Climate Issues in the 2026 Governor’s Race: Wildfire

Climate Issues in the 2026 Governor’s Race: Wildfire

Sixth in a series of posts outlining key challenges and opportunities facing California’s next governor.

Eighteen of California’s 20 most destructive wildfires have occurred in the past 25 years, driven by decades of fire suppression, climate change, and continued development in the wildland-urban interface (WUI). The 2025 Los Angeles fires alone took at least 31 lives and caused property and capital losses ranging from $95 billion to $164 billion. The next governor will confront a rapidly evolving wildfire crisis with cascading implications for utility regulation, insurance markets, housing policy, and public health. 

Wildfire risk has become deeply embedded in the state’s financial landscape. Ecologically based forest and natural lands management is central to restoring fire-resilient ecosystems, but could cost $225–$375 million per year. Electrical transmission and distribution infrastructure has been responsible for roughly half of all major California wildfires, and the combined costs of grid hardening, wildfire mitigation plans, and strict liability exposure have driven ratepayer costs up by approximately $27 billion over four years (2019–2023). Meanwhile, property insurance has become increasingly unavailable in fire-prone communities, shifting more homeowners to the FAIR Plan—the state’s high-cost insurer of last resort. All of these costs are measured against the priorities of preserving human life and infrastructure, protecting ecosystems, and limiting the emissions of catastrophic fires.

The next governor will need to tackle several key issues: 

• Fuel reduction and forest resilience: State targets call for treating one to two million acres per year through ecological thinning and prescribed fire (current treatment levels are approximately 730,000 footprint acres per year). Meeting these goals will require expanded investment, workforce capacity, and streamlined interagency and multi-stakeholder coordination. 

• Home hardening and land use: Proposed “zone zero” rules would require homeowners in high-fire risk areas to maintain non-combustible buffers around structures. Combined with retrofitting, these measures could cut WUI losses by half, but the rules remain unfinalized even as the state’s housing shortage continues to push development into fire-prone areas. 

• Utility liability and insurance reform: California’s strict liability standard for utility-caused wildfires has driven significant costs to ratepayers. The next governor will need to consider ways to reallocate responsibility for grid hardening and wildfire liability, while pursuing regulatory reforms that incentivize property and landscape-scale fire risk mitigation in insurance pricing. 

California wildfires have burned millions of acres, destroyed tens of thousands of structures, and cost the state billions of dollars in the last decade alone. Meeting this challenge will demand bold and coordinated leadership from California’s next governor. 

You can read more about Wildfire issues facing California’s next governor and access all of CLEE’s climate issue briefs at California Climate Vote. Read the other posts in the series here:

California wildfires, climate and insurance, Climate Policy, forest management, utility policy