Climate & Wildfire Institute

Home
United States
Kyburz, CA
Climate & Wildfire Institute

Directions Website Contact the organization

Committed to accelerating solutions to the era's most pressing climate and wildfire challenges.

10/13/2026

If your organization does place-based work in California, this survey is for you.

The Watershed Research and Training Center and UO Ecosystem Workforce Program are conducting a follow-up to their 2020 Capacity and Needs Assessment — supported by the Regional Forest and Fire Capacity Program — seeking input from Tribes, community-based organizations (CBOs), fire safe councils, volunteer fire departments (VFDs), collaboratives, Prescribed Burn Associations (PBAs), Resource Conservation Districts (RCDs), Special Districts, Joint Powers Authorities (JPAs), and similar organizations across the state.

Results will be used to communicate current sector capacity, identify gaps and strengths, and develop funding recommendations — including the consequences of reduced investment given current budget outlooks. The original study shaped wildfire resilience and policy funding in California. This one aims to do the same.

The deadline to complete this survey is November 20. For any questions, please contact Olivia Awbrey at [email protected].

Take the survey here: https://oregon.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0lHa7hmiP4yq3oW

10/07/2026

Co-authored with our partners at the Environmental Policy Innovation Center, our latest report evaluates wildfire fuel tracking, modeling, and inventory systems across Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado, benchmarking state efforts against national datasets and California’s Interagency Treatment System Dashboard. The initiative provides actionable recommendations for refining fuels inventories and vegetation modeling, enabling mitigation personnel to strategically site and implement targeted risk-reduction interventions.

Our findings demonstrate that static risk snapshots should be integrated with dynamic fuels inventories to evaluate treatment options accurately. Additionally, unstandardized data input processes without a unified management framework generate omissions and entry errors that obscure the picture.

The report proposes a phased, multi-state data governance roadmap to change that. Read the full report to explore what a cross-boundary wildland fuel management network could look like: https://www.policyinnovation.org/insights/data-landscape-and-interoperability-goals-for-hazardous-fuels.

09/17/2026

Funds to prepare your home for wildfire exist. Most California homeowners just don’t know about them.

CWI is excited to launch ResilientHomeFund.org: a one-stop digital hub for finding federal, state, and local grants to fund wildfire home hardening and defensible space. Answer a few easy questions and walk away with a personalized list of funding opportunities tailormade for you.

We built this tool because the biggest barrier to home hardening isn’t willingness — it’s upfront cost. Stop guessing and start applying. Visit www.resilienthomefund.org to get started.

09/09/2026

The Wildfire Ready Design Challenge is officially underway.

Last week, CWI kicked off the challenge, sponsored by Pacific Gas and Electric Company, alongside partners at the California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) WUI Fire Institute, Home Hardening Solutions Inc, and City of Grass Valley, California Government. The competition brings together the next generation of designers and planners to tackle one of California’s most pressing challenges: how to make homes and neighborhoods in high wildfire risk areas safer, more resilient, and realistically buildable.

Teams are now getting to work on design concepts sited in Grass Valley — a community that reflects many of the wildfire challenges facing California at large. They’ll be developing solutions that real homeowners can adopt, contractors can execute, and communities can afford. We can’t wait to see what they come up with.

For more details, visit our website and be sure to follow along as the design challenge unfolds: https://www.climateandwildfire.org/cwi-projects/designchallenge.

09/03/2026

We’re proud to share a new blog post from our Summer 2026 Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals (ITEP) Air Quality Intern, Haiwee Fredericks, that thoughtfully explores what it means for nonprofit organizations to initiate relationships with Indigenous entities.

The piece reflects on the intentions and preparations that underpin meaningful engagement, drawing on insights from The Stewardship Project co-leads, Don Hankins and Sara A. Clark, and highlighting the work of organizations like CWI and TOGETHER Bay Area's Rights Relations program as examples of relationships built on accountability and respect. It’s a valuable read for any organization doing this work — or beginning to.

Check out the full post on our website: https://www.climateandwildfire.org/post/initiating-relationships-with-indigenous-entities-blog-post.

08/13/2026

Doing nothing is a choice. And we've been watching it play out to devastating results.

At the Citizens Climate Lobby (CCL) Summer Conference in Washington, D.C., CWI’s James Puerini joined CCL’s Jennifer Tyler and Nyasha Osifeso of the Environmental Defense Fund for a breakout session on the science of healthy forests, the growing catastrophic wildfire challenge facing public lands, and the policies shaping the future of forest management.

