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The burning need for BDO Zones: Mitigating catastrophic wildfires with market-based solutions

We all watched as Los Angeles burned, destroying homes, businesses and lives. The total economic impact of the Los Angeles wildfires is staggering, with estimates ranging from $135 billion to over $250 billion. No one should have been surprised. In 2024, the town of Jasper, Alberta burned with tens of thousands evacuated. In 2016, the northern Alberta city of Fort McMurray burned to the ground. Fires of this magnitude – ones that destroy cities, kill people and bankrupt insurance companies – used to be once-in-a-century disasters. Now, they are a familiar story.

How do we turn the tide against this alarming trend? U.S. President Trump argues that a key part of the solution is to “clean the forest floor.” While forest floor cleaning is part of the solution, the challenge has always been who pays for it. This is where market-based solutions become crucial: without new markets to use this combustible biomass, the cost of forest fuel reduction methods falls squarely on federal, state and local governments.

So if we want to decrease the size and intensity of wildfires and reduce the public cost of achieving this vital goal, we need to rapidly stand up new markets that can pay for and utilize combustible forest material.

One way to make this happen is to establish more Biofuel Development Opportunity (BDO) Zones in high-risk wildfire regions. BDO Zones are a market-based approach that can mitigate wildfire dangers by catalyzing the development of new biomanufacturing projects which convert hazardous excess forest biomass into valuable biofuels. Here’s how it works:

BDO Zones attract new biomanufacturing plants to strategically selected regions that have been independently certified as having biomass surpluses, strong supply chains, and infrastructure suitable for bio-based development. BDO Zone ratings signal overall “regional readiness” to support biomanufacturing projects that produce biofuels and more. Achieving an ‘AA’, ‘A’ or ‘BBB’ level BDO Zone rating powerfully signals to investors and developers worldwide that a region offers an ideal, low-risk location for siting new bio-based production facilities.

So how does this help reduce wildfire risk? It’s simple: BDO Zones in high-risk wildfire regions, called W-BDO Zones, help create crucial new markets for the excess low-value forest biomass and small-diameter wood that currently overloads our forests and fuels increasingly massive wildfires.

In other words, we create a market incentive to do what the President suggests: clean the forest floor. By injecting market demand, W-BDO Zones make it economically viable to remove this dangerous excess material and convert it into biofuels and other valuable products, thereby reducing fuel loads. In doing so, it not only reduces fire risk, but it creates jobs.

This is a win-win solution. Forest managers and local communities gain a critical new tool in the fight against wildfires. Biofuels plants gain access to new sources of feedstock. Rural economies gain new investment and jobs. And the market gets more biofuels. It’s the very definition of a quadruple bottom line.

But that’s not all. The benefits of W-BDO Zones extend beyond wildfire mitigation. By facilitating the growth of biofuels manufacturing, they diversify and strengthen local economies, often in rural areas that have suffered from offshoring, automation, and boom-bust commodity cycles. Biomanufacturing is a job-creation engine, driving economic growth and resilience.

In a world increasingly on fire, we need bold solutions. Establishing a network of 500 W-BDO Zones across the highest wildfire risk regions, as proposed in the B-RREADI for Wildfire Challengeprogram, would be a quantum leap forward. It would harness the power of markets to make our forests and communities safer and more prosperous.

We have the tools. Billion of dollars of private investment capital stands ready to flow into biomanufacturing projects in BDO Zones. Now is the time for policymakers to integrate BDO Zones into federal and state initiatives and turn this vision into reality. We can’t afford to wait. The fires are already at our door.

For more information on the B-RREADI for Wildfire Challenge, click here.