The Los Angeles Fires, with Yanjun (Penny) Liao, David Wear, and Matthew Wibbenmeyer

Notable Quotes

• Why the Los Angeles wildfires have been so destructive: “[There] are really … three primary factors that I would point to that are driving the fires of the past month: climate change, fuels, and growth in the wildland-urban interface.” —Matthew Wibbenmeyer (11:05)
• Options for limiting the fuels that spread wildfires: “In general, there are two ways to reduce fuels: either by doing prescribed burning—introducing some low-intensity fire to the landscape on a more frequent basis—or cutting and removing vegetation, which is what foresters call ‘mechanical fuel treatment.’” —David Wear (13:37)
• Individual measures compound to mitigate wildfire risk and damage: “Individual homeowners tend to do too little if left to their own voluntary effort. And part of the reason is that wildfires primarily spread in communities through embers going from one burning building to the next building and other buildings nearby. So, if I fireproof my home, it’s going to benefit my neighbors, as well. If we coordinate these practices across the entire community, the combined effect will be greater than individual efforts.” —Penny Liao (18:08)

Top of the Stack

• “From Catastrophe to Caution: The Effect of Wildfires on Community Hazard Mitigation Investments” by Yanjun (Penny) Liao, Simon Sølvsten, and Zachary Whitlock
• “Insurance Availability and Affordability under Increasing Wildfire Risk in California” by Yanjun (Penny) Liao, Margaret A. Walls, Matthew Wibbenmeyer, and Sophie Pesek
• “Changing Hazards, Exposure, and Vulnerability in the Conterminous United States, 2020–2070” by David N. Wear, Travis Warziniack, Claire O’Dea, and John Coulston
• California Community Foundation
• World Central Kitchen
• Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation
• Grassroots Wildland Firefighters

The Full Transcript

Margaret Walls: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future (RFF). I’m your host, Margaret Walls. My guests today are three RFF scholars with expertise on wildfires: Yanjun (Penny) Liao, Matt Wibbenmeyer, and Dave Wear. Our episode today is all about the catastrophic wildfires that struck Los Angeles County recently.

As background, several wildfires burned out of control in Los Angeles, beginning on January 7. The two main fires were the Palisades and Eaton Fires. The Palisades Fire, which struck the Pacific Palisades community near Malibu, was the largest of the fires at about 24,000 acres. The Eaton Fire burned just over 14,000 acres in the hills near Pasadena, mainly impacting the community of Altadena. We’re recording on January 21, just so you know, and an estimated 10,000 structures were destroyed, and 27 people died. There were a few other smaller fires that also did damage. As of this morning, the Palisades Fire was about 63 percent contained, and the Eaton Fire was 89 percent contained. They’re still burning.

These fires were really devastating, because unlike a lot of wildfires, they burned a significant number of homes and other developed properties. More than half of the structures, homes, and businesses in the Palisades were destroyed. At the height of the fires, over 170,000 people had been ordered to evacuate.

Today, we’re going to learn a bit more about those fires, why they happened, how they compare to others we’ve experienced in recent years, what the overall trends are, and what we can do about this growing problem. We’ll talk about public lands management, community hazard-mitigation activities, and growing wildfire exposure in the “WUI,” or the wildland-urban interface. We’ll also talk about insurance and the challenges we’re seeing in insurance markets in California and elsewhere. Stay with us.

Hello, Penny, Matt, and Dave. Welcome to Resources Radio. Thanks so much for taking time to come on the show.

Matt Wibbenmeyer: It’s great to be here.

Yanjun (Penny) Liao: Thanks for having us.

David Wear: Glad to be here.

Margaret Walls: I gave a bit of background on the fires in my introduction, but let’s dive a bit deeper. Matt, I’m going to turn to you for this, if you don’t mind. Can you tell us a bit more about what we know about these fires and how they started? How in the world we had such a huge destructive event, or multiple events, in January, which is well past the normal fire season? What made these fires a little different from others we’ve experienced?

