California Must Move Faster on Wildfire Risk, Experts Warn

Fire risk experts cautioned California lawmakers this week that the state needs to change course to both survive and bounce back from wildfires and other natural catastrophes.

At the state Capitol on Tuesday, Nancy Watkins, an actuary at financial adviser Milliman who specializes in fire risk and insurance, counseled lawmakers that the state needs to stop “nibbling around the edges.”

“Nobody is going to save California from our decisions,” she said. “The state has to really step in and be more strategic about how to make things happen faster.”

In a statement on Wednesday, state Sen. Steve Padilla, D-San Diego, and Sen. Josh Becker, D-Menlo Park, said they would study the report’s findings and develop a plan to help strengthen recovery efforts and protect residents from rising energy and insurance costs.

“This work is essential,” Becker said. “We must advance reforms that protect access to insurance, lower costs, support wildfire resilience, and provide fair outcomes for those impacted — while ensuring our utilities are both accountable for safety and financially stable enough to attract low-cost capital on behalf of ratepayers.”

Wildfires over the past decade have driven up home insurance rates and made coverage harder to obtain in many parts of California. In response, the state has invested heavily in firefighting capacity, early fire-detection technology and vegetation management. But Watkins told legislators those efforts alone are not enough.

“The buildup of wildfire risk is a state and a local issue. It’s arising from climate change, it also arises from decades of decisions that we’ve made on land use, building, fire suppression, and decades of regulatory decisions,” Watkins said.

Watkins said the state should focus more heavily on making communities less vulnerable to wildfire by making them less ready to burn, rather than relying primarily on detecting and extinguishing fires quickly.

“We cannot address this problem through ignition reduction, fuel reduction, or fire suppression, and we definitely can’t get it just through early detection. This all has to include home hardening and defensible space within communities at a much, much greater scale than has been done,” Watkins said.

Watkins recently co-authored an article with Michael Wara of the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University and Dave Winnacker, wildfire policy adviser of the Western Fire Chiefs Association, which outlined a roadmap for reducing wildfire risk in California.

In an email to KQED, Watkins said the paper was intended to give policymakers “explicit, tangible steps” to better protect communities and reduce the state’s growing wildfire exposure.