Trends in wildfire-related bills in California, 2001-2020

Abstract California has recently experienced severe and destructive wildfire seasons, prompting new policy proposals from the California State Legislature. Here, we examine proposed state wildfire-related legislation from the ten two-year legislative sessions between 2001-2002 and 2019-2020 to track trends and factors influencing wildfire-related legislative priorities. We first use Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling to identify 29 wildfire topics from the text of 294 bills. We next determine the degree to which legislators’ backgrounds, legislative procedures, and bill intent are correlated with bill topic. We find individual correlations but no overarching correlations between legislators’ personal and political backgrounds (e.g., political party, legislative experience, home district, bipartisanship), legislative procedures (i.e., committee review, state mandates, urgency measures), and bill intent (i.e., wildfire stage, commemorative bill, focus on specific geographic area or vulnerable group) with bill topics. However, we find that successful bills are correlated with review by Appropriations Committees, review by multiple committees, and a focus on specific geographic location. In the 2019-2020 legislative session, bill passage was correlated with Democratic sponsorship. Legislators tend to propose bills related to the dominant challenge or crisis of that legislative session (such as loss of homeowners’ insurance coverage or need for more fuels management), indicating the reactiveness of the legislature to statewide issues with new proposed legislation. These findings provide important insights into how legislative priorities change over time and the policy enablers and barriers for urgent climate change adaptation. Our results indicate a potentially fundamental policy shift in response to recent wildfires in California.