Matt Wibbenmeyer: Well, as you mentioned, we’re recording on January 21, and as of now, investigations into what ignited these fires are still ongoing. We don’t know for certain what caused the two most damaging fires, the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire. But in the case of the Eaton Fire, it may have been caused by electrical equipment, which has become one of the usual suspects in some of the most damaging fires in California in recent years. The Palisades Fire seems to be a little bit different. Power lines in the area where the fire is thought to have begun are buried underground. So, it’s unlikely that that fire was started by power lines. The week before the severe fire weather began in Southern California, there had been a very small fire in the area near the ignition site for the Palisades Fire, and that fire was thought to have been extinguished.

One possibility is that small embers from that fire were buried underground and remained burning over that week between that fire and the start of the Palisades Fire. And then, when winds picked up, the fire could have reemerged. But the ignition site is also near a popular hiking trail, and investigators haven’t ruled out possible human causes—things like fireworks, a campfire, or even arson.

An important note, though, that I want to emphasize is that when conditions are ripe for extreme wildfires to occur, there’s often some source of ignition that enables them to occur and to spread. In some ways, the real culprit for these fires was the conditions that facilitated them, perhaps more so than the actual ignitions.

With regards to conditions, the last two winters in Southern California were very wet. So, you might recall news of flooding in 2023 and 2024, and those wet conditions allowed growth of brush, which this year has become very dry due to eight consecutive months of near zero rainfall. Amid those conditions, we had this very extreme Santa Ana wind event. This kind of wind event has been behind many of California’s most destructive and deadly fires in recent years. And when these wind events occur, ignitions from power lines become more likely and ignitions that do occur can spread extremely quickly. So, in some ways, the fires that Los Angeles saw this week are similar to some of the most damaging fire events in recent years, like the Camp Fire and the Tubbs Fire, which destroyed over 5,000 homes in Santa Rosa in 2017, in that they were all driven by these extreme, downslope wind events. What really distinguishes this event from some of these others is the magnitude of the losses, which has been exacerbated by the fact that these fires burned through some of the highest-value real estate in the country. The disruption these have caused is in part due to the fact that these are occurring in very dense urban areas in Los Angeles County and the fact that we had several of these historically damaging fires occurring at the same time, which was really a stress on firefighting resources.

Margaret Walls: Thanks for all that background. That’s really helpful. Matt, I’ll ask you to expand a little bit here and talk about overall trends in wildfires in the United States. I think most people can feel it by reading news stories that we’re having more of these kinds of events, but tell us about the trends, and what are the factors that are contributing to those trends?

Matt Wibbenmeyer: The fires of this past month have really been consistent with the trend of increasing wildfire activity in the western United States over the past several decades. There are three primary factors that are really driving these trends. First, it’s notable that these fires occurred during January. In the past, January wouldn’t have generally been part of wildfire season in California, but climate change is creating drier conditions, and it’s causing fire to more frequently extend into parts of the year that it typically has not. For one, this creates more opportunities for fire, with the fire season being longer. But in California, this also extends the fire season into times of year when there can be hazardous downslope winds like the Santa Ana winds in Southern California, which can drive these really devastating fire events. So, we know that climate change does play a significant role in this increasing wildfire activity.

The other main factor is accumulation of fuels on the landscape. I mentioned accumulation of fuels in Southern California due to the past several wet winters in that region. Buildup of burnable fuels on the landscape has contributed to fire trends in the rest of the western United States, as well. So, in the western United States over the past 100-plus years, there’s been an effort, initially spearheaded by the US Forest Service, to keep fire off the landscape. In dry forests of the western United States—you can think of ponderosa pine forests of the Sierras—that’s resulted in a buildup of vegetation beyond what would’ve been historically normal in those forests. Couple that buildup with fuels, with dry conditions caused by climate change, and this accumulated vegetation can now fuel very extreme wildfire events.

One thing I want to be careful about here, though, is how this story around accumulation of fuels relates to the recent California fires. It’s important that the areas burned in those fires were not predominantly forest. This was chaparral shrubland. And so, although fuels were certainly a factor in the Los Angeles fires, the role of fire exclusion in contributing to those fuels can really vary across ecosystems.

