goodness gracious, great balls of fire
In Canada last year, more than 6500 fires burned across 18.5 million hectares of forested land, which released an estimated 0.5 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the highest amount from a forest fire season on record. Just a few weeks ago, massive and intense wildfires in Jasper National Park ravaged more than 32,500 hectares of landscape and devastated the historic town of Jasper. It’s not just an increase in media coverage – the reality is that wildfires are becoming more intense, frequent, and burning more land every year. The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center reports that between January and mid-July 2023, over 25 million acres of land burned in Canada – almost 30% more acreage than any annual burn in the last 40 years and almost 4X as large as the previous 10 year high.
Over the last few months, we’ve been diving deep into what we call the “Chain of Fire” – the various stages of a fire, and corresponding opportunities for fire management.
In our research, we found novel technologies across the value chain. Many of these focus on the stages of the Chain of Fire where a fire is already underway, like early detection and automated recommendations to reduce spread. This is certainly valuable – if we detect fires earlier, we can manage them and get them under control more effectively. However, there are other parts of this value chain that could yield outsized environmental impact and financial upside that aren’t yet served by as many innovative technologies. Specifically, the first and last links in the Chain of Fire: fire prevention through more effective forest management and ecosystem recovery after a fire are both pivotal areas in the chain of fire where we hope to see many more competitive solutions that make economic sense for customers. Much of the fire prevention and ecosystem recovery work that needs to be done relates to more effective planting and vegetation management across large swaths of land, unlocking interesting applications for robotics and AI.
To dive deeper in this issue and learn more about startups working to combat the spread of fire, you can check out Sam’s longform piece.
