More on Government Ownership of Land, Wildfires, and the Advantages of Private Stewardship

By Lawrence J. McQuillan. He is a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute.

"I recently published two commentaries on why private stewardship of land decreases wildfire risks compared to federal and state governments owning and managing the land: “Private Ownership of Forests and Land Reduces Wildfires” (published in 78 newspapers across the country, August 20, 2025), and “Rescue ‘Stranded’ Federal Lands by Selling It” (published in The American Spectator, September 8, 2025).

Since publishing those commentaries, I ran across two more scholarly journal articles that support my thesis that private stewardship of land tends to reduce wildfire risks compared to government ownership.

In 2024, Liang Diao and Huiqian Song published a paper in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management titled “Does Improved Tenure Security Reduce Fires? Evidence from the Greece Land Registry.” The researchers found that strengthening private property rights for agricultural land in fire-prone Greece from 2014 to 2019 resulted in “large declines” in wildfires (17 percent), burned areas (39 percent), and associated air pollution (18 percent). Those reductions are significant.

The researchers found that “the observed reduction in fires is likely attributable to private landowners rather than public services, as it predominantly occurs in areas remote from local fire stations. This suggests that landowners are intensifying their efforts in both fire prevention and suppression. . . . [F]ires in Greece can be decreased through incentivizing land owners to reduce fuel loads and fire-prone landscapes.”

Diao and Song concluded, “Our findings indicate that strengthening property rights can lead to more sustainable farming practices and promote long-term land investment, thereby reducing fire hazards.” Part of that investment involved “stocking more fire-suppression equipment.” The study demonstrated that the benefits of more secure private property rights over land, particularly fewer wildfires, are not confined to the United States.

In 2018, Carlin Frances Starrs, Van Butsic, Connor Stephens, and William Stewart, all professors at the University of California, Berkeley, published a paper in Environmental Research Letters titled “The Impact of Land Ownership, Firefighting, and Reserve Status on Fire Probability in California.” The researchers examined average fire probability in California from 1950 to 2015 (involving more than 13,000 unique fires) and found that “federal ownership and [federal] firefighting was associated with increased fire probability,” and “the difference in fire probability on federal versus non-federal lands is increasing over time.” Those findings are worrisome.

Perhaps most importantly, federal ownership of land was found to have “much greater influence” on fire probability than climate factors such as temperature, precipitation, and topsoil moisture, a strong argument in favor of less federal control of land, especially in fire-prone California. Federal land ownership and federal firefighting decisions play critical roles in increasing wildfire probability in California.

Those two studies, and others, support the conclusion that private stewards are better incentivized than government bureaucrats to undertake the difficult work of fire-risk mitigation through active land management.

Private stewardship of land properly aligns incentives with effective, innovative, and cost-efficient fire prevention that saves lives, preserves property and restores forest health. Wildfires can’t be eliminated, but their incidence and severity can be minimized.

Below is a list of scholarly research supporting the thesis that private stewardship of land reduces wildfire risks and/or government ownership of land increases wildfire risks. I will update the list as I discover more papers:

Ana M. G. Barros, Michelle A. Day, Thomas A. Spies, and Alan A. Ager, “Effects of Ownership Patterns on Cross-Boundary Wildfires,” Scientific Reports v11, September 2021.

Carlin Frances Starrs, Van Butsic, Connor Stephens, and William Stewart, “The Impact of Land Ownership, Firefighting, and Reserve Status on Fire Probability in California,” Environmental Research Letters v13, February 2018.

Liang Diao and Huiqian Song, “Does Improved Tenure Security Reduce Fires? Evidence from the Greece Land Registry,” Journal of Environmental Economics and Management v127, September 2024.

Vibhu Vikramaditya, Free Market Environmentalism: A Market and Private Property-Based Approach to Environmental Conservation, MIT World Peace University (WPU) School of Economics, Pune, India, dissertation, 2022."