The wildfires in Los Angeles have gripped the country this past week. How could so much valuable real estate in prestigious zip codes populated at least in part by the rich and famous burn without recourse?
Today's Reversing Climate Change podcast sees alumna of the show, Allison Wolff, return to discuss Vibrant Planet and the LA wildfires. We were originally scheduled just to catch up because it had been too long, but it turned out to be a serendipitous podcast.
Allison has been working on understanding and managing fire risk for years and has built a data platform at Vibrant Planet that helps various entities like state agencies, utilities, and insurers understand and mitigate fire risk in areas under their responsibility.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. I am a carbon removal entrepreneur and have been involved in climate tech and carbon removal for the better part of a decade. I am your host here. Today’s show is with an alumna of the podcast from 2019. Allison Wolff is the founder and CEO of Vibrant Planet. Vibrant Planet, when we met in 2019 — you can go back and listen to the episode, I’ll put it in the show notes if you want to go check it out, but Christophe and I did it. They’ve come so far since we’ve spoken. Vibrant Planet now has dozens of employees, millions of acres under management. Their software, analyzing and making suggestions to prevent wildfire, is being used by utilities, agencies, insurers to understand and mitigate risk. This show is especially timely with the wildfires currently raging in Los Angeles. We recorded the show on January 9th, 2025. Right now, me recording this, is January 10th. This should come out early next week.
People are going to be thinking about wildfires for a while. Now, we’re going to discuss what kinds of fire can and cannot be mitigated. Some physical geographies are just more susceptible to this, especially if you have fire suppression at such a high amount and for so long, and all of these climatic conditions converge upon it. Whether it’s a lack of humidity, high winds, dryness, all of these things together — really, I mean, there’s a limit to how much one can mitigate. Some of these areas might just be not safe for human habitation at this point, which is a really important thing to consider. But a lot of Allison’s work is in areas where, on the margin, changes can be made to make human habitation in line with a healthy ecosystem that requires fire to some extent, can be done in a way that is good for both the ecosystem, its inhabitants, including the humans, and making sure that undue risk to life, property, and ecosystems is not experienced.
So it’s a really interesting podcast. We’re here talking about something that is happening now, something that’s going to be really important moving forward. And the cool thing about data here, by the way — something I really want you to take away from this show — is that everyone talks about how important it is when an insurer pulls out of an entire state. That is a very big red flag that the insurance company is waving, saying that for whatever reason, we just can’t do business here. That’s a surprise when that happens. Insofar as, as a result of just property risk being too high to be insured, you’re going to see more insurers use better data that’s more granular, that is going to find ways of saying, OK, it’s not just California as a whole that can’t be insured.
It’s maybe just the zip code, and maybe it’s not even the entire zip code. Maybe it’s certain streets or certain homes or certain properties within the zip code that can be insured and cannot be insured. And once you’re able to get that much more granular, that is going to change how we live in environments. Because if you have a house — if you’re listening and you own a house — you know that you essentially can’t not have property insurance. You basically have to have it. The average person who is a property owner, that is the biggest financial asset in their life. The idea of only owning the land underneath it and the house going up in smoke represents the loss of the majority of the equity in the property as a whole. And one just essentially needs property insurance. Not having it is really a risk.
And so when government sometimes tries to make things easier by having state plans that insure uninsurable property, it might make sense politically for the people who suggest that. But it’s also one of those funny cases where the market is essentially telling people it isn’t safe to be here right now. You probably should not. And so I love what Allison is doing, because as we get better data, insurers can make better decisions that will allow us to decrease our risk overall and better protect people where they live. And we will, theoretically — I think there’s a good reason to think this is the truth — over time, this should reduce the amount of intersection one has with natural disasters. It will make us safer.
So I think this data play is very fascinating and very important. I wish Vibrant Planet all the best. They’ve had a lot of traction, a lot of partners. You should go look at all the things that they’re doing with the Climate Innovation Fund at Microsoft. Very prestigious thing to be a part of. They have real customers, customers that are oftentimes big and older organizations too, that are prestigious, that you would know. So thanks for teaching me everything about forest fire that you could in the small amount of time allotted. Allison, best wishes. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoyed today’s show.
