8 Wildfire technology

If wildfires were a country, they’d be ranked No. 4, behind China, the U.S. and India in terms of carbon emissions.

Wesoff

The growing urgency of this issue has given rise to a category of startups called ​“firetech,” a technology ecosystem that aims to confront the threat of wildfires and restore the health of the world’s forests.

For much of the twentieth century, U.S. fire-management strategy focused on total suppression rather than nature-aligned regenerative management. As a result, the country is home to a backlog of denser, fuel-heavy forests that are dangerously prone to catastrophic wildfires, especially in this warmer, drier era. Beneficial fire in the form of strategic controlled burns can reduce the amount of fuel sources available to a fire while preventing the growth of invasive species, which are often less fire-tolerant.

Prescribed burns not only decrease wildfire risk and bestow ecological benefits — they are also more cost-effective than other types of fuel management, such as manually or mechanically removing leaf litter and downed woody material.

Although prescribed burns have been used for thousands of years, a new crop of startups claim they are improving on the techniques used to plan, carry out and control managed fires.

Nebraska-based Drone Amplified aims to replace the human-piloted helicopters that are now used for aerial ignition by using drones to drop golf-ball-sized incendiary spheres to set off prescribed burns. The drones are also equipped with surveillance equipment to monitor the fires as they run their course or to detect naturally occurring and other types of fires.

Vegetation-management startups are attacking the problem of tree-thinning and fuel removal with innovations in sensors, software and carbon sequestration.

Delos develops wildfire risk models for insurers and underwriters, and ClimUp provides actionable risk and mitigation data — providing insights at the structure level for almost any property. Finally, Kettle is modeling fire risk to optimize its role as an underwriter for insurers.

Wesoff (2023) A new wave of startups is tackling a huge emissions source: wildfires