Managing public lands requires a new kind of leader

Abstract

Our ecosystems are facing unprecedented rates of change from climate and climate-driven disturbances and, at least for public lands in the western US, the administrative systems we have created to manage them cannot keep pace with the changes. The Garnet Fire began on August 24, 2025, in the southern Sierra Nevada of California. On August 31 it entered the Teakettle Experimental Forest and burned through much of the forest over the next 24 hours. Nearly 30 years of experimental work has been conducted at Teakettle, including most recently a planned 3,200-acre (~1,295-hectare) prescribed burn to try to understand how reintroducing fire into this ecosystem, which had been impacted by insect pests, heat, and drought, would alter ecosystem carbon dynamics. Unfortunately, that prescribed burn did not occur prior to the Garnet Fire because we have created land management institutions that are risk averse.

Risk is generically defined as the product of the probability an event occurs and the consequence of its impact. As a species, we appear to be poorly equipped for detecting changes in the probability of various events occurring as a function of changing climatic conditions. This holds for how many land management agencies respond to changing conditions. Increasingly, tools such as the resist–accept–direct framework are being considered in a land management context. However, there are many administrative impediments to accepting and directing change and, especially at system boundaries, resistance is untenable. We believe that a contributing factor is that leaders within land management agencies are discouraged from strategic risk taking. One example is that of fire management where intentionally lighting a prescribed fire has substantial downside potential because of the impacts when the inevitable escape occurs. Whereas, waiting for a wildfire to start and then responding with full suppression carries no risk in terms of liability or negative perception because the land manager is not considered responsible for the consequences of the fire, even for the approximately 2% of ignitions that burn most of the land area in the western US. How then do we shift our relationship with risk such that strategic proactive management that has downside potential is rewarded?

In the case of wildfire, we believe part of the answer lies in tying the consequences of unintentional wildfire outcomes to prior management decision making. For example, when the consequences of a wildfire include loss of buildings or major watershed-scale impacts, we need to ask two questions—what a priori management could have altered the severity of the consequences, followed by why was that management not implemented in the past decade? If the answer to the first question is that a management activity could have moderated the effects of the wildfire and the answer to the second question is anything other than “insufficient funding”, we need to require that management unit to undertake a thorough review of their actions. This is the “stick”, so to speak, that can help to encourage more proactive land management. An example is culpability of wildfire smoke. If a land management agency fails to implement an approved plan to reduce hazards at necessary scales, then air quality agencies should fine that agency for smoke-related impacts, including premature deaths, from subsequent wildfire, rather than follow the standard practice of holding no one responsible for this smoke. The “carrot” lies in the evaluation and reward structure. We need to incentivize outcomes rather than set arbitrary targets. National Forest managers have timber targets where they must cut some volume of timber over some time period, and leadership is in part evaluated based on meeting their targets. One could argue that we just need to have targets for wildfire mitigation. Yet, targets alone still may not get us where we need to be because oftentimes the places on the landscape where risk is greatest are locations where management is challenging. Therefore, evaluating leaders based on a target—e.g., acres burned by prescribed fire—does not necessarily mean that the most important areas will be managed first.

This type of approach will require substantial change in selecting and evaluating leaders in land management. Generic evaluation criteria will need to be replaced with outcomes-based evaluation criteria—e.g., how did the acres treated contribute to achieving the management unit objectives associated with reducing the risk of high-severity fire? Appraisal of leaders against outcomes-based criteria will need to occur over a multi-year window to allow for the fact that prescribing fire and managing natural ignitions for resource benefits both require particular meteorological conditions. To effect such outcomes will necessitate organizational changes, from national offices down to local management units. If implemented, however, land management agencies will be better positioned to meet the challenges that are arising from rapid ecosystem change due to changing climate and disturbance regimes.