Fire Mitigation
Fire Mitigation
The Burning Question: How Do We Stop Super Fires?
Hotter, drier, and windier conditions are turning wildfire season into a year-round threat — and pushing fire risk into regions that have rarely burned before. These increasingly intense infernos are part of a destructive feedback loop: Bigger, hotter fires release massive amounts of stored carbon and destroy the very forests, grasslands, and peatlands that act as vital carbon sinks, further heating the planet and setting the stage for even more extreme fires. These blazes threaten lives, destroy communities, and inflict billions in economic losses — while also erasing decades’ to centuries’ worth of carbon storage and future sequestration potential. Breaking the cycle will require innovation at every stage: reducing fuel loads before they ignite, detecting fires in real time, and deploying autonomous suppression systems to stop small sparks from becoming megafires. Scaled globally, these strategies can protect people and ecosystems, preserve climate-critical carbon sinks, and keep wildfires from becoming one of climate change’s most devastating accelerants.
Emissions at stake in 2050: 2.2 Gigatons
Innovation Imperatives
Innovation Imperatives
Critical needs that can help accelerate the path to net zero
Accurate Risk Pricing
Develop more sophisticated risk modeling and urban planning systems to ensure that homes are built in the safest areas
Wildfire risk is rising in many regions, yet current insurance and zoning models often underestimate true exposure. Advances in geospatial modeling, climate analytics, and AI-driven scenario planning can more precisely map fire risk and inform land-use decisions. These tools can guide safer community design, drive stronger construction standards, and align insurance pricing with actual hazard levels — encouraging development in lower-risk areas.
Asset Hardening
Develop new technologies to protect and defend homes and infrastructure from active wildfires at the individual and community level
Protecting structures in wildfire-prone areas requires a combination of preventative design and active defense. Innovations in fire-resistant building materials, automated suppression systems, perimeter firebreaks, and deployable protective coverings or coatings can reduce ignition risk in both new builds and retrofits. At the community scale, integrated hardening strategies can create defensible zones that prevent the spread of fire into populated areas.
Automated Fuel Reduction
Create automated clearing systems to improve wildland fuel treatment and prevent fires
Dense, dry vegetation is the primary fuel for catastrophic wildfires, but clearing it at scale is labor-intensive, costly, and sometimes dangerous. Automated systems — such as autonomous forestry equipment, drone-assisted thinning, or controlled burn solutions — can accelerate and expand fuel reduction efforts, helping to reduce wildfire risk before ignition ever occurs.
Real-Time Detection and Response
Integrate automated detection with rapid, autonomous suppression systems
The beginning of a wildfire is the best opportunity for containment — which is key to stopping small sparks from becoming megafires. This imperative calls for creating an integrated, automated system that shrinks the time between ignition and suppression. A network of ground-based sensors, high-frequency satellite imaging, and AI-driven analytics could detect new fires in near-real time. Next up: linking these alerts directly to prepositioned response systems that can be instantly dispatched with water or retardant to contain a fire in its infancy. These approaches would create a powerful first line of defense, suppressing fires before they have a chance to grow.
Moonshots
Moonshots
High-risk, high-reward innovations that could radically reshape our path to net zero
Autonomous Firefighting
Deploy autonomous firefighting systems to scale capacity and mitigate risks to firefighter safety
Extreme wildfires increasingly exceed the capacity and safety limits of human crews. Autonomous firefighting systems — including ground robots, unmanned aerial vehicles, and AI-coordinated suppression fleets — could operate in hazardous environments, and around the clock, without risking human lives. Crucially, these systems could extend firefighting capacity into remote wildland areas that today’s technologies are unable to reliably reach, addressing effectiveness and scope as much as safety. Future concepts could include fleets of coordinated drones stringing water hoses from ocean to fire, or other large-scale delivery systems designed to suppress blazes that are currently beyond human reach.
Tech Categories
Tech Categories
Groupings of climate technologies
| Cluster Name | Readiness | |
|---|---|---|
| Monitoring | Commercial | |
Monitoring uses satellite imagery, remote sensors, and AI-powered early warning systems to detect fires quickly and track high-risk areas. | ||
| Prevention | Commercial | |
Prevention focuses on reducing the risk of wildfires before they start by clearing dry vegetation, enforcing burn bans, and maintaining defensible space around infrastructure. | ||
| Response | Commercial | |
Response involves the rapid deployment of firefighting resources—crews, aircraft, robots, drones, and containment tools—to control and extinguish wildfires before they escalate. |
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