The danger from wildfires is real, but cutting down more trees is not the solution. By far the most effective way to prevent damage is to focus on basic fire-safety measures for at-risk houses. These include installing fire-resistant roofing, ember-proof exterior vents and guards to prevent wind-borne embers from igniting dry leaves and pine needles in rain gutters and creating “defensible space” by reducing combustible grasses, shrubs and small trees within 100 feet of homes. Research shows these steps can have a major impact on whether houses survive wildfires.

Unfortunately, most counties in the United States don’t incorporate these protections in their building codes or help homeowners maintain defensible space. This must change, but it will not happen if politicians instead pursue misinformed measures like the ones that could end up in the farm bill.

Most of the homes that were destroyed by wildfires over the past year, as in the Tubbs fire and Thomas fire last fall in California , were not primarily in forested areas, but in grasslands, shrub lands and oak savannas. Furthermore, recent research by one of us, Dr. Hanson, and colleagues shows that reducing environmental protections and increasing logging does nothing to curb fires. On the contrary, increased logging can make fires burn more intensely. Logging, including many projects deceptively promoted as forest “thinning,” removes fire-resistant trees, reduces the cooling shade of the forest canopy and leaves behind highly combustible twigs and branches.

While forest density and the concentration of dead trees generally appear to have a minimal impact on the intensity of wildfires, data show that climate-change-driven drought and abnormal weather is increasingly influencing fire behavior and the length of the fire season. The provisions that pro-logging politicians seek to include in the farm bill run directly counter to what we should be doing to slow global warming.