Fighting the Burn

In spring 2025, TPL’s Northern Rockies Director David Weinstein and Hugh Coxe, a project manager and leader of our California wildfire resilience program, appeared on Past Forward’s The Fire Problem podcast. The series is billed as an educational program that explores the growing frequency and intensity of wildfires in California and around the world. Weinstein and Coxe spoke with host Jon-Barrett Ingels about how wildfires are influencing TPL’s approach to conservation. Throughout the hour-long conversation, they dug deep into the challenges wildfires present to our efforts to provide healthy, equitable outdoor spaces for all. (Listen to the full episode here.)

Here, we unpack some of the key takeaways from the conversation, with expanded details and commentary from Weinstein and Coxe about a threat that isn’t going to burn out anytime soon.

ON THE DRAMATIC INCREASE IN WILDFIRE FREQUENCY AND INTENSITY

DAVID WEINSTEIN: Climate change is an existential threat that affects everything we do. It keeps many people up at night. We’re learning that this is an all-hands-on-deck approach. Every organization, every business, every person has their own lane in which they can work to do better on behalf of the crisis we’re facing collectively.

Trust for Public Land works with communities across the country that are facing a wide range of climate impacts. Some confront harsher realities and more immediate risk, like California, but it’s now imperative everywhere to become proactive, not reactive. We hear a steady drumbeat of feedback from partners, local officials, and stakeholders who look to us for conservation-forward strategies.

One of our signature projects in California was conserving the land that holds the Hollywood Sign in Los Angeles. We did that in 2010, not only to protect a culturally significant landmark that was being threatened by development, but also to ensure incredible recreational access for residents and visitors to the city who can hike the sign’s Cahuenga Peak, now part of Griffith Park.

The most recent Los Angeles–based fires underscore that we safeguarded more than important iconography. That conservation effort, completed 16 years ago, created a buffer for communities that we serve who might have otherwise been in direct danger. It’s an example of what we are now looking at in nearly every project we undertake.

HUGH COXE: We are very focused on climate conservation—looking at all of our conservation and park projects through a climate lens, for the health of the land, the health of the wildlife, and the health of people. It takes a lot of different shapes and a lot of different forms.

Schoolyards are a great example. In L.A. and elsewhere, they’re generally paved in asphalt and often don’t have shade. They heat up quickly, sometimes reaching surface temperatures well over 120 degrees, and they retain and radiate that heat. At some schools, the heat anomaly—the difference in average temperature between the schoolyard and the surrounding city—exceeds 20 degrees.

So with TPL’s community schoolyards program, we find ways to transform the spaces, adding plenty of trees for shade and cooler surface materials. Places like these, that make neighborhoods healthier and more livable as the world heats up, will serve a lot of people, especially in urban areas.

In a very different approach, we look at large landscape-scale conservation to make sure that there’s refugia for wildlife—places that contain many well-connected microclimates with robust biodiversity. It’s important to know that those places will continue to be available and accessible to wildlife as climate change pushes them to higher elevations and shifts their migration paths.

One of our projects in the Transverse Ranges region, the Wind Wolves Preserve, is a great example. Ranging from 640 to 6,005 feet above sea level, the preserve includes an array of landscapes and habitats that serve as critical wildlife corridors and are home to numerous species, such as the San Joaquin kit fox and blunt-nosed leopard lizard.

So it really ranges. We’re looking at it, we’re mapping it, we’re analyzing the projects at the micro and macro scale. For example, a single, relatively small schoolyard delivers important outcomes at the micro, local level. When that approach is repeated and multiplied in cities and towns across the country, as we’re doing with our schoolyards program, that’s macro-scale systems change.

When it comes to our landscape work, we look at patterns in historical wildfire data and do future modeling to identify buffer zones with high potential for long-term resilience. The literature on climate change suggests you get spikier spikes, so to speak: The droughts are longer and more unforgiving; the wet years are wetter and last longer. And both of those can work to increase fire hazard. There’s quite a bit of evidence that these variations are going to be more extreme as a result of climate change. We’re always thinking about how to use land conservation as a natural solution to those effects.

DW: Fire ecology is becoming sophisticated enough to understand how TPL’s work can deliver preventative action and to make sure that communities are adapted and ready for these catastrophic wildfires. Everybody’s holding their breath. We all know that wildfires are going to continue to pop up, and they’re going to result in more loss of property and life. Communities can and should understand how wildfire moves from the backcountry into urban areas, and they should focus on hardening their built environments to protect themselves and their neighbors.

These catastrophic fires with the wind events that we’ve seen in places like California are pushing embers up to 5 miles, often across the wildland-urban interface into communities. We’re seeing more policies enacted around building standards, such as fire-resistant fencing design and material, shrubbery setbacks, covered vents on houses, and other solutions to harden homes against wildfire. We’re thinking more carefully about how people are building into the wildland-urban interface.

ON CLIMATE CHANGE AND FUNDING STRATEGIES

DW: There’s more and growing recognition among the general public and among philanthropic donors about the risks of wildfire. We know that forests need lots of fire to maintain a healthy, balanced ecosystem. There’s also more recognition about all the health risks and impacts of fire, like air quality, not just direct fatalities. Our supporters and donors see the throughline between fire-resilience funding and human- and environmentalhealth outcomes. We live in interconnected systems, and fires are not isolated. Those massive fires in Canada in 2023 covered about 50 million acres. This is the size and scale that reaches around the globe.