New Philanthropic Fund to Stop Amazon Megafires Launches Ahead of Severe Fire Season

NEW YORK, Sept. 25, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Destructive fire in South America's tropical forests is a solvable problem, rather than an inevitable one.

That's the belief at the heart of the South America Fire Fund, launched during Climate Week in New York City. The coordinated and codeveloped philanthropic effort aims to prevent, detect, and stop the destructive fires reshaping the Amazon, the Pantanal, and the Chiquitania regions, and ultimately, to prevent the catastrophic ecological transition of the Amazon from a rainforest to a degraded grassland.

The South America Fire Fund is a time-bound, thesis-driven philanthropic fund from Renaissance Philanthropy and Conservation X Labs, made possible with anchor support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. In three years, the fund aims to generate evidence about systemic interventions — what works, where, and why — and use that learning to inform solutions at greater scale.

"We're facing the possibility that we might lose the Amazon altogether, and once we lose the Amazon, we don't get it back — the next couple of years are really going to matter," said Kumar Garg, President of Renaissance Philanthropy.

The Fund will test an integrated set of strategies across six initial areas that include the Amazon, the Pantanal — the world's largest tropical wetland — and the Chiquitania region, which holds the largest and best-preserved dry forest in the Americas. While technology is not a solution on its own, it is an important enabling tool, and the Fund is designed to connect technology with prevention, local response capacity, incentives, finance, institutions, and cross-jurisdictional coordination.

The Fund is built around three reinforcing strategies:

1. Preventing fires through locally informed stewardship, behavior change, financial incentives, and accelerating restoration.
2. Early detection and rapid response through systematically equipping community and Indigenous brigades with the tools they need, paired with new breakthrough innovations, including AI-enabled camera traps, sensors, satellite and drone systems, and emerging technologies.
3. Unified decision-support systems that put fire-risk data directly in the hands of brigades, communities, and agencies.

The Packard Foundation's initial grant also supports integrating data sovereignty principles into the Fund's data governance from the outset, helping to establish a foundation for how information about lands, livelihoods, and communities is collected, accessed, shared, and used.

"We have to respond to fire in South America like we would any humanitarian crisis. But it's not a natural disaster. The Amazon does not burn on its own. Nearly every fire in the basin is lit by a person, which means nearly every fire was a decision somebody made. People burn because of land management incentives and practices, and these fires are burning more intensely because of climate-change related drought. But since humans have created the systems that drive the fire crisis, we know we can also fix them," said Alex Dehgan, CEO of Conservation X Labs, and South America Fire Fund Director at Renaissance Philanthropy.

Fire is concentrated and driven by identifiable actors rather than diffuse conditions, and targeted interventions can succeed where blanket burn bans have not. Through coordinated action, humanity can address it, and prevent the loss of the Amazon, the Pantanal, and the Chiquitania.

The Fund's organizers hope to avoid a fire season worse than 2024, when fire burned an area larger than Arizona across the Amazon, the Pantanal, and the Chiquitania regions. They are seeking an additional $35 million to respond to what may be a disastrous 2026 fire season, and to get ahead of the 2027 fire season, which will be the first to follow what is shaping up to be one of the strongest El Niño events on record. The Fund seeks to raise a total of $100 million.

"The Moore Foundation has invested in Amazon conservation for over two decades, and our partners have made tremendous progress on the ground.  Our investment in the South American Fire Fund is rooted in the recognition that increasing wildfire events puts all of that progress at risk, but also the belief that solutions are within our grasp:  we still have time to make a difference if we take action now," said Aileen Lee, President of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

"What stood out to us about SAFF is its commitment to learning," said J.R. Littlejohn, Vice President of Environment and Science at the Packard Foundation. "Technology can enable progress, but it is not the solution on its own. SAFF brings local leadership, science, finance, and coordination together to test what works and adapt. The Packard Foundation's grant also supports integrating data sovereignty principles from the start — building a foundation that, if successful, could inform work well beyond these initial landscapes."

The Fund's three-year design is an experiment at the scale of the Amazon. It is intended to generate scientifically rigorous evidence to guide a larger-scale response to fire under the current rapidly changing conditions, with targets including a 50% reduction in escaped fires and in ignitions during high-risk periods across target landscapes, and a standardized 14-person brigade equipped and operating in every target landscape.

The approach scales solutions already proven in the field, including a Pantanal camera network that now detects fires within three to five minutes of ignition, a 15-year Indigenous brigade program in Bolivia that kept fire out of its territory entirely during the catastrophic 2024 season, and a Peruvian green credit facility that turned $100,000 in technical assistance into $1.5 million in lending in six months.

The Fund's strategy was developed with hundreds of experts and practitioners across the Americas, including Indigenous organizations, government agencies, science and research institutions, NGOs, and technology providers.

Renaissance Philanthropy is a nonprofit organization with a mission to fuel a 21st century renaissance by increasing the ambition of philanthropists, scientists and innovators. The organization designs time-bound, thesis-driven funds led by field experts and inspires talent to take action through playbooks and communities. In its first two years, Renaissance Philanthropy catalyzed $533M in philanthropic funding for science, technology, and innovation, launching 22 time-bound, thesis-driven, philanthropic funds and programs addressing global challenges.

Conservation X Labs was built on a novel premise: that extinction is a solvable problem. The right technology and innovation, at scale, is the solution. Extinction is a systems failure and inefficiency, rooted in how we source food, make things, and price the living world. Traditional conservation organizations have spent the last fifty years trying to slow the loss or treat symptoms. In contrast, CXL has opened the extinction problem to hackers, engineers, and founders who seek to harness AI, molecular science, and sensors to change conservation.

Media Contact:

Christopher Moyer
Communications Director, Conservation X Labs
[email protected]

SOURCE Conservation X Labs