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Foundation president, Harvey Fineberg, and chairman emeritus and co-founder, Gordon Moore, discuss the Statement of Founders’ Intent with staff.

Wildfire Resilience Initiative

Team assesses wildfire damage in California. Image credit: Wikimedia

Wildfire Resilience Initiative

Smoke in the air wraps forest trees in the Northwestern U.S.

Wildfire Resilience Initiative

Firefighter approaching wildfire raging across grass meadow in California

Securing healthy ecosystems and communities

After a century of fire exclusion, ecosystems and communities across Western North America now face a growing threat from extreme wildfire. In part, this reflects changes in climate that have yielded hotter, drier seasons. Other factors contribute too: ecosystem fragmentation, historic clear-cutting, pathogens and invasive species, increasing sprawl and development at the wildland-urban interface, and a related increase in human-caused ignitions.

But fire is an essential element within many of these landscapes. For their long-term integrity, fire needs to be able to retain its integral function.

The Wildfire Resilience Initiative aims to support a transformation in the role that fire plays and is perceived to play in Western North America, from an unwanted, destructive threat to a vitalizing element in our landscapes.

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IMPACT STATEMENT

Enabling beneficial fire and reducing vulnerability to extreme wildfire to safeguard healthy fire-adapted ecosystems and resilient fire-prone communities.

KEY DATA POINTS

The dynamic context of our changing climate

The annual area burned by forest fires in the western United States has increased ten-
fold over the past half-century. Assuming constant fuels, models project a
doubling of mean annual forest-fire area between now and 2050, compared to 1991–
2020.