Larger, more severe wildfires continue to threaten the very landscapes that store carbon, protect communities, and filter clean water, while the policy conditions needed to respond at scale continue to lag well behind the crisis. From permitting reform to sustained funding to a supported workforce, CCL’s Lobby Day puts those asks directly in front of Congress. A few highlights from the conversation:

• Urgently Scale Proactive Mitigation: In some landscapes, we need to essentially 10x the use of prescribed fire and hazardous fuels reduction. Passing tools like the Fix Our Forests Act (FOFA) will help as an initial first step to increasing pace and scale.
• Protect Public Science & the Workforce: As federal fire functions reorganize, we can’t afford to gut research, cut access to public data, or fully outsource either to be most attractive bidder in the private market. We must also support our workforce with fair pay, better working conditions, career incentives for thinking big, and personal liability protections.
• End "Fire Borrowing" Permanently: Proactive forest health budgets shouldn't be redirected to backfill emergency suppression costs. Sustained, cross-boundary funding is required if we want long-term landscape resilience.

Forests won’t save the climate if we let them burn. We’re grateful to CCL for making forest health a centerpiece of this year’s advocacy — and to the hundreds of volunteers who took these conversations to the Hill last month.

07/15/2026

New student-led research shows prescribed fire could cut harmful air pollution by nearly half.

Over the past year, CWI has been working with a team of undergraduate researchers participating in UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability (IoES) Capstone Practicum to compare the smoke impacts of catastrophic fire and prescribed fire, using the Teakettle Prescribed Burn and other planned beneficial fire treatment sites as real-world case studies. Using BlueSky emissions modeling, the students found that a modeled prescribed burn at Teakettle would have resulted in up to 46% fewer PM2.5 emissions compared to the catastrophic Garnet Fire that ultimately occurred. Their vegetation regrowth projections also tracked closely with real-world observations — a sign that the modeling behind prescribed fire planning is becoming more precise and more actionable.

The data keeps pointing in the same direction: managed fire is safer and smarter than the alternative. CWI is proud to support the next generation of researchers helping make that case.

06/25/2026

Last Thursday, CWI’s program coordinator Cricket Baldwin joined Ralph Bloemers and team for a shoot day in Mount Aukum and Folsom, CA, capturing the next round of wildfire mitigation content for Fire Safe People TV.

Fire Safe People TV breaks down exactly how homes ignite during wildfire — from Zone 0 landscaping to ember-resistant vents — and show homeowners practical, achievable steps to harden their properties before fire season. This content is part of our broader effort, supported by Pacific Gas and Electric Company, to put plain-language, science-grounded wildfire preparedness resources directly in front of the communities that need them most.

We're grateful to partner with the team at Fire Safe People TV, whose front-line reporting makes wildfire preparedness feel actionable rather than abstract. More to come as this content rolls out to El Dorado County, Nevada County, and beyond.

Check out the channel here: https://www.youtube.com/.

06/23/2026

Please join us in welcoming Haiwee Fredericks to the Climate & Wildfire Institute team as our newest Summer 2026 Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals Air Quality Intern!

Haiwee will design and lead a strategic communications campaign amplifying Indigenous-led fire management and Tribal co-stewardship/co-management policy efforts across the United States — working closely with Tribal partners and organizations to source and share stories demonstrating how cultural fire advances Tribal sovereignty. She'll also help amplify CWI-funded initiatives like The Stewardship Project and the UCLA IoES beneficial fire practicum, and dig into policy issues like air quality barriers and opportunities tied to cultural burning.

We're excited to see how Haiwee's creativity and storytelling bring these critical efforts to a wider audience. Welcome to the team!

06/15/2026

The barrier to wildfire resilience isn't a lack of data, tools, or technical solutions. It's the distance between insight and coordinated action.

At our recent convening, a consistent pattern emerged across sessions: fragmentation, misaligned incentives, and limited implementation capacity are the core constraints — not the absence of solutions. Many of these tensions around landscape prioritization, cross-boundary coordination, and shared responsibility across jurisdictions have shaped and impeded wildfire resilience efforts for decades. The opportunity now is to move beyond naming them toward more deliberate, sustained action to address them.

What stood out most was the human dimension. Behavior change, trust, and collective action surfaced again and again as the limiting factors — at the homeowner, community, agency, and industry level alike. Technical solutions are necessary but not sufficient without enabling capacity and adoption at scale.

Participants kept returning to four interconnected realities: 1) Human behavior and trust require greater investment in social science; 2) Collective action is how landscape-scale outcomes actually happen; 3) Data must be usable, not just available; and 4) Financial and policy incentives are still not aligned with long-term resilience. Progress in one area depends on movement in the others.

Click here to view our 2026 Convening Report in full: https://923d0f4a-ced5-4469-98f9-1a022ef01db3.usrfiles.com/ugd/923d0f_d73f2d812a6e40d5af08171a1c5f585f.pdf.

Address

Kyburz, CA
95720

Website

http://climateandwildfire.org/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Climate & Wildfire Institute posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Organization

Send a message to Climate & Wildfire Institute:

Want your organization to be the top-listed non profit organization in Kyburz?