Giving Fire Back to the Land

Prescribed or beneficial fire, also known as a controlled burn, has been used for centuries to clear tinder-dry trees and brush that are known to fuel runaway wildfires. However, as recently as 2018, California law considered the intentional use of fire as arson, inextricably linked to wildfires and uninsured liability costs for the prescribed burn practitioners.

“If we don’t do beneficial fires in California, we’re not going to have a forest or a community,” warns Will Dessert, an environmental risk advisor, commercial insurance broker and product developer in environmental liability for California’s transportation, agribusiness, conservation and forestry sectors. His Arroyo Insurance offices are in Pasadena.

California Wildfire Ecosystem

For 100 years, California’s primary industry was forests and forest products. California is still the second-largest producer of wood and pulp products in the world.

“In Northern California, our forests are overgrown,” continues Dessert. “We should have 50 to 100 trees per acre with a 30 to 40 percent sunlight canopy that would allow for berries, acorns and grasses to grow. The excessive number of trees per acre draws on our water table, which we rely on to produce 80 percent of the world’s food.”

“There have been hundreds of years of incidences of wildfire reports, but few reports have been about beneficial fires. A low flame fire is beneficial if people monitor it,” Dessert continues. “There is unbelievably complex science involved in a prescribed burn – monitoring the weather, the wind and the humidity. When a forester or a land manager does the scientific homework, e.g., measuring the duff and the groundwater and doing a tree circumference report, then the optimal heat and flame to burn plants in that landscape can be calculated.”

For those unfamiliar with the term, “duff” is a layer of partially decayed organic material that builds up on the forest floor. It’s made up of leaves, branches, needles, twigs, and other plant parts. Duff is also known as leaf litter.

Dessert says the flame characteristics might be different on each beneficial burn.

“I’ve been on burns where the flame is 15 feet high, but that’s on chaparral or grassland where there is nothing around,” Dessert continues. “On other burns, the understory burns with two to three-foot flames that are smoke-spreading. Incredibly, the smoke that’s created is absorbed by the leaves of the trees, providing good nutrients for recycling the litter back into the soil and back into the trees. In a large beneficial burn of 1000 acres, the fire isn’t going above the tree level. It just settles downward. Whereas out-of-control wildfires are so hot, the fire pushes right through the inversion layer. The wind carries the smoke and spreads toxins to all the neighboring communities, and the fire engulfs the tops of the trees, destroying everything.”

Indigenous Peoples and the Spirit of Fire

For millennia, indigenous peoples have used fire to help manage ancient sequoia and oak groves, which were adapted to thrive in a fire-prone environment. But in 1850, California legislation banned cultural burning as part of the design to remove Indigenous people from their ancestral lands forcibly.

In a YouTube video, Wiyanka Bennett, an ecologist with the Quartz Valley Indian Reservation and tribal member of the Karuk Nation, says, “For us as indigenous people, fire is its own being. In just the same way we would live with bear, we live with fire…being a spiritual being as fire is, we’ve learned to work with it, to relate to it, how to use it to our advantage.” 

“For 10,000 years, our indigenous stakeholders knew that if they burned 100 million acres a year across this land, they would have an incredible cultivation cycle,” says Dessert. “They knew that the nutrients that the fire recycled into the soil were important for human and animal consumption. Beneficial burns teach the next generation. When this information goes unheeded, we are not protecting the environment.”

“Real indigenous peoples know how to conduct prescribed burns,” says Dessert. “I’ve worked with Indigenous stakeholders in the field, and their level of understanding of topography, grasslands, horticulture, cultivation cycles, etc., is incredible. Their management techniques for conducting beneficial fires are different from what burn bosses from Cal Fire [the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection] might use.”

“Indigenous peoples weave pine cones together and place natural pine sap on them to create fuel,” describes Dessert. “They’ll drag that through a grassland, whereas a burn boss will use 80 percent diesel, 20 percent gasoline and a drip torch. They both get the same regeneration outcome.”

A 2018 study in Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and Texas reported that protein synthesis in cows increased after one prescribed burn and cultivation cycle. The land was burned, new grass came in, the cows ate it, the cows were slaughtered, and the meat reportedly increased 52 percent in protein.

“Look at all the food we produce in California,” states Dessert. “With prescribed burns, the nutrient density levels would skyrocket. In agricultural reports, you’ll see large swings in percentage yields across different fruits and vegetables after prescribed burns. It’s the missing tool for California, providing protection for the water table, getting rid of the overgrowth of invasive species, and putting ash back into the soil.”

