International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction 2021
Technology applications for wildfire risk management
Hi folks,
We’re so excited to come together with you all on October 13th this year to mark the United Nations’ International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction.
This year is made extra special by our partner — CrowdDoing — who’ve proposed to mark this day as the Global Catastrophic Wildfire Prevention Day.
For so many of us who’re steeped in wildfire resilience work this call really resonates with our efforts and we thank the team at CrowdDoing for taking the time to bring us together in this way.
The cool thing is we’re not just celebrating a day. This is also a great opportunity to come together as a year-round global alliance that collaborates on a range of wildfire resilience goals.
We’re hopeful that such efforts will put a ‘living with fire’ agenda back in the global policy, funding, and investment conversation, where the topic certainly deserves more attention as economic losses spiral and more communities are ravaged by megafires each year.
We think the opportunity that we have here, with marking this day, and forming this alliance, is one of collaborative action.
What we do with that action will really depend on how we can create a common guiding framework for thinking about wildfire resilience goals, desired outcomes, and guiding principles.
This is important because we’ve long known that no one stakeholder can do this alone. We need greater convergence in our approaches to bring diverse stakeholders together across silos and geographies.
We will need such convergence to reduce systemic risk in inclusive, just, and sustainable ways.
This approach of converging for greater outcomes really aligns with the goals set out in multiple international frameworks — such as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the Sustainable Development Goals, and the Paris climate agreement.
As a start, we think it’s important for us to assess our individual and collective work on wildfire resilience along the Sendai Frameworks’ four priorities for action, see Figure 2. Adapting the Sendai Framework’s priorities to wildfire resilience efforts can entail the following:
1/ developing a better understanding and characterization of wildfire risk for communities and ecosystems
2/ strengthening risk governance and diversify capacities to manage wildfire mitigation and risk reduction,
3/ investing in wildfire risk management systems including end to end systems for early detection, public alerts and notifications, and incident management
4/ Using nature-based solutions to enhance community preparedness for response, recovery, and adaptation.
In light of these priorities, we’ve noticed that many of the conversations planned for October 13th are around wildfire technologies which cluster around the third priority––investments in wildfire risk management systems.
As you launch into these really important conversations, we wanted to share some of our thinking at Wonder Labs in the hope that this can spark new points of discussion and insights to guide the work of our alliance over the next months.
We think this conversation is important to have because while we’ve all been learning a lot from trends in humanitarian tech, disaster tech, and climate tech, what we’re really doing here together is ‘Fire Tech’ — which is helpful to recognize as an emerging and unique space.
We think that doing so will not only help develop a better understanding of our synergies and potential for partnerships but also so we may begin to pay attention to the gaps and blind spots which need both innovation and funding attention.
So, what is Fire Tech?
When thinking about wildfire resilience in our communities, we need to consider not just the active fire operations but also prevention & recovery.
In addition to early detection and response, technology can also be deployed before a fire — for risk mitigation work, and then after a fire–– to enable recovery and adaptation.
At Wonder Labs, we find it helpful to anchor our definition of Fire Tech around the application of three important secular technology forces that are already transforming the world around us (see Figure 3):
1/ digitization & data,
2/ mechanization, and
3/ materials.
We believe these technologies can help us reimagine how we live with wildfires in the near future.
Digitization & data is perhaps the biggest area of innovation right now. We’re seeing the adoption of digital technologies across disaster preparedness, response, and recovery workflows: such as in the applications of GIS in incident management and post-disaster case management, advances in sensor technology (ground, aerial, satellite), as well as data harmony and integration in networked systems.
Mechanization broadly refers to tooling, robotics, and automation, which is another macro secular force changing the world around us, whether it’s bionics, assistive and collaborative bots, ground based systems or aerial drones.
Finally, materials represent the convergence of biology, chemistry, and material sciences towards developing new suppressants, retardants, and building materials for wildfire resilience.
No framework is perfect or complete but all the projects that we have examined in our research fall clearly into one of these buckets. So far, this three-pronged classification seems to hold.
Also, we have found it helpful to further assess each Fire Tech innovation along three levels to assess maturity: 1/ science, 2/ application, and 3/ scale.
It’s important to develop this common understanding because it can allow us, as a community, to support and nurture innovations, and align with available capacities and capabilities in the broader innovation ecosystem.
Science refers to ideas that require fundamental research to be done. This is typically where the funding bet is. For example, we know that more science is needed for wildfire resilience, whether it’s for developing new kinds of suppressants, or in improving our understanding of mega fire spread & behavior.
Application refers to projects where the science exists, but the application and its users need to be developed, that is to say, we don’t have product market fit yet but the technical risk is modest. For example, leveraging advancements in drone technologies to detect & respond to fires while they are still small is an active & promising application area.
Scale refers to ideas that have product market fit and are mature technologies that can perhaps even serve as a platform to build on. Funding commitments here can allow for replication and scale. For example, ground-based camera networks are examples of data centric technologies that are ready to scale.
So putting this all together, we can start imagining solutions and asking questions to explore whitespaces, for example:
- What are some innovations that can help communities recover from wildfires and adapt ?
- How can the development of new materials help with bolstering defensible space and structural survivability?
- How can ground based robots help with fuel treatment at scale for risk reduction, or assist our front line fire fighters by performing dangerous clearings?
At Wonder Labs, we have used this framework to both incubate new ideas and fund entrepreneurs. We hope this framework can help frame the emerging space of Fire Tech and guide how we, as innovators, entrepreneurs, investors, practitioners, may think about leveraging these secular technology forces towards a set of shared objectives.
As companies, institutions, and communities that are vested in wildfire resilience efforts, where do we go from here?
We realize that what we really need at this stage is a common guiding framework for our collective efforts. See Figure 4 for a basic template that we propose the alliance can build on over the next months.
We’ve organized it around four normative goals that hopefully already underpin your institution’s strategies and visioning for the future.
We can approach vulnerability reduction, systems change, community wellbeing, and ecosystem resilience as cross-cutting, higher order goals that we can all align on.
The four goals, in turn, guide the four priorities for action, which align with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Sustainable Development Goals.
We hope these goals and priorities will lead us to a clearer vision of the desired or ideal outcomes. The priorities and outcomes are supported by enabling processes and guided by cross-cutting principles which should underlie all our efforts for enabling inclusive, just, and sustainable ways of living with fire.
We encourage you to think about these ideas as you enter into conversations on October 13th.
Think of this as an emergent framework, not complete or final. We hope you find the framing useful, as a point of reflection for what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how we’re coming together to achieve desired outcomes for wildfire risk reduction.
We’re also beginning to facilitate this exercise with philanthropic, corporate, and impact investors as part of our contribution to a global Wildfire Tech Funders Group and we would love for you all to join in this conversation.
Thanks for engaging with our thinking and we really look forward to hearing your perspectives. We hope you have a great discussion on Global Catastrophic Wildfire Prevention Day!
Our very best,
Shefali and Anukool
Please feel free to reach out to us with ideas and comments: shefali@lakhina.com & anukool@lakhina.com
You can watch our YouTube message to partners here.
