Trends in wildfire-related bills in California, 2001–2020

Abstract

California has recently experienced severe and destructive wildfire seasons, prompting new policy proposals from the California State Legislature. Here, we examine proposed state wildfire-related legislation from the ten two-year legislative sessions between 2001-2002 and 2019-2020 to track trends and factors influencing wildfire-related legislative priorities. We first use Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling to identify 29 wildfire topics from the text of 294 bills. We next determine the degree to which legislators’ backgrounds, legislative procedures, and bill intent are correlated with bill topic. We find individual correlations but no overarching correlations between legislators’ personal and political backgrounds (e.g., political party, legislative experience, home district, bipartisanship), legislative procedures (i.e., committee review, state mandates, urgency measures), and bill intent (i.e., wildfire stage, commemorative bill, focus on specific geographic area or vulnerable group) with bill topics. However, we find that successful bills are correlated with review by Appropriations Committees, review by multiple committees, and a focus on specific geographic location. In the 2019-2020 legislative session, bill passage was correlated with Democratic sponsorship. Legislators tend to propose bills related to the dominant challenge or crisis of that legislative session (such as loss of homeowners’ insurance coverage or need for more fuels management), indicating the reactiveness of the legislature to statewide issues with new proposed legislation. These findings provide important insights into how legislative priorities change over time and the policy enablers and barriers for urgent climate change adaptation. Our results indicate a potentially fundamental policy shift in response to recent wildfires in California.

Prescribed burning on private land: reflections on recent law reform in Australia and California

“…Current policies and reform proposals in NSW and California highlight challenges and opportunities for expanding the use of prescribed burning on private land as a climate adaptation strategy. The proposal and passage of new prescribed burn legislation reveals enthusiasm for fuel treatments among policymakers (Miller et al 2022). Recent proposals emphasise streamlining vegetation clearing regulations in NSW, addressing liability concerns in California, and beginning to recognise and promote cultural burning in both jurisdictions.…”

“…Finally, recent law reforms in California reveal nascent legislative recognition for First Nations' cultural knowledge and fire management practices (Ansell et al 2020;California Assembly Bill 642 2021). The 2021-2022 legislative session featured the first recognition in law of the value of cultural fire for First Nations communities in California, and some limited legislative recognition of particular barriers to cultural burning (California Assembly Bill 642 2021; California Senate Bill 332 (SB332) 2021; Miller et al 2022). The impact of fire suppression policies on First Nations communities was acknowledged in proposed legislation prior to the 2021-2022 legislative session, but those bills did not propose new measures to support or expand cultural burning.…”

“…These reforms are not comprehensive and do not address many challenges that First Nations researchers have highlighted, including inadequate resourcing and inconsistencies and technicalities in permitting processes (Clark et al 2021). However, they appear to signal a new willingness from the legislature to begin to recognise cultural fire management and perhaps, through future reform, to support and promote its use (Miller et al 2022).…”

Fracking Twitter: Utilizing machine learning and natural language processing tools for identifying coalition and causal narratives

“…They find that pre‐existing worldviews are strong determinants of how individuals cognitively absorb certain narratives over others. Miller and others (2022) used topic modeling to examine 294 bills introduced to the California State Legislature on wildfire management over ten years, identifying the topic structure of proposed legislation.…”