Wildland fire triggered by lightning is a normal, inevitable, and necessary ecological process that nature uses to periodically remove excess undergrowth, small trees, and vegetation to renew ecosystem productivity. However, various human land use and management practices, including several decades of fire suppression activities, have reduced the normal frequency of wildland fires in many forest and rangeland ecosystems and have resulted in abnormally dense and continuous accumulations of vegetation that can fuel uncharacteristically large and intense wildland fires. Such large intense fires increasingly threaten catastrophic ecosystem damage and also increasingly threaten human lives, health, property, and infrastructure in the wildland-urban interface. Federal researchers estimate that vegetative conditions that can fuel such fires exist on approximately 190 million acres––or more than 40 percent––of federal lands in the contiguous United States but could vary from 90 million to 200 million acres, and that these conditions also exist on many nonfederal lands. Our reviews over the last 5 years identified several weaknesses in the federal government’s management response to wildland fire issues. These weaknesses included the lack of a national strategy that addressed the likely high costs of needed fuel reduction efforts and the need to prioritize these efforts. Our reviews also found shortcomings in federal implementation at the local level, where over half of all federal land management units’ fire management plans did not meet agency requirements designed to restore fire’s natural role in ecosystems consistent with human health and safety. These plans are intended to identify needed local fuel reduction, preparedness, suppression, and rehabilitation actions. The agencies also lacked basic data, such as the amount and location of lands needing fuel reduction, and research on the effectiveness of different fuel reduction methods on which to base their fire management plans and specific project decisions. Furthermore, coordination among federal agencies and collaboration between these agencies and nonfederal entities were ineffective. This kind of cooperation is needed because wildland fire is a shared problem that transcends land ownership and administrative boundaries. Finally, we found that better accountability for federal expenditures and performance in wildland fire management was needed. Agencies were unable to assess the extent to which they were reducing wildland fire risks or to establish meaningful fuel reduction performance measures, as well as to determine the cost- effectiveness of these efforts, because they lacked both monitoring data and sufficient data on the location of lands at high risk of catastrophic fires to know the effects of their actions. As a result, their performance measures created incentives to reduce fuels on all acres, as opposed to focusing on high-risk acres. Because of these weaknesses, and because experts said that wildland fire problems could take decades to resolve, we said that a cohesive, long- term, federal wildland fire management strategy was needed. We said that this cohesive strategy needed to focus on identifying options for reducing fuels over the long term in order to decrease future wildland fire risks and related costs. We also said that the strategy should identify the costs associated with those different fuel reduction options over time, so that the Congress could make cost-effective, strategic funding decisions. The federal government has made important progress over the last 5 years in improving its management of wildland fire. Nationally it has established strategic priorities and increased resources for implementing these priorities. Locally, it has enhanced data and research, planning, coordination, and collaboration with other parties. With regard to accountability, it has improved performance measures and established a monitoring framework. Over the last 5 years, the federal government has been formulating a national strategy known as the National Fire Plan, composed of several strategic documents that set forth a priority to reduce wildland fire risks to communities. Similarly, the recently enacted Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003 directs that at least 50 percent of funding for fuel reduction projects authorized under the act be allocated to wildland-urban interface areas. While we have raised concerns about the way the agencies have defined these areas and the specificity of their prioritization guidance, we believe that the act’s clarification of the community protection priority provides a good starting point for identifying and prioritizing funding needs. Similarly, in contrast to fiscal year 1999, when we reported that the Forest Service had not requested increased funding to meet the growing fuel reduction needs it had identified, fuel reduction funding for both the Forest Service and Interior quadrupled by fiscal year 2004. The Congress, in the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, also authorized $760 million per year to be appropriated for hazardous fuels reduction activities, including projects for reducing fuels on up to 20 million acres of land. Moreover, appropriations for both agencies’ overall wildland fire management activities, including preparedness, suppression and rehabilitation, have nearly tripled, from about $1 billion in fiscal year 1999 to over $2.7 billion in fiscal year 2004. The agencies have strengthened local wildland fire management implementation by making significant improvements in federal data and research on wildland fire over the past 5 years, including an initial mapping of fuel hazards nationwide. Additionally, in 