Allison, thanks for being back on the show. It’s been, I think, six years or so since we spoke at GreenBiz. I remember the exact room we were in. So much has happened since then. Thanks for coming back on.
Allison Wolff: Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited to chat and give you a big update.
Ross Kenyon: Big updates indeed. Before we get to you specifically and Vibrant Planet, we should probably just talk about the fires in Los Angeles right now. I’m sure it’s something that everyone is asking you about. I have a hard time understanding, given how valuable that real estate is, if we can’t protect land like that from wildfire, what hope is there for us? How does it even happen in an area that you would think, if anyone could protect themselves against this known risk, it’d be there?
Allison Wolff: Yeah, the Los Angeles situation is absolutely horrific. It’s sort of the worst-case scenario, unfortunately, and it’s also where there are much bigger fundamental issues at play. So our software helps with risk mitigation, and a lot of that is around fuels reduction in and around communities. And really looking at defensible space, parks and BLM land and Forest Service land that surrounds communities, and making sure that we’re reducing fire severity. In Los Angeles, unfortunately, there’s not a lot you can do about the situation. I mean, when you’re dealing with hurricane-force winds — I mean, we’ve got 100-mile-an-hour winds there, really low humidity, months of drought. The dryness factor we haven’t seen since the 1800s.
My friend Daniel Swain, a climate scientist that really intersects with fire a lot, was quoted yesterday: there’s just not a lot you can do about this. This is like a Category 5 hurricane situation, where it’s just going to happen every now and then. And of course, with climate change, these events are happening more and more frequently. And you know, the solution in this case is less about the kinds of treatments that our platform prescribes. Although we are doing some analysis right now, because we are deployed down there, and where the fires are near Pasadena, there are actually treatments that could have reduced the severity of the fire. So we’re looking at that.
But really, this is a where-are-humans-going-to-be-able-to-live problem. How do we live within a fire-adapted ecosystem? We have to remember, we chose to build in a place across the entire western United States where fires rolled through naturally on a regular basis. It’s part of how the ecosystem functions. It’s how these ecosystems cycle carbon, how they cycle nutrients, how they keep brush down, how forests are culled to a sustainable number of trees per acre. And we’ve had 100% fire suppression policy for 130 years. We put every fire out. Only 2% to 5% of fires get out of control like this. We’re really good at doing that, but it’s also biting us in the ass, because we have these fuel build-ups and we continue to build homes in places that are fire prone.
And so this is just sort of, we have to live with it. That said, we do know how to build with materials that don’t burn. We know how to do defensible space. But we sure like our shrubs around our houses and our trees in our backyard that wouldn’t be there, right? Like, the Los Angeles area didn’t have trees. It was the desert. So, you know, we’ve designed communities to create this problem, unfortunately, but that also means we can to some extent design our way out of it. And where we look at things like community design to have better ingress-egress routes to get the public out and to get fire operations in — we’re seeing that failure right now. We didn’t design for this.
And how we design homes, building codes for homes — there are fire-resilient materials that you can build with. How we do landscaping. All these things are a design problem to some extent. And that’s really, down in Southern California, a lot of the Southwest, that’s really the solution to this fire problem. Our system’s a little bit less relevant there. But, you know, again, we are doing some analysis on places where a system like ours could have helped a little bit.
Ross Kenyon: How much do you think managed retreat is going to be the future? Are many of these homes in Malibu or Pacific Palisades going to be rebuilt, or will it just be decided that they’re uninsurable, even at the state level? The state might conceivably decide that this is too risky to even do that, by the way, and then we might just no longer repopulate these areas. Is that likely? Are we just going to do the same thing over again?
