A few days after the Park fire tore through Cohasset, a small forest community in Northern California, in late July, Dallas Koller drove out to inspect the damage.

He passed destroyed buildings, trees charred to black matchsticks and smoke rising from smoldering vegetation. But amid the destruction, there was a heartening sight: The homes at the four properties where Koller, volunteers from Butte County and a few fire professionals had intentionally set blazes to burn excess vegetation had survived.

Koller, 34, said there was no way to know for sure if the intentional burns, which occurred periodically in the years before the fire, including two in March, had made the difference. “But prescribed fire was part of that puzzle,” he said.

Federal and state agencies, as well as other groups that work with them, including private citizens and businesses, are setting fires that burn the dry grasses, small trees and other vegetation that could otherwise fuel an intense wildfire. Research has shown that these burns reduce wildfire risk, potentially saving lives and property.

Although the state is increasing its use of beneficial fire, as the method is called, officials and experts alike say it is far from enough to meet the threat posed by catastrophic wildfires.

Land managers in the state, including the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, and federal agencies have set a target of intentionally burning 400,000 acres annually by next year, an amount of land that when combined would be larger than the city of Los Angeles. The goal is to chip away at the 10 million to 30 million acres that officials estimate would benefit from some form of fuel-reduction treatment. In 2022, the most recent year for which there is data publicly available, about 96,000 acres were burned by these land managers.

“The state is struggling to get anywhere close to the targets they have for prescribed fire,” said Chris Field, a climate scientist at Stanford University who has studied controlled burns. “It’s clear that there would be real profound benefits of reaching the target and ultimately going beyond it.”

According to one study from researchers at Columbia University and Stanford, low-intensity fires, a category that includes mild natural fires and prescribed burns, reduce wildfire risk by about 60%. Experts also say that prescribed burns have reduced the severity of previous wildfires, including in Yosemite National Park, where researchers found that they helped protect giant sequoias during the Washburn fire in 2022.

Most of California’s ecosystems have evolved to adapt to or depend on fire, which can rejuvenate forests and help nutrients return to the soil. But federal and state land management agencies banned intentional burns for many decades, arguing that all fires were dangerous and could hurt the timber industry. This, along with aggressive efforts to suppress wildfires, allowed vegetation to accumulate, a condition that could supercharge blazes.

Since then, intentional burn practices, including planned fires and cultural burning by Native American tribes, have been gradually reintroduced. Nowadays, these efforts are carried out by various entities across the state, including Cal Fire, the U.S. Forest Service, tribal organizations and private citizens.

Koller, for example, runs Butte County’s prescribed burn association, a group with about 400 members that carries out controlled fires for private landowners. Groups such as these now operate in about half of the counties in California.

“The state can’t possibly burn everyone’s land,” he said. “The task is too large.”

Cal Fire has steadily increased the number of acres it has burned over the past few years, and now it has an annual target of 50,000 acres by next year. It burned about 36,000 acres during the 2022-23 fiscal year. Cal Fire said in a statement that the department was taking “numerous positive, if incremental, steps” toward increasing that number.

The state’s budget maintains $2.6 billion in funding for tackling wildfires and improving forest health. An additional $200 million per year is designated for healthy forest and fire-prevention programs, which include prescribed fire projects.

The money is most likely not enough, especially because it is spread across a number of initiatives, said Mark Schwartz, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis, who has studied controlled burns and other wildfire management methods.

In addition to the need for more funds, Schwartz said, controlled burn programs face a number of hurdles. Already limited in number, firefighters who would staff a prescribed fire are often called away to battle an active blaze. There are also only so many days in a year that conditions are right for a fire, and access is a challenge in some locations. And local communities may oppose a controlled burn, he said.

Koller said he was happy to see that the homes treated had survived, but the feeling was short-lived. He knew of other landowners who had requested a prescribed burn but did not receive one and subsequently lost their homes.

“It’s hard not to think about it,” he said. “You just wonder if maybe we had burned it, if that would have been enough.”