News – Blog
Taming wildfires with innovation challenges
5 December 2022
Our plan to reduce the risk and severity of wildfires around the world.
Challenge Works is exploring opportunities to incentivise innovative solutions to the growing problem of wildfires. Data-driven and autonomous systems are bound to offer a much-needed boost to firefighters struggling to cope with the ever-increasing scale and intensity of wildfires.
Since we made a case for a challenge prize on adapting to wildfires earlier in the summer, the situation only worsened.
The carbon released by wildfires in the Amazon this summer was the highest in 10 years, while Europe has broken a 15-year record. Land in the US was also burning above its 10-average as of the end of October 2022.
We are getting to the limit of our capacity for fighting fire.
…Fires are just overwhelming us
Wildfires and extreme weather events
While the link between carbon release accelerating climate change is old news, what is new is showing a connection between the growing intensity of wildfires and weather hazards such as extreme hail, storms and floods.
Similarly, scientists studying the Australian bushfires of 2019-20 have recently found that it persistently warmed the stratosphere and extended the lifetime of the Antarctic ozone hole.
A dynamic approach to tackling wildfires tailored for a complex world
There are many ways innovation could lead the way forward, and a one-size-fits-all solution is unlikely to have a global impact.
Solutions will have to diverge and adapt depending on the region’s geography, flora and fauna, not to mention the firefighting resources available locally.
However, there are some universal innovation gaps along the lifecycle of a wildfire that we need to target – from predicting and mitigating a potential fire to detecting and responding to an escalating wildfire.
Prediction and mitigation
Should we prevent wildfires from ever happening?
Not at all.
Wildfires are natural phenomena that are necessary for maintaining a healthy ecosystem.
People tried suppressing wildfires in the past, but that only built up more vegetation which fueled larger fires for longer.
Instead, we must employ mitigation strategies to prevent wildfires from getting out of hand.
This requires accurately predicting the risk of wildfires and taking preventative measures – including starting controlled burns.
The puzzle to save lives is almost complete
The individual pieces are already available to create autonomous systems that could support us with all of this. Data scientists and firefighting practitioners have made impressive strides in improving their ability to predict wildfires. At the same time, drone-based systems are already used to cover great distances and start controlled burns.
All we need is a push in the right direction to incentivize putting the pieces together and develop more comprehensive solutions.
Detection and response
Taking control of a fire is a race against time.
The sooner we can detect a wildfire, the better the outcomes.
Similarly, the better the firefighting response, the more time we have before a wildfire gets out of control.
The next generation of firefighting systems will likely innovate on both ends – detection and response – to create the longest possible window of opportunity to tame a wildfire.
Machine learning joins the wildfire fighting team
Detection is being sped up by machine learning – feeding information such as satellite, overflight or sensory data through pattern recognition to identify a high-risk fire and mobilise a firefighting response.
The other side of the equation requires more effective and sustainable fire suppressants, lighter and faster cargo vehicles, and equipment on the ground to improve frontline firefighters’ safety and deployment times and support them in what they do best.
Investing to bring wildfire prevention and reduction innovation together
While all of these innovations exist to some extent, more investment and support are urgently required to connect the dots into an end-to-end solution and achieve the necessary level of accuracy, precision and reliability of its individual components.
Providing incentives and acceleration now will avert future wildfires, keep carbon safely locked away and save unimaginable amounts of resources that would be otherwise spent on disaster relief and climate action.
We think this is an important topic – do you?
Challenge Works is seeking like-minded partners who also see this opportunity and want to work with us on developing our thinking and funding the Taming Wildfires Challenge. Contact us to discuss the idea further.