Allison Wolff: Well, history shows that we keep rebuilding in places that we know are going to burn again. Paradise, California is an example of that. Again, we could rebuild differently, with fire-resilient communities, natural fire breaks, you know, ingress-egress design. We could build better. Unfortunately, we don’t have a good track record there. So I don’t expect any change to happen. I think people will rebuild. The question now is insurance. So the implications on insurance for California, where insurance has already stopped underwriting anything new, and where the effects of this are going to be devastating — I don’t know.
But I mean, there are a lot of people on the FAIR Plan already in this region. And my guess is that the FAIR Plan went bankrupt yesterday. And we’ve always known, one big fire — the FAIR Plans, unless they mitigate risk, unless we build differently, they can’t sustain. So it’s a really bad situation. It’ll be very interesting to see what happens with insurance after this event.
Ross Kenyon: What are the politics of the FAIR Plan? That is the California state plan, for listeners?
Allison Wolff: Yes, correct. FAIR Plans — and many western states have recently set them up. It’s basically insurance of last resort, where it’s a state-funded program. Well, it’s funded by the state, but also the largest insurers put a percentage of their — basically, it’s based on how much insurance they underwrite in a state. Those big insurers, think State Farm, Progressive, etcetera, pay in that percentage that represents their portion of underwriting in a state, to fund this insurance of last resort mandated by state laws. It’s just not enough money for what we’re dealing with. It’s just not.
Ross Kenyon: Is it political suicide for state-level politicians to recommend that there be buyouts of uninsurable homes and we stop trying to defend indefensible fire-prone lands? It just seems like suggesting that, it sounds weak. It’s unpopular.
Allison Wolff: Did you read Jake Bittle’s The Great Displacement? Have you read that book?
Ross Kenyon: I have not. It is on a list, a short list of books I would like to read.
Allison Wolff: That’s good.
Ross Kenyon: It just got promoted. Yeah, there’s always, always growing this list. But a lot of it’s about flood, and just trying to use funds to get people to get out of flood plains, which predictably flood with some regularity. It’s just no longer safe for people to live in a lot of these areas. And so what do you do, where you’re putting other people’s lives at risk trying to rescue them when things go wrong? There’s a lot of consequences to this. But California homeowners, they’re an influential group, both in terms of how they structured property taxes there. And I can’t imagine telling them you basically need to go. That’s — you’re not getting re-elected if you do that, I think.
Allison Wolff: It is a really, really difficult situation. And I don’t even want to guess how things play out here. But yeah, I mean, there’s layers of issues. Water, obviously, to Southern California, with the draw on the Colorado River that used to run to the Gulf of Mexico, right? Like, we’re already at the limits of the system now. And so, you know, these events, I think we have to ask ourselves those questions of, does a proposal like you just laid out make sense? I don’t know. It does to me. But it’s a very difficult — it is political suicide, probably. Very hard. Like, who proposes that? How does that actually happen?
Ross Kenyon: I could just imagine someone like Gavin Newsom having proposed something like this would be absolutely excoriated by people who are already critical of him. I have a hard time imagining what the upside of that would be, even if it was the responsible decision.
Allison Wolff: Yeah, absolutely. And just even what’s happening, the backlash on him around smelt, right? The protected fish that is making sure that we have a functioning water system for the entire state of California. And, you know, he’s being blamed for this. But this is where humans are so bad at thinking beyond ourselves and our own kind of safety. We also need water to drink and farm with. California’s 13% of global ag, and we have to have a functioning water system for that massive draw. But we just are so singularly focused. I think the policies in California around water and protected species like smelt are critical for ecosystems. Humans can’t exist without the ecosystem functions, right? So it’s really too bad to watch the blame happen.
Ross Kenyon: It’s a funny reversal, because I think most people imagine that political systems are more responsive to climate risk than the market is. I think they associate the market with unpriced carbon pollution that leads to climate change, and this is a big market failure. But this is one of the few cases where you can point to and say insurance companies pulling out is a market response to climate change that should cause human behavior to change. That is a free market response that could be instructive to people. But the government has intervened and made that signal much weaker as a result. It’s like a funny topsy-turvy kind of thing. I don’t know if you agree with that, but it always strikes my brain as humorous.
