Joe Biden will visit California on Monday to survey wildfire damage, as the state battles a devastating fire season that is on track to outpace that of 2020, the state’s worst fire season on record.

The president is to highlight the connection between the climate crisis and the west’s increasingly extreme wildfires as he seeks to rally support for a $3.5tn spending plan Congress is debating.

Just ahead of the visit, Biden issued a disaster declaration for the state in response to the Caldor fire, which has destroyed 782 homes, scorched 342 sq miles and forced the evacuation of tens of thousands in the Lake Tahoe Basin. In August, Biden approved another disaster declaration to provide aid after the River fire and the Dixie fire, the largest single fire in California history.

Wildfires in California this year have already leveled entire towns, killed one person and burned 2m acres. California and several other western states experienced their hottest summers on record this year as the climate crisis fueled deadly heatwaves.

Experts have said that without dramatic action to combat the climate emergency and reintroduce fire into the landscape, California and the American west will continue to endure devastating fire seasons.

“All evidence would suggest a business as usual scenario where we keep warming the climate and we don’t rapidly scale up our efforts to get fuels out of the forest, we’re going to see a lot more wildfire and a lot more extreme wildfire. The science is clear on that,” Marshall Burke, an associate professor in the department of earth system science at Stanford, told the Guardian last month.

The Biden administration in June laid out a plan to step up its investments to combat the west’s wildfire crisis, after facing criticism the federal efforts are under-resourced and understaffed. The plan includes hiring more federal firefighters and using new technologies to detect and address fires quickly.

Biden’s visit to California is part of a two-day tour of the west that will include stops at the National Interagency Fire Center in Idaho and Denver, Colorado. While in California, the president will also campaign with the state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, who faces a recall election Tuesday.

The president plans to drum up support for his $3.5tn spending plan by pointing at the increasing frequency of wildfires in the west – and extreme weather events across the US – and the need to invest billions in combating the climate emergency and to vastly expand the social safety net.

The spending plan, which faces skepticism from centrist Democrats, includes climate provisions such as tax incentives for clean energy and electric vehicles, investments to transition the economy away from fossil fuels and toward renewable sources such as wind and solar power, and creation of a civilian climate corps.

Biden recently declared a “code red” moment for the nation to act on the climate crisis while visiting a New York City neighborhood damaged by Hurricane Ida.

“Folks, the evidence is clear: climate change poses an existential threat to our lives, to our economy,” he said during the New York visit. “And the threat is here; it’s not going to get any better. The question: can it get worse? We can stop it from getting worse.”