As summer swings into high gear, many Californians are wondering what to expect from this year’s fire season. We spoke with Scott Stephens of UC Berkeley, who is a member of the PPIC Water Policy Center research network, to learn more.

Northern and Southern California saw big differences in rainfall over the winter. What will that mean for the coming fire season?

Northern California received above-average precipitation, but the southern Sierra Nevada saw just 75% of average precipitation, and it was even lower in Southern California, with roughly half the average rainfall. In the southern part of the state, vegetation is dry. Conditions are very difficult.

In Southern California, it could mean an earlier fire season. If this fall’s precipitation is delayed as it was last year, that makes for a very dangerous fire window. That’s exactly what happened last year when we had those two terrible fires, the Eaton and Palisades fires. Lack of fall precipitation really sets the area up for continued drying and bad fire behavior because of the Santa Ana winds that arrive in the fall and winter.

What lessons can we draw on for this coming fire season?

We have to get our human communities better prepared for the inevitability of fire across the whole state—not just in Los Angeles and the areas that were impacted last fall and winter. Our structures are often the most flammable features in the landscape; better preparing our houses for fire is paramount. Otherwise, we’re going to continue to lose them at terrible rates, with more and more people impacted.

One idea for that is “zone zero”—zero vegetation and combustibles anywhere within five feet of your home. I know that is a little draconian, but fire insurance is going to push us in that direction. Insurance is getting more difficult and expensive to get, or it’s being canceled. It’s going to be a revolution in the way we actually think about how we live. It’s going to change the way neighborhoods look. So many places have beautiful vegetation next to the house. I think that’s all going to become secondary because you need to have a house that can survive fire.

Retrofitting houses to be resistant to wildfire can be expensive, so there is also an economic challenge here. The other critical preparation action is to better manage trees and other vegetation to reduce the intensity and the spread of wildfire.

How much progress have we made in recent years?

In the Berkeley Hills, we installed fuel treatments—areas where we have removed excess vegetation or burned it in a controlled manner—with Cal Fire on UC Berkeley property, which has been a great success. There are many of these projects across the state.

What we lack, though, is large-scale restoration treatments in forests, woodlands, and mixed hardwood forests, so that when these forests do burn, they’ll be resilient even if we have four years of drought. Nowhere in this state has someone done a restoration project of a 300,000-acre area, where there’s defensible space and perhaps 30% of the landscape has been treated to reduce its vulnerability to severe fire. You would think you’d see this in several places in the state, but you don’t. Instead, you’ll see restoration on maybe 5,000 acres. When you have fires spanning half a million acres, that’s basically a thumbprint. It’s not effective.

What are the most important things people can do to prepare for fires this year?

Around your house, make sure that your plants are well-watered and pruned. Get rid of any dead vegetation near the house itself. Decorative bark and mulch should not touch your house or your fences. Replace that with something incombustible, like pea gravel. Embers hitting your double-paned windows or stucco won’t start a fire, but when they hit bark or mulch, it will go up in flames.

Make a plan—don’t wait until there’s a fire at your doorstep. Think about your neighborhood; maybe you have a 75-year-old man next door who isn’t mobile. Have a conversation with your neighbors about how to take care of that person if there’s a fire. So many people try to do that on the fly, and that is catastrophic.

What gives you hope moving forward? Are the state’s efforts moving in the right direction?

There is hope. People feel that severe wildfires are inevitable, and they may think this is primarily a climate problem. But I’d guess that climate change is less than 25% of the problem in frequent-fire-adapted systems like mixed conifer forests and mixed evergreen forests. The real issue is how we manage these ecosystems, and we can change that. Research in the last 20 or 30 years shows that fuel treatments work and don’t cause ecological harm if done properly.

Tribal members are reclaiming their ancestral lands and restoring good fire there, and that that gives me great hope. Cal Fire provides grants every year for people to treat lands with diverse ownerships. That’s fantastic; that’s something that wasn’t around even seven years ago. We simply have to get things done, not just aspire to get them done.