Allison Wolff: Yeah, we humans are bad at planning generally. We’re very reactive, right? Like, we’re good at reacting. There’s a lot of heroism in reacting, and we’re not good at the prevention. An example I like to give is, you know, when Ebola broke out in Liberia years ago, we raced in with hazmat suits and we contained it and it didn’t spread, within a matter of months. And then no one still has dealt with the underlying reason Ebola broke out there, where there’s a war-torn country with no healthcare system, and no one wants to deal with that. Slow change versus fast change. We’re really good at fast change, in reaction and disaster response. We’re really bad at dealing with foundational problems that create the emergency in the first place. And fire’s certainly one of those cases, where we know what to do, we can mitigate a lot of this risk.
Again, there are going to be anomaly events like this, hurricane — you know, Category 5 hurricane kind of situation we’re dealing with in LA. Those are just going to happen, and they are going to happen with more frequency with climate change. But there is a lot we can do for fire resilience. It’s one of the climate-driven risks we can actually bend the curve on. And we know how to build, we know how to design communities. We know how to mitigate risk to reduce fire severity in wildlands around communities, so that when a fire is coming towards a town, it’s moving slower. You can set up a fire operation to defend the community. We know how to do that. We know how to harden homes and defensible space. We just have to do it. We have to decide to do it. And it’s proactive versus reactive, and that’s a shift that humans are going to have to embrace. And I do think insurance is going to drive that behavior change. I’m watching it right now.
Ross Kenyon: Let’s reintroduce Vibrant Planet, because it has been so many years. When we spoke, it was very, very early. I think you were still trying to figure out exactly what kind of product you were going to offer. I’m thinking back to that podcast. I remember you were enamored of the idea of mobile pyrolysis machines turning waste wood in fire-prone areas into biochar. I don’t think that’s a part of it. Seems like you’ve moved more in a data direction. [unclear]
Well, of course, I think you dig a little bit deeper into any of these areas, you end up close to biochar in some way. But you’ve moved into data, seemingly, and offering services and analysis that help prevent and mitigate fire risk. So what happened over the last six years? And tell everyone about Vibrant Planet.
Allison Wolff: Yeah. So I think when we met, our company was an idea. I’d started a nonprofit to try to figure out where technology can help solve a big system problem where we really need — it’s the planning problem. You know, the issue with biochar and syngas that can be produced from forest waste: what I saw back then was that industry is not investable without supply certainty. Goes back to a planning problem. We can’t unlock nature-based climate solutions and fire-adapted landscapes without really good data and certainty on that commodity supply, basically, right? That we can assure markets that the carbon is going to be there, that the water service that we can unlock water markets around is going to be there. Biodiversity as well, right? Like, none of those markets are going to happen until you solve the planning problem and the certainty problem.
And so that was really what I discovered in this exploration I was in when we first talked, in the nonprofit. I saw a clear need to harness state-of-the-art technology, the cloud, which seems so basic. There were no cloud-based planning tools for natural resource management or fire risk mitigation six years ago, believe it or not. No one had harnessed machine learning really yet, or AI. And so I saw a clear path to launching a data-driven, science-driven technology platform to inform decision making. And so that’s what we spun up. We spun a public benefit corp out of the nonprofit. The nonprofit is now a data commons. And we develop really killer data on the for-profit side, and then we make those data products available via the data commons. And then the nonprofit also develops other data sets. We’re taking on some work with tribes, for example, to think about indigenous science and data directly through the nonprofit.
So the public benefit corp, which is Vibrant Planet, is building these really sophisticated analytics and prioritization and monitoring capabilities. It’s a tool set. We sell it as an annual subscription to the Forest Service, Cal Fire, counties, fire districts, utilities, to help with — we have this much budget, we know where the biggest risks are for wildfire, flood, landslides, those kinds of disasters. And they interrelate too, right? Like, after you have a really big fire, there’s nothing holding the ground, and then you can deal with up to four years of landslides afterwards. Think about, there’s a big fire in Glenwood Canyon in Colorado, I-70, major commerce, you know, throughput there. And there was a big fire, and then there was a landslide. I-70 was closed for, I think, three weeks and cost tens of millions of dollars of detriment to the economy.
