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A Fire Law That Ignores Prevention and the Recovery of Destroyed Forests

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There is no doubt about the neglect, sloppiness, and lack of knowledge with which current authorities and legislators are drafting laws to improve forest governance. A concrete example is the wildfire bill. The urgency to regulate, promote, and boost an important sector of our country's economy cannot come at the cost of personal preferences, ignorance, or outdated ideologies among authorities and lawmakers, which hinder the growth and development of the sector.

In this case, we can highlight some aspects that make this bill a law hostile to forest owners.

The proposal makes no reference to real prevention—the kind organized from the ground up in rural areas, with training and provision of equipment and resources to neighborhood associations and residents of villages and small towns, who are the first to encounter fires.

There is also no mention of the State's responsibility in a preventive campaign starting with early childhood education in all schools across the country, incorporating into their curricula that caring for nature also involves teaching, from an early age, the damage and destruction caused by wildfires. The State of Chile is the largest forest owner, with 14,500,000 hectares.

This proposed law expropriates a significant portion—nearly 30%—of a property in the wildland-urban interface to be used as a firebreak. Failure to implement the measures outlined in this law exposes the owner to fines by CONAF or SERNAFOR, benefiting the treasury with penalties of up to 10,000 UTM.

What is the law's response when, in the province of Arauco, 40% of the firebreaks owned by forestry companies, bordering roads or in interface zones, are encroached upon by people building homes—and in many cases, these plots are even sold via social media?

What about intentionality, the leading cause of wildfires, which, according to CONAF's own figures, accounts for 53% in the 2024-2025 season? Nothing is said about this. This concept should be the starting point of any serious analysis by those who govern us and propose laws. What is needed—and not included in the law—is the creation of dedicated prosecutors and the allocation of better tools and more resources so that the prosecution can properly investigate, gather sufficient evidence, and secure the arrest and conviction of arsonists.

They also forget that current climate conditions are leading to increasingly frequent extreme weather events, which will trigger catastrophic fires like those in 2017 and 2023. These require specific preventive measures, such as preemptive patrols by the Armed Forces and police in the days leading up to and during such events.

And finally, how do we restore native forests and planted forests destroyed by fire? Nothing is mentioned in this legislative proposal.

This law fails to incorporate the holistic analysis that authorities and legislators should undertake to create regulations that truly protect Chile's forests—heritage belonging to all its inhabitants.