First Street Foundation Partners with Pyregence Consortium to Build First Property Specific, Climate Adjusted, Publicly Available National Fire Risk Model and Upcoming "Fire Factor" Assessment Tool

BROOKLYN, N.Y., Aug. 9, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- First Street Foundation is teaming up with members of the pioneering wildfire modeling group Pyregence Consortium, Spatial Informatics Group, Reax Engineering, Eagle Rock Analytics, and Apex Resource Management Solutions, to build a climate-adjusted, property specific wildfire risk model, analyzing the risk to American homeowners of wildfire, one of the most dangerous and growing climate perils associated with a changing climate.

The costs associated with wildfires have accelerated faster than any other climate hazard since 1990, growing from $1 billion per year in the 1990s, to $16.6 billion in 2020. This partnership brings together organizations dedicated to a common mission of democratizing risk information for private citizens, and a commitment to open source and open science principles that prioritize inclusivity and collaboration.

Currently, the only nationally available, online resource about community wildfire risk is www.wildfirerisk.org. The USDA Forest Service and their partners developed the tool to help elected officials, community planners, and fire managers understand how risk varies across a state, region, or county, but it does not include parcel-level data about the risks faced by individual homeowners, nor does it capture changes in wildfire risk due to recent fires or climate change.

As the frequency and severity of wildfires has worsened over the years, the need for a comprehensive, property level wildfire risk assessment based on the latest climate science has become crucial for both current and prospective homeowners. The partnership brings together leading data scientists and modelers to provide a property level, integrated analysis of the inputs that impact wildfire risks over time, allowing individual homeowners to understand their home's risk from wildfire.

"Federal, state, and local governments and agencies at every level have struggled to inform American homeowners at the property level about the growing risk of wildfire as the risk of wildfire worsens year after year," said Matthew Eby, founder and executive director of First Street Foundation. "Pyregence has built a world leading wildfire model which, combined with First Street's data modeling capabilities, will vastly expand our ability to arm homeowners with crucial information about their wildfire risk, to help them protect their homes, investments, and lives."

"As wildfires grow more frequent and more severe with each passing year, the need to educate, inform, and prepare homeowners of their risk of experiencing a disaster has only grown," said David Saah of the Pyregence Consortium. "Working with First Street Foundation allows us to leverage their modeling and communications expertise to vastly expand our ability to inform Americans of the wildfire risk posed by a changing climate."

The partnership allows First Street Foundation to expand the portfolio of climate hazards it analyzes to include wildfire, and positions it to grow further, providing information publicly for current and future homeowners to evaluate their risk from wildfire today, and over the next 30 years.

Data analysis and work on the underlying model is underway, and the groups intend to launch via a national report on the impact of wildfire in mid-2022.

First Street Foundation is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) research and technology group working to define America's growing flood risk. The Foundation uses transparent, peer-reviewed methodologies to calculate the past, present, and future flood risk of individual homes and properties across the United States. The Foundation's data addresses an asymmetry of information in the U.S., empowering Americans to protect themselves from increasing flood risk.

The Pyregence Consortium is building next-generation tools to address the rising threat of catastrophic wildfires—and making the information freely available to all. Current wildfire behavior models were developed decades ago and do not account for factors related to climate change. Pyregence scientists are conducting groundbreaking research on how forest fuels burn and the weather conditions that encourage wildfires to spread. This data is fed into Pyregence's new generation of accurate, fast, and simple models, which project wildfire risk for the near term (the next week) and the long term (the rest of the century). Using Pyregence's free, web-based tools, government officials can order timely evacuations, firefighting agencies can position crews to avoid danger and speed suppression, and electrical utilities can avoid grid-sparked fires. In sum, Pyregence models protect people and property and strengthen the resilience of infrastructure and ecosystems.

SOURCE First Street Foundation

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