So we really help all these agencies with, where do we go to get the most bang for the buck in terms of avoided losses, but also where we can enhance ecosystems the most? So where we can actually restore carbon, water, biodiversity functions, and even recreation, public health as a service.
Ross Kenyon: What’s it like selling to public agencies and utilities, whom I imagine are — well, the reputation is as slow, lumbering organizations that are difficult to sell to? What’s it like doing business over there?
Allison Wolff: Just like that. Just like that. But I can say, boy, have I met some of the most incredible people inside the US Forest Service, BLM, the Homeland Security, US Fire Administration. I mean, the people that are public servants in these agencies are absolutely mind-blowing. They’re caught in bureaucracy that was set up for good reason, right? Environmental analysis to permit a project to cut trees down to save a forest, we need that in place, right? Because we humans don’t have a good history of ecological management over the last 100 or 150 years.
So all those rules are in place for good reason, but they also bog the system down and hog-tie really innovative people inside these agencies. But we’ve managed to really prove ourselves. And you know, the key with these agencies is creating proofs of concept. And so over the last several years we’ve done that continuously, in different contexts, and with Forest Service, Cal Fire, all these agencies. And so we’re now at four years into starting the public benefit corp, where we’re proven, we’re a known entity all the way up to Congress, including the incoming Congress. And you know, we’re very much poised to go big now, which is great, because now is the time to go big, and the agencies know it. And they’re really looking for accountability on the efficacy of spend. What were the actual outcomes achieved? Did we put the dollars where they mattered most, and what happened there? And that’s where technology comes in and can really help answer that question.
Ross Kenyon: I imagine you might be less vulnerable to political changes as well, given that there’s such a strong regional commercial protective design in the example you gave with I-70, where if that’s closed, R or D, it doesn’t really matter. Your district is losing out on huge amounts of funds, and whether it’s anthropogenic climate change or just a freak thing about nature doesn’t really even matter at that point. Your goal is to make sure that this doesn’t cause a catastrophe, and that’s not political, in your experience, I imagine.
Allison Wolff: It is not. It is very purple, thankfully. And we’re ironically very well positioned as we move into the era of efficiency and accountability and DOGE. We built a system exactly for that. So it’s very apolitical, and yeah, we’re well positioned both on the agency side and the congressional side to actually make that happen now. And I’m excited, ironically, about where, you know, if some of the changes being talked about to reduce red tape get work done — as long as the guardrails are still there on the right work. And that’s where our system really helps visualize. You need to care about the water source for this community. You need to care about the biodiversity that enables the hunters to go get turkey, and the trout that everybody cares about. This stuff, we just have to meet people where they are and help them visualize what’s at stake beyond just our houses and lives. That there’s a lot more that is key to our survival that we can put on the table through data visualization, and helping people weigh trade-offs on this versus that plan.
Ross Kenyon: I like hearing stories like that. I even — I asked that question about lumbering organizations in a pejorative way, but I actually have a great deal of sympathy, and that sympathy grows as I get older too, where even a small company, and small companies I’ve worked at, making changes even there can be agony at times too. I’m sure you’ve encountered that internally too, where if you’ve ever had to make a pivot, it often takes way longer and is way more emotionally and structurally difficult than imagined.
I can’t imagine if you’re at a company or an agency that’s thousands of people and has a lot of different political incentives that one needs to keep track of, trying to make changes. It’s non-trivial. I don’t think it’s because everyone did anything bad. It’s just there’s checks and balances and all of the personalities and stakeholders as an organization grows. Even small startups. I don’t know if it’s been that way for you ever, but you’ve probably caught some whiffs of that even at Vibrant Planet.
