From Wildfire Risk to Resilience The Investment Case for Action 2026

Wildfire ecosystem actor  Role in the ecosystem  Challenges and risks Communities (including Indigenous Peoples), non-governmental organizations (NGOs)  and civil society Pioneer on-the-ground solutions, combining traditional knowledge and innovation that larger systems can scale.Scale and continuity: Reliance on short grant cycles limits replication and long-term stewardship. Home/landowners, small businesses and HOAs Collective action drives community-level mitigation and represents the frontline of wildfire resilience.Affordability and uptake: Upfront costs and uneven incentives slow adoption of hardening and defensible space. The public sector  (municipal to national) Governments affect wildfire resilience through land- use planning, funding, building codes, emergency management and regulatory measures.Capacity and funding gaps: Local governments often lack funding, technical capacity or incentives to focus on mitigation over immediate emergency needs. Multilateral institutions  Align global policy, financial and technical standards to scale local resilience efforts worldwide.Metric misalignment: Global climate finance frameworks still emphasize emissions reduction over adaptation, leaving wildfire resilience under-funded. Philanthropy  Provide catalytic funding for early pilots, data systems, as well as community-led programmes.Bridge failure: Early grants de-risk pilots but rarely connect to sustained government or private investment pipelines. Agriculture and forestry Land managers can reduce wildfire risk by embedding fuel treatments (thinning, prescribed fire and targeted grazing) into routine forest and rangeland management.Economic imbalance: Fuel-reduction and restoration costs often exceed returns from crops, timber or carbon credits, discouraging participation in resilience efforts. Private sector: insurers and reinsurers Convert physical risk into financial signals that reward prevention and determine coverage availability and affordability. Promote “build back better” coverage.Regulatory misalignment: Short-term policy and pricing cycles limit recognition of long-duration risk reduction, while local regulatory frameworks in some jurisdictions (e.g. the US) constrain insurance availability. Private sector: utilities Co-fund ignition reduction and share mitigation data to reduce systemic risk.High exposure and cascading risk: Utility-linked fires can trigger outsized claims and capital strain; prevention evidence must be recognized in pricing to sustain investment. Private sector: technology and data providers Enable detection, modelling and measurement, reporting and verification (MRV), turning data into investable information.Policy and privacy concerns: Airspace restrictions, data-sharing and procurement barriers slow the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) detection and autonomous response. Private sector: lenders and builders Integrate mitigation standards into finance and construction, shaping where and how resilience is built.Credit withdrawal and valuation risk: Lenders are retreating from high fire-prone areas (e.g. in California, US) due to rising default and insurance instability.62 Private sector: investors and asset owners Investors and operators seek stable, risk-adjusted returns by embedding resilience into portfolios, infrastructure and asset management.Valuation uncertainty: Data quality and lack of standardized avoided-loss metrics prevent pricing of resilience in portfolios and bonds.Roles, challenges and risks across wildfire ecosystem actors TABLE 1 Wildfire resilience requires coordination among ecosystem stakeholders who play distinct but interconnected roles, across knowledge, public planning, land management and capital allocation. When these roles are aligned, community knowledge and pilots inform regulation; governments translate this learning into codes and planning; land managers implement fuel treatments and restoration; and market actors, such as insurers and utilities, use consistent data to guide risk reduction and direct capital towards what works.In practice, achieving alignment requires negotiation and trade-offs, and trust-building among parties whose objectives and incentives may conflict. Wildfire risk cascades across properties and community lifelines; therefore, resilience planning helps communities align priorities and resources.63 Neighbourhood-scale resilience standards then provide a common basis for action across adjacent properties64 and shared infrastructure, reducing conflicting goals and enabling measures to reinforce one another over time.65 From Wildfire Risk to Resilience: The Investment Case for Action 13