Wildfire Fighting Agencies Spend Too Little on Prevention

Wildfire agencies around the country have been slow to adopt technologies that can help them detect and locate wildfires, even the technologies that are no longer considered new.

That was one of the takeaways from a survey of 173 public-sector wildland firefighting professionals around North America released in the 2024 State of North American Wildfire Resilience Report from environmental technology firm AEM.

A key finding was that a good percentage of these agencies have yet to adopt prevention techniques because they lack the funding or technology to make it happen.

For instance, just 38 percent of agencies surveyed said they use cameras as part of a resilience strategy; 42 percent said they don’t use any software to manage a wildfire event. In fact, at the municipal level, only 37 percent said they used more than 10 percent of their overall budget on prevention and preparedness.

“As you might expect, there’s not as much going into prevention. Most of the budget is going into the detections and response areas,” said Anuj Agrawal, vice president of marketing for AEM. “It’s kind of like a fire drill — it’s where the most urgency is. Instead of investing in something that might happen, you invest in something that does happen.”

One sticking point is that it’s hard to know the ROI of some of these prevention measures. What’s the value of responding a half-hour sooner to a wildfire? “It’s very hard to quantify lead time,” Agrawal said. “These are all things we know we need to do, but it’s hard to quantify.”

And while budgets are tight, restricting how agencies use funding, there are a good percentage of agencies that are just unaware of what’s available even though some of the technology has been available for some time.

“One of the insights we got from the survey was that there is a large proportion of people that aren’t using software,” Agrawal said. “You kind of need the software to do these preventive measures. It’s funding [and] lack of understanding.”

Wildfire management plans consist of using historical data to understand what scenarios are most likely in the future, and the software tools are necessary to calculate that. AI is beginning to play a larger role in wildland firefighting as it can grab data from cameras in real time, giving firefighters a quick first step to response. And yet, just over a third of those surveyed use cameras.

“Predictive modeling, automatic alerting, these are tools and technologies that aren’t really new now,” Agrawal said. “People have predictive models that they can leverage for these kinds of things.”

And the data to feed these models is readily available from various agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

There is technology readily available that will monitor soil moisture, rainfall and humidity to help agencies get a sense of the risk of a wildfire starting or spreading.

“It’s easy to justify ‘There’s a fire breaking out, we need to get resources on it quickly,’” Agrawal said. “But the more you can invest in prevention, the less you have to invest in the other areas. We’re just not there yet.”