Abstract
Large-scale, climate-driven wildfire has become a recurring and foreseeable feature of life in the American West, creating long-term consequences for forests, watersheds, and rural communities. The 2022 Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire, the largest wildfire in New Mexico history, provides an opportunity to examine how a federally created compensation statute functions once a climate disaster moves from legislation and rulemaking into adjudication. Sparked by prescribed burns on public land, the fire led Congress to enact the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire Assistance Act, directing the Federal Emergency Management Agency (“FEMA”) to provide expeditious and just compensation for injuries resulting from the fire. Building on observations first presented at the University of New Mexico School of Law’s Life After Fire: (Re)Imagining Post Fire Recovery for Headwater Dependent Communities Symposium, this Article examines the Act’s implementation at the claims and appeals stage. Rather than revisiting the statute’s design or FEMA’s rulemaking process, the Article offers a post-enactment case study with implications for future wildfire compensation programs across the West by focusing on how compensation has been adjudicated in practice: how FEMA has interpreted New Mexico law, how land- and resource-based losses have been valued, and how courts have addressed disputes arising from those determinations. Drawing on claim outcomes, administrative appeals, and developing case law, the Article analyzes two areas where adjudication has proven especially contested: reforestation and revegetation claims, and noneconomic damages for smoke, ash, evacuation, and loss of use. These disputes reveal the limits of market-based valuation and administrative efficiency when applied to losses that implicate subsistence use, watershed stability, intergenerational land stewardship, and community-wide harm. By examining how land-based and noneconomic harms are valued, or discounted, in practice, the Article situates wildfire compensation as a question of procedural justice and substantive equity in the adjudication of climate-driven loss. As climate change renders large-scale wildfire increasingly foreseeable on public lands, the experience of Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon demonstrates that disaster compensation regimes must be capable of accounting for natural resources and land-based livelihoods as lived conditions, not merely as damaged property.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Brett Phelps,
Climate Change, Justice, and Equity in the Adjudication of Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire Claims,
66
Nat. Res. J.
260
(2026).
Available at:
https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nrj/vol66/iss2/5