2003, the agencies approved funding for development of a geospatial data and modeling system, called LANDFIRE, to map wildland fire hazards with greater precision and uniformity. LANDFIRE—estimated to cost $40 million and scheduled for nationwide implementation in 2009––will enable comparisons of conditions between different field locations nationwide, thus permitting better identification of the nature and magnitude of wildland fire risks confronting different community and ecosystem resources, such as residential and commercial structures, species habitat, air and water quality, and soils. The agencies also have improved local fire management planning by adopting and executing an expedited schedule to complete plans for all land units that had not been in compliance with agency requirements. The agencies also adopted a common interagency template for preparing plans to ensure greater consistency in their contents. Coordination among federal agencies and their collaboration with nonfederal partners, critical to effective implementation at the local level, also has been improved. In 2001, as a result of congressional direction, the agencies jointly formulated a 10-Year Comprehensive Strategy with the Western Governors’ Association to involve the states as full partners in their efforts. An implementation plan adopted by the agencies in 2002 details goals, time lines, and responsibilities of the different parties for a wide range of activities, including collaboration at the local level to identify fuel reduction priorities in different areas. Also in 2002, the agencies established an interagency body, the Wildland Fire Leadership Council, composed of senior Agriculture and Interior officials and nonfederal representatives, to improve coordination of their activities with each other and nonfederal parties. Accountability for the results the federal government achieves from its investments in wildland fire management activities also has been strengthened. The agencies have adopted a performance measure that identifies the amount of acres moved from high-hazard to low-hazard fuel conditions, replacing a performance measure for fuel reductions that measured only the total acres of fuel reductions and created an incentive to treat less costly acres rather than the acres that presented the greatest hazards. Additionally, in 2004, to have a better baseline for measuring progress, the Wildland Fire Leadership Council approved a nationwide framework for monitoring the effects of wildland fire. While an implementation plan is still needed for this framework, it nonetheless represents a critical step toward enhancing wildland fire management accountability. While the federal government has made important progress over the past 5 years in addressing wildland fire, a number of challenges still must be met to complete development of a cohesive strategy that explicitly identifies available long-term options and funding needed to reduce fuels on the nation’s forests and rangelands. Without such a strategy, the Congress will not have an informed understanding of when, how, and at what cost wildland fire problems can be brought under control. None of the strategic documents adopted by the agencies to date have identified these options and related funding needs, and the agencies have yet to delineate a plan or schedule for doing so. To identify these options and funding needs, the agencies will have to address several challenging tasks related to their data systems, fire management plans, and assessing the cost-effectiveness and affordability of different options for reducing fuels. The agencies face several challenges to completing and implementing LANDFIRE, so that they can more precisely identify the extent and location of wildland fire threats and better target fuel reduction efforts. These challenges include using LANDFIRE to better reconcile the effects of fuel reduction activities with the agencies’ other stewardship responsibilities for protecting ecosystem resources, such as air, water, soils, and species habitat, which fuel reduction efforts can adversely affect. The agencies also need LANDFIRE to help them better measure and assess their performance. For example, the data produced by LANDFIRE will help them devise a separate performance measure for maintaining conditions on low-hazard lands to ensure that their conditions do not deteriorate to more hazardous conditions while funding is being focused on lands with high-hazard conditions. In implementing LANDFIRE, however, the agencies will have to overcome the challenges presented by the current lack of a consistent approach to assessing the risks of wildland fires to ecosystem resources as well as the lack of an integrated, strategic, and unified approach to managing and using information systems and data, including those such as LANDFIRE, in wildland fire decision making. Currently, software, data standards, equipment, and training vary among the agencies and field units in ways that hamper needed sharing and consistent application of the data. Also, LANDFIRE data and models may need to be revised to take into account recent research findings that suggest part of the increase in wildland fire in recent years has been caused by a shift in climate patterns. This research also suggests that these new climate patterns may continue for decades, resulting in further increases in the amount of wildland fire. Thus, the nature, extent, and geographical distribution of hazards initially identified in LANDFIRE, as well as the costs for addressing them, may have to be reassessed. The agencies will need to update their local fire management plans when more detailed, nationally consistent LANDFIRE data become available.