Allison Wolff: Oh, for sure, for sure. We have. We’re constantly thinking about our own decision support system for ourselves on where should we point. But yeah, I mean, that was what we built the system for, where it’s impossible when you’re thinking about interrelated issues, and where you pull on one string and there’s a lot of unknowns on the other strings that come with that string, right? So if you’re optimizing a plan as a big private landowner for carbon finance, there are a lot of other strings that come with that, right? And you get fire benefit, if you’re doing it right. You get water benefit, you get biodiversity benefit. You’re also protecting the town downwind or downstream. And so it’s all interrelated.
And when you’re dealing with an agency like the Forest Service or BLM, they by law are managing for carbon, water, biodiversity, recreation values. And they have to make sure that the towns in and around their communities are protected. They have to make sure that the roads that run through their forests are clear, so that you can evacuate and you can get fire operations in to defend communities and resources. So they have to manage for multiple objectives.
And so you can imagine, in a collaborative setting — and this is where fire, there’s a herd immunity kind of mentality you have to have. Like, if I do defensible space around my house, but you don’t around your house, my house is still going to burn. And that’s the case at bigger scales too, where if Forest Service is next to BLM, is next to a big rancher, is next to a town, all of those actors have to be engaged and they have to get to a consensus-driven plan to deal with the combined risk for everybody. And the only way to get through that kind of process, where you have your own values that you care about or are mandated to manage for, is if you visualize the trade-offs and you help people see where they actually agree, and where they don’t agree, give them more information to negotiate that, right?
Like, if you have a spotted owl nest, which is protected by law, next to a neighborhood — our system helps find the places where, like, no-brainer, we all agree on this area. We’ve got an issue here with this owl nest in this neighborhood. Let’s game out what we do for this part of the plan, using data and data visualization and the ability to understand trade-offs, which is what our system does for these difficult decisions. It was the glaring need when we started the company.
Ross Kenyon: Even if you were unable to help an environment like West LA, there are plenty of other communities that on the margin your services are quite valuable for, people determining how to act. Is that how you might characterize it? LA probably not so good, but other places.
Allison Wolff: Yeah. Again, LA is more of a kind of city planning, really thinking about how we build. Like, I mean, I hope we build back. If we build, we will build back. But we’re building with different materials down there and different community design. But you know, take one of our oldest areas of work, is in the Tahoe National Forest and with Placer County and Truckee. People are familiar with Truckee. If you’ve ever skied in the Lake Tahoe area, you’ve come up I-80 to Truckee and turned right from the Bay Area. We’ve been working there ever since the beginning of the company, and a lot of work’s been done in this region. And Placer County has the most structures at risk of fire in the state of California. And it’s a forested community. And the team there and the fire district have worked in, the Forest Service, because the town kind of meanders through the Tahoe National Forest. They’ve worked incredibly well together, in part using our system, to coordinate where are we going to put our resources to protect. It’s a massive county.
And so yeah, that’s it. It’s a shining example of what’s possible. And now we’re looking at insurance solutions in the region, where high-value assets — I think utilities in the area, the airport in Truckee, and communities like HOAs, like Tahoe Donner is the second largest HOA in the country — where we actually have achieved herd immunity. And we can show pre and post risk mitigation analytics on the risk profile change. There’s a lot of innovative insurance carriers that want to underwrite that, ’cause it’s possible. Like, the risk has been reduced, we can verify the number of structures that are no longer at risk, and that’s underwritable. And even recreation assets, right, like ski areas and hiking trails, you can insure that. So we’re very excited about the lever that insurance is going to have on the behavior change that we were talking about. And we’re really starting to play that out now in some of the communities where the work has happened.
Ross Kenyon: It took me a while to come around to being able to see that, because I’ve been thinking that some of these areas are just so dangerous that they are inherently uninsurable in the near to medium term future. But that may not actually be true. I know that there are insurance companies that are trying to use this data to make it so that we don’t need to leave the mountains in certain parts of Southern California behind entirely. And obviously, if State Farm or others just leave an entire state, to the right kind of nimble insurer that just looks like opportunity, rather than, OK, there be dragons, stay away, never go over there. So it’s unsurprising that there’s just nimbler, younger organizations that are ready to insure some of those. You know, does it make sense that an entire state is uninsurable? Probably not. There’s probably pockets that are better than it might look at first glance.
