Interior, working with the Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service, has taken steps to help manage perhaps the most daunting challenge to its resource protection mission—protecting lives, private property, and federal resources from the threats of wildland fire. But concerns remain. Interior also faces challenges in managing oil and gas operations on federal lands, adapting to climate change, and resolving natural resource conflicts through collaborative management. The wildland fire problems facing our nation continue to grow. The average annual acreage burned by wildland fires has increased by approximately 70 percent since the 1990s, and appropriations for the federal government’s wildland fire management activities tripled from about $1 billion in fiscal year 1999 to nearly $3 billion in fiscal year 2007. As we have previously reported, a number of factors have contributed to worsening fire seasons and increased firefighting expenditures, including an accumulation of fuels resulting from past land management practices; drought and other stresses, in part related to climate change; and an increase in human development in or near wildlands. While Agriculture’s Forest Service receives the majority of fire management resources, Interior agencies—the National Park Service (NPS); the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA); the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS); and, particularly, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM)—are key partners in responding to the threats of wildland fire. Consequently, most of our work and recommendations on wildland fire management address agencies in both departments. Specifically, we have called on the agencies to develop a cohesive strategy that identifies options and associated funding to reduce potentially hazardous vegetation and address wildland fire problems. In 1999, to address the problem of excess fuels and their potential to increase the severity of wildland fires and the cost of suppression efforts, we recommended that a cohesive strategy be developed to identify the available long-term options for reducing fuels and the associated funding requirements. Six years later, in 2005, we reiterated the need for a cohesive strategy and broadened our recommendation’s focus to better address the interrelated nature of fuel reduction efforts and wildland fire response. In January 2009, agency officials told us they were working to create such a cohesive strategy, although they could not provide an estimate of when it would be completed. establish clear goals and a strategy to help contain wildland fire costs. In 2007, we reported that the agencies were taking a number of steps intended to help contain wildland fire costs, but had not clearly defined cost-containment goals or developed a strategy for achieving those goals. Agency officials identified several documents that they believed provide clearly defined goals and objectives that make up Interior’s strategy to contain costs. However, the documents lack the clarity and specificity officials in the field need to help manage and contain wildland fire costs. We therefore continue to believe that our recommendations, if effectively implemented, would help the agencies better manage their cost-containment efforts and improve their ability to contain wildland fire costs. continue to improve their processes for allocating fuel reduction funds and selecting fuel reduction projects. Also in 2007, we identified several shortcomings in the agencies’ processes for allocating fuel reduction funds to field units and selecting fuel reduction projects, shortcomings that limited the agency’s ability to ensure that funds are directed where they will reduce risk most effectively. While Interior has taken steps to improve its processes for allocating fuel reduction funds and the information it uses in selecting fuel reduction projects, we believe that Interior must continue these efforts so that it can more effectively use its limited fuel reduction dollars. take steps to improve its use of a new interagency budgeting and planning tool. In 2008, we reported on the Forest Service’s and Interior’s development of a new planning tool known as fire program analysis (FPA). FPA was intended, among other things, to allow the agencies to analyze potential combinations of firefighting assets, and potential strategies for reducing fuels and fighting fires so that they could determine the most cost-effective mix of assets and strategies. While recognizing that FPA represents a significant step forward and shows promise in achieving certain of its objectives, we believe the agencies’ approach to FPA’s development hampers it from meeting other key objectives. We made a number of recommendations designed to enhance FPA and the agencies’ ability to use it, and Interior, in conjunction with the Forest Service, has identified several steps it is considering taking to do so. It is not yet clear how successful these steps will be. Furthermore, the steps the agencies outlined do not address all the shortcomings we identified. We continue to believe agency improvements are essential if the full potential of FPA is to be realized. The number of oil and gas operations that are permitted by BLM for access to federal oil and gas resources has increased dramatically—more than quadrupling from fiscal year 1999 to fiscal years 2006 and 2007—in part as a result of the desire