The last factor contributing to increasingly damaging fires is an increasing number of homes in places at risk of fires. As we mentioned earlier, fire scientists call these areas the “wildland-urban interface,” and the number of people living in this kind of area has grown significantly over the past several decades. People tend to live in these areas either because they’re looking for more affordable housing or, more likely in the case of the Los Angeles fires, because they want to be around nice amenities, nice views, and nice scenery. But when a larger number of people live in these areas, the fires that occur there are more likely to be destructive.

Those are really the three primary factors that I would point to that are driving the fires of the past month: climate change, fuels, and growth in the wildland-urban interface.

Margaret Walls: Gotcha. So, let me turn to you, Dave. Now that Matt has mentioned this point about fuels build-up on the lands—these fires started, as many do, on public lands. I think the Palisades Fire was on conservation lands owned by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, but I’m pretty sure that the Eaton Fire was on Forest Service land. So, the management of those lands has been such over the years that there’s been a buildup of fuels.

Can you talk about what the Forest Service and other land management agencies are trying to do now to combat this problem and what some of the challenges are? I know, of course, this setting, especially the Palisades, is a little different—Matt mentioned the Chaparral, and we’re going to come back to that in a minute—but just talk about this fuels-treatment issue and public lands management, if you could.

David Wear: Sure, Margaret. I guess I’ll just start by saying that in California and across most of the West, a majority of native vegetation is found on public lands. For example, in California, the federal government alone controls about 60 percent of all forestland. The great challenge for public land managers today is managing vegetation in a way that enhances the resilience of forest and wildlands but, at the same time, reduces the likelihood of catastrophic wildfires, either by reducing the amount of flammable vegetation through some kind of fuel treatment or breaking up the contiguity of fuels—breaking up the ability of forests to spread fire and doing this at a scale that can make a difference in how wildlands actually deliver hazards to communities. I think it’s safe to say that in the West, wildfire resilience has become the primary focus of public forest management.

As Matt points out, this is a case where one size does not fit all. The chaparral ecotype of the Los Angeles Basin is distinct from mixed conifer forests in Northern California or in other parts of the West. Specific management strategies always need to be tailored to match ecological conditions, things like the natural fire frequency that one would typically observe in these different ecotypes.

But in general, there are two ways to reduce fuels: either by doing prescribed burning—introducing some low-intensity fire to the landscape on a more frequent basis—or cutting and removing vegetation, which is what foresters call “mechanical fuel treatment.”

There are challenges to getting this done at a meaningful scale. First, there’s just a huge backlog of high-hazard forests that need fuel treatment. And the Forest Service estimates that there’s at least 50 million acres of critical need in the western United States. There are fewer and fewer days within a year when prescribed burning can be safely applied to the landscape.

As we look at various climate models, it’s pretty clear that we’re going to expect fewer and fewer days moving forward. Cutting and removing vegetation, the mechanical fuel treatments I mentioned, are by their nature very expensive. And then, having an effective treatment at the right scale, which is the landscape scale, requires coordinating treatments among several owners. That could be multiple agencies, but also private landowners, as well. All of these concerns or challenges are amplified in the wildland-urban interface where you have people commingled with the native vegetation.

I think it’s safe to say that getting ahead of the curve is going to be difficult and it’s going to require very large public investments. We’re beginning to see a response from the government. Expenditures for wildfire management have grown by an order of magnitude in just the last few years, both at the federal level and at the state level in California.

Margaret Walls: Thanks for that. I want to go off on a little bit of a tangent for a second here, Dave. I read some things that said the Indigenous peoples who were once on these chaparral lands in Southern California used fire regularly to ensure healthy ecosystems and preserve their access to food sources, hunting grounds, and the like. I heard a really interesting podcast on that. So, I think all over the western United States, we see Native American Tribes who’ve managed these lands in ways like this. Can you just say a little bit about that?