From Arson to Benefit

Stakeholders and insurance companies had been reluctant to incur the liability of a beneficial burn. That thinking changed in 2018, resulting in the passage of California’s SB 926 in 2021.

SB 926 identifies California stakeholders who can benefit from prescribed fires. These include Indigenous peoples, county associations, colleges for fire scientists, and fire bosses, as well as resource conservation districts, volunteer fire departments, forestry and conservation services, firms, private landowners, forest owners and conservancy land trusts.

According to Dessert, the change in designation from arson to beneficial fire was mostly credited to Lenya N. Quinn-Davidson, Fire Director for the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources Division.

Quinn-Davidson’s focus was on the human connection with fire and increasing the use of prescribed fire for habitat restoration, invasive species control, and ecosystem and community resiliency. She works at the local, state, and national levels to bring fire back as a land management tool by collaborating on policy and research related to prescribed fires.

As an adjunct to her work, former Senator Bill Dodd (D-Napa) sponsored SB 926, establishing a pilot program to increase the use of prescribed fire. The bill also created the Prescribed Fire Claims Fund, a $20 million resource administered by Cal Fire, to cover losses from prescribed fires. The Fund, which sunsets in January 2028, provides a solution for the previously unavailable insurance that prescribed fire practitioners require. Practitioners must be enrolled in the program to be covered.

According to reports, prescribed fires rarely escape their bounds and damage neighboring properties. If they do, the Claims Fund helps cover the costs. The SB926 law is a follow-up to SB 332, which protects landowners and prescribed fire managers from having to pay fire suppression expenses unless they have acted with gross negligence.

“Most general liability policies have an exclusion for prescribed fire,” says Dessert. “The government can’t offer insurance, so they created this claims fund, with no more than 10 projects live at one time. There have been 200 projects that have been enrolled and completed in the last eighteen months under SB 926. The fund was the integral piece in making affordable liability insurance for contractors and land stewards liability policies possible.”

Beneficial Fire Education

Disseminating prescribed fire information to the general public has been accomplished through word of mouth. Matt Dias, President and CEO of the California Forestry Association, is a Registered Professional Forester. He organized private and government stakeholders to come to meetings in Sacramento in January and February 2025 to work with the design team created by David Jones with support from Dessert.

Jones, an American politician who served as California’s Insurance Commissioner from 2011 to 2019, has had a 45-year career creating environmental insurance products. When he and Dessert met at the International Risk Management Institute conference, they agreed to make a plan to solve the California wildfire crisis.

Jones came up with the idea of appropriating funds for claims. Since then, Oregon has followed California’s plan. Idaho, Colorado, and Montana are introducing bills to create the same kinds of entities. 

Dessert believes additional legislation should be written to recognize fire science.

“All universities and private schools should realize there is a real need for this work on fire ecology. SB 926 creates jobs and entrepreneurship. There have been 95 burn projects this year with no claims. We’re going to be able to make thousands of new jobs through these activities.”

Twenty schools in California provide fire science degrees. From Antelope Valley to Yuba City, four-year coursework in fire science is divided among general education liberal arts and science courses, major studies in fire science specialties, and elective classes that offer studies in the fire and emergency services curriculum.

Additionally, the Pelican Bay Scholars Program in Crescent City and the Cal Poly Humboldt bachelor’s degree program offer college courses to incarcerated students at Pelican Bay State Prison. Students can earn an AA  or BA Liberal Arts Degree in Behavioral and Social Sciences under the program. It is the first bachelor’s degree program in a Level IV incarceration facility in California and the first program in the country to allow incarcerated students to access Pell Grant funds.

The Fix Our Forests Act

The Fix Our Forests Act was introduced in Congress in January 2025 to provide that the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) be waived for burns under 10,000 acres. This has the potential to reduce the timeline for a burn from 18 months of planning before it can start to an actual burn organized in under one month.

The bill establishes requirements for managing forests on federal land, including requirements concerning reducing wildfire threats, expediting the review of certain forest management projects, and implementing forest management projects and other activities.

Of the approximately 33 million acres of forest in California, federal agencies (including the US Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service) control 19 million acres or approximately 57 percent.

Additionally, the bill supports reducing community wildfire risks, carrying out forest restoration and stewardship activities (including watershed protection and restoration), conducting biochar demonstration projects, advancing technologies to address forest wildfires, and assisting wildland firefighters and their families.

“It’s really difficult with NEPA and the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) to get a burn approved,” says Dessert. “There’s so much red tape. The Fix Our Forest Act is the best land management bill we’ve seen in 100 years,” Dessert optimistically relates. “It passed the House on January 23rd and is in the Senate now.”