to reduce the country’s dependence on foreign sources of oil and gas. In June 2005, we reported that BLM has struggled to deal with the increase in the permitting workload while also carrying out its responsibility to mitigate the impacts of oil and gas development on land that it manages. Overall, BLM officials told us that staff had to devote increasing amounts of time to processing drilling permits, leaving less time to ensuring the mitigation of the environmental impacts of oil and gas development. While the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriation Act of Fiscal Year 2008 required BLM to charge a $4,000 processing fee for drilling permits, the act provided that the appropriation for permit processing would be reduced by the amount of fees received; thus the fee did not provide any additional resources for BLM to increase its monitoring and enforcement activities for oil and gas development. In its fiscal year 2009 budget request, BLM requested authority to (1) permanently implement a cost recovery fee for processing applications for permits to drill, (2) set the cost recovery fee at $4,150 for fiscal year 2009, and (3) deposit the revenues generated from the cost recovery fee in BLM’s Service Charges, Deposits and Forfeitures Account. BLM estimated the cost recovery fee would generate $34 million for fiscal year 2009. Within the energy and minerals budget for fiscal year 2009, BLM also requested a net increase of $7.8 million for oil and gas activities. Just as we have had concerns about BLM’s protection of environmental resources from oil and gas activities, we have had concerns, as we reported in 2003, that FWS’s oversight of oil and gas operations on wildlife refuge lands was not adequate. For example, we found that some refuge managers took extensive measures to oversee operations and enforce environmental standards, while others exercised little or no control. Such disparities occurred for two primary reasons. First, FWS had not officially determined its authority to require permits—which would include environmental conditions to protect refuge resources—of all oil and gas operations in refuges; we believe the agency has such authority. Second, refuge managers lacked guidance, adequate staffing levels, and training to properly oversee oil and gas activities. We also found that FWS was not collecting complete and accurate information on damage to refuge lands as a result of oil and gas operations and not identifying the steps needed to address that damage. In June 2007, we reported that the FWS had generally not taken sufficient actions to address five of the six recommendations we had made in 2003 to improve FWS’s management and oversight of oil and gas activities on national wildlife refuges. A growing body of evidence shows that increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases—primarily carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide—in the Earth’s atmosphere have resulted in a warmer global climate system, among other changes. In August 2007, we reported that, according to experts, federal land and water resources are vulnerable to a wide range of effects from climate change, some of which are already occurring. These effects include (1) physical effects, such as droughts, floods, glacial melting, and sea level rise; (2) biological effects, such as increases in insect and disease infestations, shifts in species distribution, and changes in the timing of natural events; and (3) economic and social effects, such as adverse impacts on tourism, infrastructure, fishing, and other resource uses. BLM, FWS, and NPS have not made climate change a priority, and the agencies’ strategic plans do not specifically address it. To better enable federal resource management agencies to take into account the existing and potential future effects of climate change on federal resources, we recommended that the Secretary of the Interior and two other departments develop guidance incorporating agencies’ best practices that advises managers on how to address climate change effects on the resources they manage. Interior and the other agencies generally agreed with our recommendation. The effects of a warmer climate have been clearly evident in Alaska. In December 2003, we reported that coastal villages in Alaska are becoming more susceptible to flooding and erosion in part because rising temperatures cause protective shore ice to form later in the year, leaving the villages vulnerable to fall storms. In addition, rising temperatures in recent years have led to widespread thawing of the permafrost (permanently frozen subsoil that is found in over approximately 80 percent of Alaska), causing serious damage. At that time, we found that flooding and erosion affects 184 out of 213, or 86 percent, of Alaska Native villages to some extent, and four villages in imminent danger planned to relocate. Interior’s management of its vast federal estate is largely characterized by the struggle to balance the demand for greater use of its resources with the need to conserve and protect them for the benefit of future generations. In February 2008, we reported that conflicts over the use of our nation’s natural resources, along with increased ecological problems, has led land managers to seek cooperative means to resolve natural resource conflicts and problems. Collaborative resource management is one such approach that communities began using in the 1980s and 1990s.