David Wear: As I see it, the traditional use of burning by Indigenous people all across North America reflects an understanding that we live in fire-adapted ecosystems, and fire plays an essential role in sustaining productivity and maintaining resilience to really big fires. So, as Matt mentioned, eliminating wildfire over long periods of time, as we’ve done in the West since 1910, takes these lands out of balance, and it sets the stage for explosive wildfires. So, part of our wildfire-management strategies—any kind of effective wildfire management, in effect—is emulating Indigenous burning by putting low-intensity fire back on the landscape where that’s practical and appropriate.

I think the emphasis is that there is no treatment strategy that will eliminate wildfire. And again, as I just mentioned, eliminating wildfire can lead to a backlash and some of the problems that we’re observing today, but the key is finding a way to live in fire-adapted ecosystems in a safe way.

Margaret Walls: That’s a good point.

We’ve talked about public lands management agencies. What about communities themselves in this wildland-urban interface area? What can and should they be doing in the realm of wildfire hazard mitigation?

Penny, I want to turn to you on this. What are some of the options? I’m going to ask you about the challenges, too. What are the challenges communities face in implementing them?

Penny Liao: Thanks for the question. There are a variety of measures homeowners can take to lower the fire risk on their properties by changing the built environment. They can do landscaping; they can clear the vegetation and any combustible materials surrounding their home to create defensible space. They can also harden their structures, such as by replacing their roof and window materials with more fireproof materials or replacing, for example, their wooden fences with metal ones.

What I really like about how you phrase this question is the emphasis on what communities can do, because individual homeowners tend to do too little if left to their own voluntary effort. And part of the reason is that wildfires primarily spread in communities through embers going from one burning building to the next building and other buildings nearby. So, if I fireproof my home, it’s going to benefit my neighbors, as well. So, if we coordinate these practices across the entire community, the combined effect will be greater than individual efforts.

Communities also have mitigation options at the community level. For example, clearing vegetation in communal areas and implementing fuel breaks surrounding the neighborhoods along the lines of prescribed burns. Those are going to help lower the risk of the fire spreading to the communities. They can also implement more resilient building codes or zoning practices to try to make sure that new developments in these areas have limited exposure to wildfire risk, to the extent possible. As mentioned previously by Matt, development in the wildland-urban interface is a major contributing factor to escalating wildfire damage in recent years.

You also asked about challenges. Obviously, all of these measures are costly, so communities could face financial constraints. They could face pushback from homeowners if they try to push them to implement some of these measures on their own properties. Homeowners sometimes don’t like how things look if you clear all the vegetation, or if they have to build with more expensive materials and things like that. It would require the community to have additional capacity in terms of manpower, as well, to carry out some of these activities that involve a lot of coordination.

Margaret Walls: Yeah. I want to ask you about a specific study you’ve done recently, Penny, and that was one that looked at the Firewise USA program. This is a voluntary program run by the National Fire Protection Association where communities agree to join, and they agree that they’ll adopt certain plans and practices, and in exchange, of course, they hopefully lower their risks of wildfire. But also, I believe that residents get some discounts on their insurance, which we’re going to talk about in just a minute. Can you tell us a little bit more about the Firewise program, how it works, and then what some of the findings in that study that you’ve recently published are?

Penny Liao: Sure. The main purpose of the Firewise USA program is to provide a framework for communities that has a series of practical steps that they can take for risk reduction. So, those communities that have met certain planning and implementation criteria are recognized as Firewise sites. And yes, recent California insurance regulation mandates that insurers should offer discounts to Firewise sites. It is important to note that the program does not have very high criteria. It requires one volunteer hour per unit included in this neighborhood annually.

This is not a very high standard, and actually, a lot of participating communities do more than that. So, it’s a pretty basic first step towards a comprehensive strategy. It does help create an organization within the community and a culture that engages with risk mitigation more seriously.

In this study, we are looking at factors that shape participation in the Firewise program, and we find that, in fact, participation is largely driven by communities responding to a recent wildfire. Communities tend to learn from wildfire experience, and they’re less inclined to preemptively invest in risk mitigation.

