The Burning Question: How Do We Stop Mega Fires?
Technology can help fight wildfires at every stage of management. Robots and drones can shrink fuel loads in forests before they ignite. New materials can make buildings more fire-resistant. Drones, satellites, and sensors can detect fires in near real-time. Autonomous ground robots and unmanned aerial vehicles can save lives by fighting fires more effectively and operating in hazardous environments around the clock.
Hotter, drier, and windier conditions are turning wildfire season into a year-round threat. 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’ worth of carbon storage and future sequestration potential. Breaking the cycle will take technology 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.
Using IPCC and GCAM data, Energy Innovation projected future “greenhouse gas emissions at stake” in 2050, assuming current policies remain in place. The resulting estimates overlap because different technologies may reduce the same emissions pool.
The Path We’re On
The world’s on fire.
In many parts of the world, headlines about out-of-control wildfires have become all too familiar. These fires were once considered a seasonal summer threat, mostly confined to particularly fire-prone regions. Now they stretch across the entire calendar — and across the map too, increasing risk even in regions that have historically burned infrequently, including higher latitudes.
In addition to the emissions consequences, there are plenty of reasons to face this bigger-by-the-year problem head-on: displacement of residents, infrastructure damage, energy blackouts and water shortages are at best disruptive; at worst, devastating. Smoke exposure causes more than 1.5 million deaths worldwide each year, worsens respiratory and cardiovascular disease, and creates significant mental health burdens.
The economic costs are also staggering: in the U.S. alone, combined annual losses from property damage, health impacts, and ecosystem degradation range from $400B-$900B.
And then there’s the catastrophic climate impact.
When forests burn, the climate burns.
In 2023, wildfires were responsible for a worrying 7.3 gigatons of carbon dioxide. 2024 was even worse — in the most extreme year for forest fires on record, at least 13.5 million hectares of forest burned, an area roughly the size of Greece.
Wildfire emissions come from two sources. First, there’s the pollutants released by the act of burning. Incomplete combustion produces methane (CH₄), nitrous oxide (N₂O), carbon monoxide (CO), and black carbon (soot). These gases and particles are smaller in volume compared to CO₂, but far more powerful in their warming potential and their damage to human health.
Then there’s the release of stored carbon in vegetation and soils. When fire breaks out, decades to centuries of carbon accumulated in trunks, branches, leaves, roots and forest litter is suddenly released into the atmosphere as CO2. In most wildfires, aboveground biomass is the primary source of emissions, while in carbon-rich peatlands and boreal forests, soils themselves can smolder and release millennia-old carbon. Compounding the problem, fires also destroy the ecosystems that would otherwise keep pulling carbon out of the atmosphere for decades to come. Which means when forests burn, the climate loses twice.
The result: increasingly extreme fires are contributing to a frightening feedback loop. Hotter, drier, windier conditions (plus shifts in vegetation and land use) make ignition more likely and fires more intense. More fires release more CO₂, methane, and nitrous oxide; compromise the planet’s natural carbon sinks; and ultimately lead to more warming. The vicious cycle continues. But innovation can help break the cycle.
Good fire, bad fire
It’s important to note that not all wildfires are bad — which means fast fire suppression isn’t always the goal. Fire is a natural part of many forest cycles. In fact, some species rely on periodic, low-intensity burns to regenerate and stay healthy. Small fires also help prevent the accumulation of excess fuel. That’s why Indigenous communities have long used controlled burning as an effective form of land stewardship, and prescribed burns are an important component of contemporary forest management. The real danger comes from today’s increasingly intense megafires, which burn so hot they wipe out entire ecosystems and release massive carbon stores. Forests take decades longer to rebound and begin sequestering carbon again.
A New Way Forward
Outsmarting wildfire: prevention, detection, defense
Solving the wildfire crisis will take coordinated innovation across every phase of the fire cycle — from prediction and prevention to detection and rapid response. The following imperatives and moonshot explore that full spectrum: technologies that can map and manage risk before ignition, harden assets and communities against spreading flames, and deploy autonomous systems to detect and suppress fires the instant they start.
Innovation Imperatives
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The most viable solutions will:
Deliver clear value to public-sector decision-makers: Wildfire mitigation is fundamentally a public-goods challenge. The solutions that matter most are those that align with the real objectives of governments, utilities, Indigenous authorities, insurers, and local fire agencies — such as reducing loss of life, protecting infrastructure, preserving ecosystems, and limiting fiscal exposure — rather than relying on private, market-only incentives or voluntary adoption.
Work under real-world fire conditions, not just in theory: Wildfire solutions must perform reliably in extreme heat, smoke, wind, rugged terrain, and degraded communications environments. Tools that only work under ideal conditions — or require significant human intervention at the wrong moment — will struggle to deliver impact when fires escalate rapidly.
Enable action at the speed wildfires demand: In wildfire management, minutes matter. The most effective solutions shorten the gap between risk identification, ignition, and response — whether through faster detection, better forecasting, or rapid deployment. Technologies that surface information too late, or only after damage has occurred, dramatically lose their value.
Scale across diverse landscapes, agencies, and governance contexts: Wildfires do not respect jurisdictional boundaries. Successful solutions must be adaptable across ecosystems (forests, grasslands, peatlands), governance structures, and levels of capacity — from well-funded state agencies to under-resourced local or Indigenous fire stewards. Highly bespoke or labor-intensive approaches will struggle to scale.
Preserve carbon sinks without undermining broader land and community priorities: Protecting forests, peatlands, and other ecosystems is about more than carbon alone. Solutions that reduce fire risk and emissions must do so in ways that respect ecological health, cultural land stewardship practices, and community acceptance — otherwise they will face resistance, regulatory barriers, or non-adoption, regardless of technical merit.
