气候变化领域集成服务门户

Biden’s policies on climate change

In a memo for the Federation of American Scientists’ Day One Project, which collected dozens of expert proposals for the incoming administration, Gonzalez called on Biden to restore “good fire” to landscapes and devote money saved on firefighting to proactive land management and community protection. For a few hundred million dollars — rather than billion — this approach would reduce catastrophic fire and make ecosystems healthier, Gonzalez said.

Some of this could be achieved through executive action. Biden’s Interior and Agriculture departments could update the 19-year-old Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy to allow for more natural fires and intentional “prescribed burns.”

The nomination of Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.), a member of Pueblo of Laguna, to be the first Native American interior secretary makes advocates hopeful the agency will expand tribes’ rights to practice cultural burning, an effective land-management tool that has been used by the West’s Native communities for hundreds of years.

The president could strengthen the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s hazard mitigation programs, ensuring more funding to retrofit homes, clear out “defensible space” around communities, and insulate electric and water services from future fires. He also could call on all agencies to consider climate change resilience when they undertake infrastructure projects or issue grants.

This approach has been embraced by Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris. Last year, Harris, then a senator from California, sponsored a bill that would have directed FEMA to establish a $1 billion community wildfire defense grant and require the Forest Service to create a map of wildfire-prone neighborhoods. The bill never made it out of committee, but Kirin Kennedy, deputy legislative director for lands and wildlife at the Sierra Club, hopes it’s a preview of what could come from the Biden-Harris administration. Instead of trying to stop a force of nature, she said, “our focus should be on community protection … measures that can be helpful when the devastation inevitably occurs.”

The reference to forest “thinning” in Biden’s clean energy plan could be contentious. The idea of selectively removing trees from dense forests is appealing, because it can generate logging revenue while avoiding the smoke that comes with managed fires or prescribed burns. But some scientists and many environmental groups argue that thinning and similar “treatments” disrupt the ecology of forests without reducing wildfire severity.