We also find this kind of response to be pretty uneven. We didn’t find any response from communities with a higher share of minority population, and this could be because they face greater barriers to engage in these activities and engage with the program. Or, because a lot of this is post-disaster response, they could have greater difficulties recovering from a wildfire in the first place.

Margaret Walls: Thanks for that. We’ll put a link to that study on our webpage here.

Let me talk about something a little beyond the actual fires themselves, and that’s smoke. So, I think we’re learning that air-pollution problems from wildfire smoke can occur thousands of miles from where a fire starts. Matt, I know you’ve thought about this problem a little. You have a couple of papers on smoke. Tell us a little bit more about the extent of the smoke problem and some of the challenges in addressing that.

Matt Wibbenmeyer: Thanks, Margaret. In general, direct damages from wildfires tend to get the most attention, as has been the case in the Los Angeles fires. But I think we’re learning more and more that, in general, the aggregate harms caused by wildfire smoke can be, perhaps, at least as big as direct damages from wildfires, like damages to structures. So, this may or may not have been the case in the recent Los Angeles fires, given how extensive those damages were, but I think, in general, we’re learning that damages from smoke can be quite big.

One of the primary pollutants in wildfire smoke is particulate matter finer than 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5). Wildfire smoke has accounted for more than 25 percent of overall exposure to PM2.5 across the United States in recent years. In some western states, wildfire smoke accounts for more than 50 percent of exposure. So, we have decades of research on PM2.5, and we understand its health impacts pretty well.

Because it’s so fine, PM2.5 can enter the bloodstream through the lungs, where it can spread throughout the body and lead to all kinds of respiratory and cardiovascular problems, especially for older people and the very young. And because, as you said, wildfire smoke can travel so far, it can cause these very serious impacts across a broad area. The evidence is accumulating that when you add all of these health effects up, they’re very large in size and, like I said, perhaps larger than direct damages from wildfires.

Still, there’s a lot we have to learn about health effects from wildfire smoke in particular, as distinguished from PM2.5 more generally. So, especially in cases like the Los Angeles fires, when wildfires lead to urban conflagrations, PM2.5 emissions can be accompanied by other co-pollutants released as homes and other things burn. These pollutants can include volatile organic compounds, lead, chlorine, or asbestos, and there’s just a lot we don’t know about the harmful effects of some of the smoke generated by this kind of wildfire in particular.

As far as doing something about wildfire smoke, the best thing we can do is try to mitigate wildfire hazard to try to reduce the potential for large and severe fires that cause the most smoke. But one of the challenges to doing this is that the United States’ primary tool for improving air quality, the Clean Air Act, doesn’t really address wildfire smoke. So, I have a paper coming out soon that addresses how the Clean Air Act could be adapted to help address this problem. But for now, the Clean Air Act is mostly silent on wildfire smoke.

Margaret Walls: Yeah, we’ll look forward to that paper.

I’m going to turn to the elephant in the room, and that’s insurance. Pretty soon, I think, once these fires die down a bit, insurance is going to be the biggest story.

Penny, let me turn to you. Can you just describe for our listeners what’s been going on in the California insurance market over the last few years? Let me preface this by making sure our listeners know that wildfire, just like a regular house fire, is typically covered in your standard homeowner’s insurance policy. Now tell us what has been going on in California.

Penny Liao: Sure. The situation really starts around 2017 and 2018, when we have two consecutive fire seasons that caused an unprecedented level of loss. California insurers were under great financial pressure, and they started to withdraw from parts of the state by dropping their existing customers and declining to offer new policies in certain areas. And later, many of them have declined to offer new policies in the state altogether. Even when they’re not dropped by their insurers, a lot of homeowners start to see a rapid increase in their premiums as well.

About three years ago, you, Matt, and I, as you know, wrote an issue brief looking at some of the patterns in insurance data from California. We find that insurer-initiated nonrenewals happen at a higher rate in the higher risk ZIP codes in the state. In some ZIP codes, it can go up to 30 percent, and that was in 2019.