Allison Wolff: Absolutely. And that’s where we’re starting to play, where we can show this is underwritable now and you can price affordably, and we can show over here there’s a bit of a problem, but this is how you’d mitigate it. Here’s who needs to be engaged in that mitigation across jurisdictions, down to the parcel scale. And then, you know, here you had a really big problem, that’s a 20-year problem. Like, we can see that now, and that can really shift, that can really change the game. And then again, like, there’s a lot of places that work needs to be done. But if it’s done, I mean, you can spend — we’re starting to do analytics like, you know, $20 million of risk mitigation work, you know, defensible space around homes, work in a park or Forest Service land, BLM land around a community, to reduce fuels, slow that fire down, reduce ember cast, right?
Like, ember cast is what’s causing all these fires to light up all over Los Angeles, because embers are travelling when you’ve got 100-mile-an-hour winds, miles and miles and miles, and then hitting a roof or a deck or whatever, right? And so all those things can be dramatically reduced with the kinds of treatments that our system prescribes. And then we can do, with data visualization — and we’ve got this incredible foundational model that maps vegetation — we can show what changed and how the fire modelling changes, with really solid predictions. So yeah, it really unlocks a lot of opportunity.
But there are situations where we know — I know that Governor Green in Hawaii is incredibly frustrated with what’s happened in Lahaina and the profits the insurance companies have made on that disaster. And there are conversations about, like, where do we just pull out of insurance and set up our own way to self-insure? There’s structures like captives, that you basically, if you’ve mitigated the risk, you can pull funds from public and private resources and then just self-insure way less expensively than underwriting’s happening right now, because insurers just have sort of a blanket approach of, we’re just going to pull out. So anyway, it’s a very interesting time right now.
Ross Kenyon: That is interesting. I could see — obviously it depends on the time scale and the amount you have to pay. But with insurance versus self-insurance, you’re like, OK, if I take out life insurance and I die next month, I come out pretty good. Or my descendants, my beneficiaries come out well. I don’t, personally. But yeah, obviously if you have to pay premiums in perpetuity to maintain Lahaina’s fire risk, versus we invested some of that money upfront, reduce the risk, and now the money that would go to premiums is either never taxed in the first place, so people get to spend it in the way that they choose, or the government has it and they’re able to do something for the public benefit. At some time scales, that sounds like a great idea. I wonder why that isn’t more common, or maybe it is, I just don’t know about it.
Allison Wolff: It’s about to be. It’s about to be helpful, just because the FAIR Plans are just no longer going to be solvent.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Wow. Yep. Tell me more. Add texture to that a little bit, with how you imagine this is going to look moving forward.
Allison Wolff: Well, you think about, like, FAIR Plans are a pool of money. One big disaster, that pool of money is gone. And you can imagine, for the people paying into those pools, realizing the level of risk, we’ve passed this point of no return. And unless we bend the curve on risk — and that’s again where it’s possible with fire. It’s hard with hurricanes, but with fire, we can absolutely do something about this. And that’s where the behavior change comes in and where innovation happens. And we are there squarely with what we have seen, with Paradise, then Lahaina, now Los Angeles. We have to change something. And I think it’s become very, very clear. And a lot of Western states have very recently set up departments of insurance and FAIR Plans. And they’re watching what’s happening in California right now and going, oh shit, how’s this going to work? So yeah, I think a lot of innovation is going to continue to be sparked.
Ross Kenyon: Do you just think that flood and/or hurricane risk is less mitigatable than fire risk? Is that what you were implying?
Allison Wolff: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. What do you think that is?
Allison Wolff: Well, hurricanes, we’ve kind of done what we’ve done with the oceans and temperatures. OK, so the die is just cast with that. That’s a very, very long-term solution, right? And I know there’s all kinds of crazy things being talked about there. We can’t really do much about how we’ve changed the currents of the world’s oceans at this point. But with fire, it really comes down to how you build, where you build, how you design a community, and what vegetation you have right around your homes, in your community.
