every burn day.
298 burn bosses would be required if the number of burn days decreases at the rate forecasted by climatic trends, the proportion of large burns increases, and each burn boss burns on every burn day.
4,103 burn bosses would be required if the average burn implementation rate of a burn boss (acres burned per burn boss) stays the same.
2,320 burn bosses would be required if the average number of burns implemented per burn boss stays the same, but the average burn size increases.
1,607 burn bosses would be required if the average burn size states the same, but the average number of burns implemented per burn boss increases.
938 burn bosses would be required if both the average burn size and average number of burns implemented per burn boss increase.
The middle estimates above would require qualifying 3 to 8 times as many burn bosses as currently exist in California. Increasing the burn boss workforce at this scale will require substantially increasing the number of burn bosses in training, and doing so soon. Right now, only about 2% of California’s state and federal fire management workforce are qualified burn bosses. Our mid-range estimates would necessitate closer to a quarter of the workforce holding the qualification. Becoming a burn boss, be it through CAL FIRE, the state-certification process, or the federal NWCG system, is a rigorous and lengthy undertaking. For example, it is estimated that qualifying as an NWCG RXB2 requires 12-15 years of fire experience. In order to increase the burn boss workforce to the desired size by 2045, we must also build our capacity to train them.
In addition to a significant increase in the number of burn bosses needed, the fire management workforce as a whole must scale up to meet the acreage target. Alongside burn boss, broadcast burns usually require many additional personnel, including people on site to implement the burn, contingency resources nearby in the event more help is needed, and staffing after the burning operation has concluded in the patrol and mop-up phase. To increase the pace and scale of beneficial fire at such a rate as is called for, the number of personnel required to fill each of these roles will be considerable.
Thus, increasing the implementation of prescribed fire at the scale indicated by the proposed acreage targets will require careful attention to who is asked to do the work, and how their health, wellbeing, and compensation is protected. Indeed, the current constraints of workforce structure, size, and supports – combined with studies showing that the potential of prescribed fire treatments to effectively mitigate wildfire risk increases with proximity of the treatment to values at risk — suggests that land managers should be incentivized to maximize the impact, rather than extent or scale, of prescribed fire treatments with the workforce available. Strategic placement of prescribed burns may better enable more holistic approaches to manage wildfire on the landscape with less intervention in the long term, but in the near term this will require managers to prioritize treatments in areas that present a larger challenge, for example near communities and other values at risk.
Our hope is that this paper will help to inform workforce planning efforts by demonstrating the magnitude of work required by the state’s beneficial fire targets, and by identifying the key factors that impact (and are impacted by) the size of the workforce tasked with meeting these goals. Setting workforce capacity targets requires making some important decisions. In the context of prescribed fire, these include: how often can we expect someone to be available to burn? How regularly does the weather cooperate? How much risk are land managers willing to take on? What is the wage level required to appropriately compensate personnel for the demands of the job?
The study intends to daylight the true operational requirements of prescribed fire implementation, so that land managers can consider these questions in order to proactively anticipate personnel, budget, and training needs. We believe that by understanding the workforce capacity required to accomplish California’s beneficial fire goals, land managers can better plan for, create, and capitalize on opportunities to restore fire resilient landscapes and communities. We also emphasize that more accurate forecasting of workforce needs is not just necessary to make these ambitious treatment goals attainable, but also to ensure that worker health, wellbeing, and compensation is safeguarded.
This study is part of a series of papers published by CEPP focused on the wildland fire mitigation and management workforce, which has included research into the size, composition, and usage of different sectors within the workforce, as well as recommendations to address issues pertaining to federal wildland firefighters, and to improve diversity and representation within the field. In this most recent work, we are excited to turn our attention to the workforce needs of the future, which provides an important opportunity to consider how land managers can provide sustainable, desirable, and equitable livelihoods and career opportunities to a workforce that must scale along with wildfire resilience activities.
Abigail Varney is a Wildland Fire Research Fellow and current federal wildland firefighter working on issues relating to the wildland fire mitigation and management workforce.