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Haze and smoke settled into the front range last week, and it’s about to get worse. Air quality will dip as wildfire smoke mixes with urban pollution.

The Alexander Mountain Fire started on Monday, July 29, and is burning in Larimer County. The Quarry Fire started on July 31 and is fully contained.

The National Federation of Federal Employees, which has been pushing hard for the reform, is hopeful of ultimate passage, pointing to significant bipartisan support for firefighter raises.

The Forest Corps, a new collaboration between AmeriCorps and the U.S. Forest Service, just inaugurated its first cohort of nearly 90 members. They’ll be sent out into priority landscapes across the West to do fuels reduction, prescribed burn and tree reseeding projects, all intended to support the USFS’ broader Wildfire Crisis and Reforestation strategies.

These state-regulated plans are typically more expensive and offer less coverage compared to private insurance. Colorado’s is the first new Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) plan created in the U.S. in decades.

The Dinosaur Fire is currently not threatening any structures, and is burning near the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

There’s little doubt that insurance markets in the West and elsewhere are being severely impacted by climate change-fueled disasters. However, robust, granular data on the phenomenon is hard to come by. That is until a pair of researchers developed a clever methodology to extract detailed, zip code-level data on tens of millions of properties across the country. What they find is steep increases in premiums in disaster-threatened areas, and the promise of even steeper jumps in years to come.

Beneficial fire is an essential part of confronting the wildfire crisis. But for now, there’s not enough people to do the work. A prescribed burn this spring in Central Idaho shows how partnerships can get more workers on the line.

Prescribed fires and other forest treatments have a proven track record of reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfire. But a new paper argues that an overreliance on those practices has come at the expense of efforts to make homes and communities more resilient.

The federal government spends, on average, more than $3 billion a year on fighting wildfires. A new report estimates how much those costs could increase in the future due to human-caused climate change.