In those areas, we also see the fastest premium increase and more people going to the California FAIR Plan, which is the state program that acts like the last-resort insurer. Our data only goes to 2019, but we know that all of these patterns have gotten significantly worse since then. Insurers continue to drop customers. State Farm, for example, dropped 1,600 policies in Pacific Palisades just last July.

The state insurance commissioner recently issued a major regulatory reform in an effort to reverse these trends. What the reform does is relax some of the key restrictions on rating in exchange for more coverage in high-risk locations, and insurers should offer discounts for risk-mitigation actions. The effect of these reforms is yet to be seen, but definitely, I think, the Los Angeles fires would complicate the picture.

Margaret Walls: Definitely. You mentioned the FAIR Plan, and people should understand most of those FAIR Plan policies provide more limited coverage than your standard homeowners insurance. Isn’t that right? I think they don’t have liability; they don’t have contents coverage. Am I right about that, Penny?

Penny Liao: Yeah, absolutely. We should think about the FAIR Plan as an imperfect substitute for regular homeowners insurance.

Margaret Walls: Right. Maybe I’ll put you all on the spot a little bit, because I really think these insurance issues are not limited to California; we have problems in other states that have high hazard risks, like Florida and Louisiana. So, I think these issues are not going anywhere. Can I ask you—I’ll start with you, Penny—what are you on the lookout for when it comes to insurance this year or in the near future? Do you think there’s going to be any big changes, either in state regulations or the role of the government, either state or federal, or anything like that? What are your thoughts?

Penny Liao: This is a really big problem, actually. There has been a lot of interest in Congress in terms of thinking through some of the solutions to support the provision of primary insurance. I’ve been looking into international experiences of what other countries are doing to support their insurers in catastrophic risk transfer. And there are various approaches that involve some public-private partnership. There could be public support to offer some kind of backstop so that it cuts off the tail part of the disaster losses for the insurers and things like that. I will continue to monitor what kind of discussions go on along the lines of these kinds of policy options.

Margaret Walls: I don’t know, Dave or Matt, if you want to add anything to that, or if you’re just watching it like I am.

David Wear: I might add that, in a recent RFF working paper that we released last month, we looked to the long-term projections of hazards of various types linked to climate change and find that, not only do we see a growing intensity of potential hazard in the western United States, but an expansion of wildfire hazard, especially into the southeastern quadrant of the country, with quite a bit of an expansion in the number of exposed communities, but also an expansion in the size of the vulnerable communities exposed to wildfire hazards. So, this is something that’s going to get bigger as we move forward.

Margaret Walls: Good point. Yeah.

Penny Liao: Margaret, here’s a question for you.

Margaret Walls: Okay.

Penny Liao: Beyond insurance payouts, there is government disaster aid that people and communities receive after a disaster strikes to help them recover. Do you know what’s happening with this for the Los Angeles fires?

Margaret Walls: Thanks Penny. I know a little bit. Of course, what happens is there’s a major disaster declaration, and that happened quite early on for these fires. And then, what happens then is that starts to release some federal funds. So, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) can give some immediate money out—up to $770—for what’s called Serious Needs Assistance. You have to apply within 30 days. I read that, in the middle of January, they’d already handed out $5.3 million of this kind of money. And then, what happens is there are damage assessments for properties, and FEMA will give some individual assistance to homeowners and renters. And then, there’s a lot of public assistance that goes to state and local governments to rebuild infrastructure.

So, we don’t know what that’s going to amount to yet. I would just say that the maximum amount of individual assistance you can get for your home for damage is $43,600. There is no way in the world it is ever going to rebuild these homes. It’s a drop in the bucket, a literal drop in the bucket, and you must turn to your insurance first. But it’s there to help, and you can get that same amount for loss of contents, as well. And then, they give you some temporary housing assistance. FEMA steps in and does a lot.

