Researchers say they’ve found a misalignment between federal policy and public priorities. The current system focuses heavily on fire suppression, a reactive approach that responds to cases of emergency fire management needs when wildfires begin or start to spread.
The other part of wildfire management is in prevention, a more proactive approach that can potentially make wildfire situations more manageable. The UW survey has found so far that most people want to see more focus on this aspect.
However, this doesn’t mean the study suggests choosing one option over the other. Rather, it indicates a preference for altering how funding and resources are allocated to each strategy, the researchers say.
In 2023, the U.S. Forest Service spent $2.7 billion on fire suppression, compared to the $207 million spent across the nation for fire prevention that same year.
“Both methods are integral parts of effective wildfire management, and work in tandem to reduce the severity of wildland fire,” wrote Peri Brimley, one of the members of the research team who conducted the UW survey, in email correspondence with the Wyoming Tribune Eagle. “Unfortunately, suppression has been prioritized for nearly a century as the main method of wildfire management.”
Brimley sees this as unfortunate because she says the science shows that effective wildfire suppression is contingent on comprehensive wildfire prevention, which has historically not been executed this way.
According to the USFS, the century-old policy of wildfire suppression is one of the major factors that drives the increased extent, intensity and damage associated with the small number of large wildfires that are unable to be suppressed.
A 2015 Forest Service study identified some negative consequences of maintaining a need for a loop of suppressive response that simultaneously increases wildfire risk in the future.
Brimley made it clear in her email that the survey does not advocate choosing preventative efforts over suppressive, but rather, “effective wildfire management will recognize that suppression in the absence of prevention lends itself to forests that are not wildfire resilient and more prone to severe wildfire events.
“The ultimate goal of investing more in prevention is not to defund suppression, but to make future suppression efforts more ecologically and cost effective.”
A study published in July by Calvin Bryan of Colorado State University and Frederik Strabo and Matthew Reimer of the University of California at Davis provided large-scale empirical evidence of the cost-effectiveness of fuel-reduction treatments in mitigating wildfire damages, a key component of preventative wildfire management efforts.
It found that, between 2017 and 2023, fuel-reduction treatments significantly reduced wildfire spread and severity, avoiding an estimated $2.7 billion in damages by limiting structure loss, and reducing carbon dioxide emissions and dangerous particulate matter exposure. It estimated that each dollar invested in fuel-reduction treatments yields $3.42 in expected benefits.
Last year, Wyoming suffered severe wildfire damage at levels that had not been seen since 1988. Fires blazed across 840,000 acres in the state, quickly burning through the state’s $39 million Emergency Fire Suppression budget.
Currently, there is less acreage on fire, but more fires in the state than there were at this time last year, in the middle of a wildfire season that typically runs through the summer and fall.
According to wildfire.gov, there are five active fires in Wyoming currently larger than 1,000 acres, covering a total of 173,225 acres statewide.
To the south, in Colorado, more land has been scorched in 2025 already than between 2021 to 2024 combined. Nearly two dozen large wildfires have charred roughly 218,000 acres in Colorado so far this year, according to the Rocky Mountain Area Coordination Center.
The RMACC also estimates hundreds of millions of dollars in fire damages for both states already this year.
Jerod DeLay is the fire management officer for Wyoming’s Forestry Division. He said fire prevention efforts typically make wildfires easier to manage and hopefully reduce the size and cost of some of the fires, though it is always situational.
“There’s only so much money in prevention. So, you’re kind of forced to have to spend the money on the suppression side, where, if you put more on the preventive side, maybe we can reduce some of the impacts to some of the values out there,” he said. “That’s a juggling act.”
DeLay said that juggling act can look different, depending on factors like droughts and previous preventative efforts, adding that another prevention measure is public outreach to educate the public on safe fire practices outdoors.
Brimley predicts the UW survey will contribute to a larger collection of research on the topic of wildfire management when it is complete.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, the study began last surveying participants in June 2024. Participants are from all across the country, but primarily in the American West. Last year, there were just over 2,000 responses from across the country.
Following the outbreak of major wildfires across the West, including the Elk and Pack Trail fires in Wyoming — which burned more than 164,000 acres and cost more than $80 million to suppress — the NSF allocated funding for a series of follow-up surveys as part of the study, which took place earlier this year.
To date, there are more than 9,000 survey respondents.
Brimley could not release the findings from the 2024 study yet, as it is currently under review by a journal, and the other study is still in progress, so results from this year have yet to be analyzed. Preliminarily, she said her team observes that the public values and wants wildfire prevention.
© 2025 Wyoming Tribune-Eagle (Cheyenne, Wyo.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