And then, you know, again, this broader wildland problem. Just for context, 40 to 60% of land ownership in the Western United States is federal. And where fires start out in wildlands and move into a community, that wildland-to-structure type of fire transfer, we can do something about the wildland. Again, like, we can reduce that severity by removing fuels, getting to a historically appropriate but also future-appropriate number of trees. Again, fire used to roll through, like where I live in the Sierra Nevada, every 5 to 15 years. Fire rolled through everywhere with lightning, and there was cultural fire. Tribes burned every inch to cultivate medicinal plants and to clear brush to hunt more effectively, for thousands of years. And we had lightning fires, and we didn’t have red retardant being shot out of planes to put them out. There was constantly fire.
And that cleaned up the forest. It kept the appropriate number of trees per acre. And of course, we didn’t have a lot of buildings in those forests either, and lots of people sparking fires. So there’s, you know, there’s all these kind of overlapped issues. But basically, if you think about fire, it’s sort of like a triangle. At the base of the triangle is fuels and vegetation structure. Then there’s climate change, or whatever the climate is of the day. How dry is it? How hot is it? And then there’s weather, which is the current weather situation. You know, how much precipitation you’ve had. What we’re seeing in LA are these 100-mile-an-hour winds. It’s like the moment of the day, right?
The science is very clear. If you change the bottom of that triangle, if you change the fuels — and fuels are both built infrastructure and vegetation. So you can change the vegetation structure to be resilient to fire. In fire-adapted ecosystems, they want fire, but it has to be the right kind of fire, not catastrophic fire, right? It needs to be more low-intensity and regenerative fire. And that’s where our system can help get us there, with fuel treatments and prescribed fire and, you know, applying goats to eat up vegetation and brush and stuff like that. And then around homes, we can make sure, you know, if you’ve got bushes planted around your house, they’re five to 10 feet away from the house, not right up against the house, and making sure you don’t have a whole forest right next to your home, right? So that’s really what our system does.
And then there’s what are you building with, that is also fuels. If you have a shake roof, that thing’s going to burn like crazy when an ember hits it. If you have a wood deck, if you have a propane tank in your backyard, those are all really big problems. And so, again, it goes back to the design problem and how we build.
Ross Kenyon: Well, Allison, what’s next for Vibrant Planet? What are you going to be thinking about, working on in the near future?
Allison Wolff: At the moment, we are very focused on pathways for how we scale in the state of California, with Cal Fire, with other states that we’re in conversations with, and with some of the federal agencies like the Forest Service and BLM, where we can deploy our system to really help at broader scale. Today we are deployed in about 40 million acres in six states. And so really hoping to expand upon the work we’ve done and where we’ve proven ourselves with those big agencies. We are going to continue to grow our work supporting counties and fire districts on community wildfire protection planning, often in coordination with Forest Service or BLM or other agencies.
And then we’re hyper-focused on really tuning front-end applications for utility resilience, to help reduce liability in the fuel bed where they can spark fires, and also risk to their infrastructure. Utilities are really big landowners and infrastructure managers and owners, and they are also having a hard time with insurance in a lot of states. And so they’re very concerned about risk to them, in addition to reducing liability, where they’re getting fined billions of dollars for starting fires. And so we’ve got a whole utility play that really tunes our application specifically for what they need.
And then we’re starting to put together some of these insurance pilots where we’ve worked with communities to change the risk profile around a community, around a key asset like energy infrastructure or a university, and really prove, with actual underwriting, working with some of the innovative managing agents and brokers, that insuring these assets is possible profitably. And so, starting to really catalyze a change in the insurance industry kind of from the grassroots up. Give that industry a kick in the pants, basically.
Ross Kenyon: Thanks so much for being here. I’m glad we had a chance to reconnect and catch up with Vibrant Planet.
Allison Wolff: Yeah, thanks for having me again. Fun conversation, as always.