One of the questions that people might have is, because there’s been a lot of stories about this, whether FEMA has the money. I will say that the continuing resolution that passed in December, which kept the government running, did give FEMA about $29 billion for its Disaster Relief Fund. So, this is a fund that FEMA has to … They spend it quickly when a disaster strikes. It almost always runs out before the end of the fiscal year, even though FEMA provides monthly reports to Congress about it. A lot of times, they end up moving that money to some special category, which then keeps them from spending money somewhere else, and it’s a little bit of a mess.

I suspect that Congress—it may not happen for this disaster, but for something in 2025—Congress is going to have to pass a supplemental appropriations bill to give FEMA more money. I see that the state has stepped up, and the governor is proposing $2.5 billion. So, there’s a lot of money flowing already, and I suspect that it’s going to continue to flow.

Penny Liao: Yeah, that sounds about right. This is a really large-scale disaster.

Margaret Walls: Okay. Regular listeners know that we usually end our podcasts with what we call Top of the Stack, which is where we ask our guests to recommend a book or some other kind of reading materials or podcasts or anything. But today, we decided to change this up a little bit. I’m going to ask the folks here to give us some recommendations for where people can make donations to help the Los Angeles communities and to help firefighters and anything that they want to recommend. Matt, let me turn to you first. Do you have an organization you’d like to recommend?

Matt Wibbenmeyer: Yeah. Thanks, Margaret. This was a great idea to do this change-up. One place you can direct your donation dollars is an organization called the California Community Foundation. This is a community foundation in Los Angeles County that funds a variety of smaller organizations that are engaged in addressing various pressing issues around the county.

The California Community Foundation maintains a wildfire-recovery fund, which they’ve maintained since 2003, and they’ve of course activated it for this last month’s events. And that recovery fund is really directed towards helping communities rebuild in the medium to longer term after some of the very short-term aid needs have been fulfilled. They’re focused on helping the communities rebuild in the medium to longer term. The fund has already awarded more than $15 million to local community organizations like churches and social service centers, which are needed even more during times of disaster. Some of these organizations have even experienced losses themselves; churches destroyed, and that kind of thing. So, this is a great place to send your money, I think.

Margaret Walls: Awesome. That’s great. Penny, do you want to add an organization?

Penny Liao: One of the first organizations that I noticed that is helping in the area is World Central Kitchen, perhaps because of the Washington, DC, connection. It was founded by José Andrés after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and they have been pretty active in disaster-relief efforts ever since. They’re working with local restaurants to provide meals to first responders and the public. So far, they have distributed 200,000 meals.

Margaret Walls: That’s great. Awesome. Dave, how about you? Do you have an organization you want to recommend?

David Wear: Another place to take a look at is the Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation, who’s currently funding a number of emergency needs within the Los Angeles area and focused on maintaining safety and funding critical programs for fire departments and firefighters in that area.

Margaret Walls: That’s great. We’ve got a diversity of organizations here, and I’ve got one more to add. I’m going to thank our producer, Elizabeth Wason, for this, and that’s the Grassroots Wildland Firefighters. This is an organization that works with the federal wildland-firefighting workforce, and their mission is to promote and advocate for that workforce, improve pay and working conditions, and also to educate the public about solutions to this problem.

So, the federal wildfire workforce, the state, and the locals are all fighting in this case, as they often do. We’ll put links to all of these organizations on our website, and we hope that you’ll find it in your hearts to donate.

So, Penny Liao, Matt Wibbenmeyer, and Dave Wear, it’s been a pleasure having you all on Resources Radio to talk about the recent Los Angeles wildfires, wildfire issues more broadly, policies, insurance issues, and everything else. It’s a complex problem. Thanks so much for making the time to come on the show.

Matt Wibbenmeyer: Thanks, Margaret.

Penny Liao: Thanks.

David Wear: Thanks for putting this together.

Margaret Walls: You’ve been listening to Resources Radio, a podcast from Resources for the Future (RFF). If you have a minute, we’d really appreciate you leaving us a rating or comment on your podcast platform of choice. Also, feel free to send us your suggestions for future episodes.

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