As fire frequency and severity increases worldwide, biodiversity, ecosystems, and communities are all at risk. Indigenous and traditional communities have deep histories and knowledge of fire management. Yet, they often manage and fight fires under changing climate and land-use conditions, in remote locations, and with little outside help.
Graphic recording and illustrations by Zulma Patarroyo
Tending the Spark:
Melding breakthrough innovation and ancient knowledge
for fire into the future
The Fire Grand Challenge seeks to re-imagine how we live with fire. We are seeking solutions that can transform local and systemic fire stewardship by braiding together place-based engagement and knowledge with cutting-edge innovation, science, and technology. Solutions should incentivize the promotion and incorporation of Indigenous, traditional, rural, and/or place-based knowledge and practice, collaboration across sectors, and economic benefits of locally-appropriate, community-centered fire management. The Challenge critical issues are deliberately written to allow for solutions appropriate for widely varying ecological and socioeconomic contexts across the diverse challenge focal geographies. The goal is to restore fire to its appropriate place in natural and social dynamics. Solutions must demonstrate positive, measurable outcomes for biodiversity, ecosystem health, and human well-being.
CHALLENGE TOPICS
The Fire Grand Challenge seeks to re-imagine how we live with fire.
We are seeking solutions that can transform local and systemic fire stewardship by braiding together place-based engagement and knowledge with cutting-edge innovation, science, and technology. The three topics were carefully drafted to allow for solutions appropriate for widely varying ecological and socioeconomic contexts across the diverse challenge focal geographies.
Shaping the land to tame destructive fires
+ Ecosystem Stewardship Topic
Innovations that incentivize and scale locally-appropriate ecosystem stewardship throughout the fire cycle.
This topic seeks solutions that protect biodiversity and promote healthy ecosystems and communities through community-centered land and fire stewardship.
Solutions may decrease the risk of, or incentives for, catastrophic or ecologically damaging fire, provide alternatives to destructive or dangerous uses of fire for land management, promote the use of beneficial, prescribed, and cultural fire where appropriate, or manage and/or restore degraded or transformed ecosystems. Solutions should aim to create economic incentives for collaborative, proactive, and integrated ecosystem stewardship at meaningful scales while incorporating or promoting local and place-based knowledge and practice where appropriate.
Fires and their Impacts
Known by All
+ Information Topic
Innovations that promote transparency, knowledge exchange or application, and broad access to information on fire dynamics and fire impacts throughout the fire cycle.
This topic seeks solutions that translate data into relevant, timely, and actionable data and information that is available to all throughout the fire cycle.
Solutions may address access to, production, or communication of, information to support situational awareness, facilitate real-time decisions, and prioritize capacities and resources before during or after fire, including preventing and/or managing fire, facilitating prescribed or beneficial fire, or understanding fire impacts on biodiversity, ecosystems, and communities. Solutions may incentivize information exchange across scales, sectors, and jurisdictions and promote the integration of local knowledge, practice, and data into systemic fire-related information flows.
Equipping communities for a fire-adapted future
+ Equipment Topic
Innovations that provide novel or newly-adapted equipment or technology, or their integration, that enable communities to better respond to and manage fire and fire impacts and/or to more effectively use fire as a landscape management tool where appropriate. Innovations could also address logistical barriers to the delivery of technology, information, or supplies to remote, difficult-to-access areas.
This topic seeks solutions for cost-effective, community-based fire preparedness and management, especially in remote and resource-limited areas. Solutions should increase the capacity of communities to prepare for, detect, manage, communicate about, and/or respond to fire events (including promoting use of prescribed or cultural fire) and/or to mitigate fire impacts on biodiversity, ecosystems, and communities. Solutions may enable broader or more effective community engagement and/or integration of communities with systemic fire response systems.
Three Unique Geographies
Graphic recording and illustrations by Zulma Patarroyo
The Amazon, Western North America, and South East Asia all share rich histories of traditional fire management and suffer from changing fire conditions with severe consequences for biodiversity and human well-being. Together they represent a large swath of global fire dynamics. We will seek solutions that are relevant and scalable to one or more of these contexts and beyond, with implications for how we live with and manage fire globally.
+ Amazon
Fires in the Amazon are human-caused and linked to land-use change. They are a key facilitator of deforestation, with enormous implications for biodiversity and climate function. Communities are often on the front lines of detecting and responding to fire.
+ South East Asia
In South East Asia, fires in drained peatlands, often lit to clear lands, smolder underground for months and cause regional biodiversity and health impacts. Community engagement is critical to preventing, detecting, and responding to such fires.
+ Western North America
In Western North America, climate change and decades of fuel build-up have created the conditions that allow destructive megafires to rage out of control. Indignenous knowledge and rural community management can help us find new ways to manage and live with fire.
CHALLENGE MILESTONES
Be a part of the solution.
Want to help stop destructive fires?
We are currently consolidating the resources and partnerships needed to make the Fire Grand Challenge a reality.
ways to partner
+ TECHNICAL PARTNERS
- Contribute to on-going research consultations
- Participate in one of four 'Think' ideation sessions
- Give feedback on the Landscape Analysis
- Advise and/or participate in the process to evaluate and select high-quality applicants
- Recommend technical, business, and policy experts to help the evaluation
- Lend your expertise as a judge after the launch
+ Funding Partners
- Financially support the Challenge’s implementation in 2023-2024
- Contribute to the prize pool
- Sponsor the Challenge launch or awards event
- Provide resources for design, testing, adoption, and scaling of innovations
+ Amplifying Partners
- Leverage your network to promote the challenge to a global audience through digital, social, and/or print media
- Help recruit a pool of high-quality Challenge contributors and applicants
+ Scaling Partners
- Play a key role in advancing the innovations.
- Support innovators through mentoring, networking, and technical assistance to test their solutions.
- Make additional commitments to help implement and scale innovations.
Stay in touch
Learn more about the Fire Grand Challenge
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