Fire Grand Challenge

CHALLENGE STATEMENT AND THEMES
Tending the Spark
The Fire Grand Challenge seeks to reimagine how we live with fire. We are seeking
solutions that can transform local and systemic fire stewardship by braiding together
place-based knowledge with cutting-edge innovation, science, and technology. The
goal is to restore fire to its appropriate place in natural and social dynamics. Relevant
solutions can help scale beneficial fire and mechanical treatments, more profitably
utilize forest biomass, advance large-scale forest restoration, or ensure that
practitioners have access to actionable information at every stage of the fire cycle.
Solutions should incentivize the promotion and incorporation of Indigenous, rural, and
place-based knowledge and practices, collaboration across sectors, and economic
benefits of locally appropriate, community-centered fire and ecosystem
management. Solutions must demonstrate positive, measurable outcomes for
biodiversity, ecosystem health, and human well-being and should be designed to
achieve impact in the face of barriers such as restrictive policy frameworks and
workforce limitations.
The Challenge themes provide information on the types of innovations that the
Challenge seeks to incentivize, accelerate, and scale. The themes were developed to
guide technical applicants toward addressing key drivers of the fire crisis. Innovations
may fit under one or both of the themes; they are not mutually exclusive. All innovations
will be judged through the same process, regardless of the theme they fit within.

Theme 1. Scaling Innovative Ecosystem Stewardship
Innovations that enable and scale locally-appropriate and/or community-driven
ecosystem and fire stewardship throughout the fire cycle.
This challenge theme focuses on reestablishing appropriate fire regimes through
cost-effective, community-based ecosystem stewardship for fire preparedness and
management. Solutions may decrease the risk of ecologically damaging fire,
decrease the cost of mechanical thinning, promote the use of beneficial fire where
appropriate, or restore degraded or transformed ecosystems. Solutions should aim to
create or influence policy and/or economic incentives for collaborative, proactive,
and integrated ecosystem stewardship at meaningful scales, and under changing
climate and land use conditions, while incorporating or promoting local and placebased knowledge and practice.
Questions to consider:
• How can we transform land and watershed management practices to
restore ecosystem health, conserve biodiversity, and establish appropriate
fire regimes across Western North America?
• How can we utilize wildland fires as opportunities to establish locallyappropriate fire regimes in damaged landscapes, while considering future
needs driven by changing climate and land use?
• How can we increase the financial viability of sustainable ecosystem
management practices at scale, assisting communities in developing
thriving stewardship economies?
Examples of solutions could include, but are not limited to, innovations that:
• Enable more effective landscape-scale management using fire where
appropriate, such as solutions to promote prescribed and/or cultural
burning.
• Advance more effective and cost-efficient landscape management without
fire in ecosystems, or under conditions, where fire is inappropriate or
destructive.
• Enable novel fire management techniques by communities or local fire
brigades (including facilitating prescribed and/or cultural fire or suppression
where needed) through new technologies or novel applications of existing
systemic tools.

Enhance restoration of areas degraded by fire exclusion, including through
biomass removal or utilization.
• Create profitable opportunities for forest restoration, including through:
o Decreasing barriers (including cost) of processing, transporting, and
marketing forest biomass and residuals
o Contributing to portfolios of marketable forest products (such as
biomass, bioenergy, biochar, mass timber, or others) with
biodiversity and community benefits
o Creating opportunities for communities to benefit from ecosystem
stewardship
• Restore, protect, and/or cultivate locally valued natural and cultural
resources and biodiversity.
• Mitigate degradation of landscapes and watersheds after fires, including
from impacts such as landslides, soil erosion, and water pollution.
• Enable long-term planning, monitoring, and care for restoration efforts.
• Address logistical barriers to the delivery of technology, information, or
supplies to remote, difficult-to-access areas.

Theme 2. Synthesizing Diverse Knowledge
Innovations that promote transparency, knowledge exchange or application, and
broad access to information on fire dynamics and fire impacts throughout the fire
cycle.
This challenge theme focuses on solutions that translate knowledge or data into
relevant, timely, and actionable information that is available to all throughout the fire
cycle (before, during, and after a fire). Solutions may address access to, production
of, or communication of information to support situational awareness, facilitate realtime decision making, and prioritize capacities and resources before, during, and/or
after fire. This includes preventing and/or managing fire, facilitating prescribed or
beneficial fire, or understanding or mitigating 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.
Questions to consider:
• How can we uplift the voices and knowledge of Indigenous and rural
communities to improve systemic approaches to fire management, tailor
solutions to local contexts, and engage local actors, while protecting
knowledge and data sovereignty?
• How can we enhance communities’ capacity to understand, measure, and
create actionable information related to fire impacts on community and
ecosystem health and well-being?
• How can we mobilize the wealth of information that is being collected to
work across jurisdictions and operationalize proactive fire management at a
regional level?
Examples of solutions could include, but are not limited to, innovations that:
• Translate data into actionable information for all stages of the fire cycle.
• Inform actors of how to protect and/or cultivate valued ecological and
cultural resources during ecosystem restoration processes.
• Support situational awareness and coordination for proactive fire
management.
• Understand and incorporate implications of future climatic conditions into
landscape stewardship practices.

Promote information flows and enable planning and action across
jurisdictions and in remote locations.
• Facilitate the incorporation of place-based knowledge and practice into
systemic ecosystem and fire management and decision making for mutually
beneficial knowledge sharing.
• Facilitate the rediscovery and implementation of lost place-based
knowledge for fire or fire-related ecosystem stewardship.
• Increase communities ability to generate, access, and share actionable
information on post-fire impacts and on the success and durability of
restoration efforts.
• Capture and/or quantify long-term environmental, economic, health, and
social impacts of fire (or lack of fire) on ecosystems, biodiversity, and
human communities.
• Monitor post-fire impacts and allow for long-term adaptive management of
restoration and ecosystem stewardship efforts.
• Enhance local engagement in ecosystem stewardship and/or integrate
place-based knowledge and practices into systemic landscape
management.

COMPETITION GUIDELINES
We invite teams with ideas for ground-breaking innovations (including bold
adaptations to existing practices or technologies) to join us in transforming how we
live with fire.
There are two primary ways to engage with the Challenge’s innovation process: as a
technical applicant or as a partner community. Organizations or individuals with an
idea for an innovation will submit an application (detailed in this document) during the
open application phase, thereby becoming a technical applicant. Members of
communities who are interested in co-developing and field-testing innovations
submitted by technical applicants will submit a form (linked on the Challenge
website), which Challenge administrators will assess for fit.
Then, a third-party panel of evaluators and Conservation X Labs will create a shortlist
of the technical applicants with promising innovations and a shortlist of partner
communities. Conservation X Labs will then lead a matchmaking process in which
shortlisted technical applicants and partner communities will familiarize themselves
with each other, rank their desire to collaborate with each other, and match to create
teams (each required to have a technical applicant and a partner community) to
participate in the 9-month field-testing and acceleration phase. To be eligible to
become a finalist, teams must successfully match and have their field-testing plan
accepted by Challenge administrators. Finalists will then be named and awarded
$50,000 to fund their participation in the next phase.
Technical applicants should refer to the “Eligibility” and “Technical Evaluation
Criteria” sections for information on their unique pathways.
Indigenous, rural, or local communities interested in becoming partner
communities are encouraged to complete an interest & capacity form, linked here.
See “Navigating the Application Portal” for more details.