However, Dessert may have to temper his optimism as current predictions indicate it has only a 28 percent chance of being enacted. The outcome of the bill is critically influenced by last week’s Trump Administration layoff of 3,400 US Forest Service employees after the “deferred resignation” deadline passed.

The cuts amount to about 10 percent of the agency’s workforce. While firefighter jobs appear to be unaffected, other roles that support wildfire prevention are being cut. Employees who work on road and trail maintenance, timber production and watershed restoration are also impacted.

Harnessing Biomass

Biomass is organic material that comes from living or recently living organisms and that stores energy from the sun as chemical energy. Biomass can be used as a renewable energy source and to make products like biofuels, biogas, and bioethanol. Examples of biomass include plants, agricultural waste, wood and municipal waste.  

“California is the only state that really does biomass regeneration correctly,” says Dessert. “Biomass has a really negative connotation to it because southeast states and parts of Mexico are intentionally deforesting because their burns create electricity. Whereas, in California, biomass is a byproduct of the logging industry. Approximately 700,000 homes in the state depend on biomass for their electricity, which is 100 percent renewable.”

Dessert also thinks a wildfire resiliency strategy should be developed, which includes mechanical thinning of the forest and prescribed fire.

I received a photo from one of the burn bosses, Scot Steinbring from Torch Bearr, who has been educating local counties in Northern California to encourage prescribed fire.

“The photo shows a wildfire that went through a forest. Part of the forest was untreated, so there was no thinning, no mastication, no prescribed fire. Another part of the photo shows forest land that was only thinned. Lastly, it shows forest land that was thinned with prescribed fire, and that area had no damage. The fire didn’t go through it.”

Assessing Insurance Risk and Affordability

Regarding the nuts and bolts of fire insurance, Dessert says, “There are two different types of insurance underwriting. There’s case study and fieldwork, which is what we did that produces a real insurance policy, measuring real risk with affordable premiums to match that risk. The majority of the insurance industry that is pulling out of California plays insurance roulette, meaning they’re not doing the case study work needed to appropriate premium prices to the risk.”

“For the underwriting, we look at the insured’s years of experience,” says Dessert. “How many acres they actually manage, and how many burns they scheduled. We did real field research and real case studies using a total of 585 acres burned and reported the real risk analysis of each burn. No one has done that before because the premiums are relatively small, so large vendors are not going to go after this marketplace because there’s not enough revenue or agency commission off a $10,000 premium. So these stakeholders needed an agency that was open to solving a problem and really genuinely concerned about our environment.”

The policy covers general liability, pollution liability, and professional liability lines. Purchasing all three lines of coverage is strongly recommended for burn practitioners with a $1 million to $5 million liability coverage per occurrence, but it can be written up to $20 million. If a contractor is working on a property, the landowner can be listed as an additional insurer for free on the contractors’ insurance and vice versa. So, the contractors’ insurance would kick in first, and then the landowners’ insurance would sit on top of that. You have aggregate coverage, but they must be enrolled in the claims fund.

“After our year of research,” says Dessert, “we were concerned to see how many conservancies, land trusts, resource conservation districts, etc., don’t have proper insurance. We call it defective insurance, which means they don’t have insurance to cover the activities of work they actually do. It’s been an effort to explain to them that they may have 10 different policies, but if you read the general liability insurance agreement, it has exclusions for wildfires. Automobile coverage is excluded from wildfires, and there is no pollution coverage for smoke, soot or fume contaminants.”

“With SB 926, they can have a prescribed fire liability package that covers herbicide and pesticide application, landscape and trail construction, soil groundwater remediation, wetlands, contracting and all pollution exposures. That’s why the claims fund is necessary and why other states replicate the model,” says Dessert.

It’s important to understand that insurance only works if claims are paid out, and insurance underwriting only works if the risk is understood. And insurance companies are typically for-profit entities.

Millions of Acres Beneficially Burned May Equal Fewer Destructive Wildfires

“We need the US Forest Service to commit to prescribed burns of a million acres a year. Cal Fire needs to commit to a million acres a year, and then I think the private sector needs to commit to three million acres a year. That will set a California strategic goal of five million acres a year,” Dessert postulates.

“Fire history has a five to seven-year lifespan. If we can treat five million acres a year, we’re not going to have a wildfire for five to seven years. On that cycle, in 10 years, you’ve covered 50 million acres that are not going to have a large-scale wildfire,” Dessert predicts.

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^{Reporting on natural disasters is supported, in part, by a generous grant from the Institute for Nonprofit News.}