Oregon spans roughly 63 million acres. About 30 million acres – nearly half of the state – is forestland, including both public and private forests, and is increasingly prone to fires.
Wildfires have become a defining force across our landscape. In 2020, 1 million acres of forest burned in Oregon, including a majority on Oregon’s usually wetter west-side of the Cascades. These fires devastated the cities of Detroit, Gates, Idanha, Phoenix and Talent, among others. In Oregon’s record-breaking 2024 fire season, about 1.9 million acres burned, shattering previous state records and dwarfing long-term averages. Even more moderately severe seasons still see hundreds of thousands of acres affected – in 2025, roughly 350,000 acres burned by mid-October, despite cooler, wetter conditions later in the year.
Although forests make up about half of the state’s land, they disproportionately account for the majority of fire-damaged acres in most years. If highly destructive fire seasons like the 2-million-acre-2024-season were to become the norm, the cumulative losses to forestlands in just a few years could be enormous, profoundly reshaping Oregon’s ecosystems, cities and towns, tourism, timber economy, and more.
This trajectory underscores not just a forestry management challenge, but a broader climate and land-use reality: longer fire seasons, hotter and drier conditions, and more intense wildfire behavior are changing what it means to steward Oregon’s forests in the 21st century – pushing land managers and policymakers to rethink how forests are valued, funded, protected, and regenerated.
In 2024 and early 2025, the Oregon Wildfire Sustainable Funding Work Group brought together a broad cross-section of Oregon: state agencies, local governments, tribes, landowners, fire professionals, conservation groups, utilities, insurers, and public health voices. Convened by the Oregon Department of Forestry and the State Fire Marshal and facilitated by Oregon Consensus, the group met through an exhausting fire season to confront a hard truth: Oregon’s wildfire funding-and-fighting system is being asked to perform at the current 21st-century scale but with a 20th-century funding model.
What distinguished this effort from past efforts was not just the ever-increasing strain on Oregon’s funding system given larger, more severe and more frequent fires, but also the collaborative discipline it required. Thirty-five members worked through a structured process of shared learning, principle-setting, brainstorming, and winnowing. They deliberated on more than 70 ideas before narrowing to a small set of funding recommendations that aligned with their shared principles. Importantly, the group did not chase a single “silver bullet” – because there is none. Instead, they converged on a comprehensive funding portfolio that balances mitigation, readiness, and response and reflects shared responsibility across all who benefit from a safer, more resilient Oregon.
The group also surfaced deeper system mismatches, e.g., outdated land classification, strained local fire districts, and funding mechanisms that no longer align with where people live or how fire moves across the landscape.
At a larger level, this work reflects a growing shift in public governance. As risks become more complex and interdependent, durable solutions increasingly emerge not from unilateral expertise, not from litigation, but from sustained, well-facilitated collaboration. In that sense, the wildfire funding effort is about more than fire: it is a living example of how Oregon is learning to solve complex challenges through collaborative governance in an era of chronic risk, fiscal constraint, and shared fate.
