When the U.S. Department of Agriculture last June announced plans to rescind its 2001 Roadless Rule, which prohibits road-building and development on millions of acres of national forest land, officials argued that the change would allow for better fire prevention and reduced fire risk.
But a new study in the journal Fire Ecology seems to counter that view. Surveying all contiguous-US Forest Service regions from 1992 to 2024, the authors found wildfires more than four times more likely to ignite within 50 meters of a road (7.99 fires per 1000 hectares) than within inventoried roadless areas (1.97 fires).
“The big surprise was just how stark the differences were,” Greg Aplet, the lead author and senior forest ecologist at The Wilderness Society, told Inside Climate News. “We found the exact same result in every Forest Service region, consistent across the entire national forest system.”
Interestingly, the Forest Service has been aware of this trade-off for decades. “Building roads into inventoried roadless areas would likely increase the chance of human-caused fires due to the increased presence of people,” the agency wrote in its January 2001 environmental impact assessment for the Roadless Rule.
The Forest Service is expected to offer a public comment period, potentially starting in April, for its draft environmental impact statement on revoking the Roadless Rule, which covers nearly 1.4 million acres of Helena-Lewis & Clark National Forest.
