Environmental Conservation: Wildfire Resilience Initiative Grant Program

The Wildfire Resilience Initiative Grant Program, funded by the Gordon E And Betty I Moore Foundation, addresses the urgent need for wildfire resilience in Western North America. With increasing threats from extreme wildfires due to climate change and human activity, this initiative aims to transform fire's role from a destructive force to a beneficial element. By supporting research, early interventions, and community preparedness, the program seeks to foster a collaborative approach to enhancing ecosystem health and community safety.

NOTE: Because of our tightly defined grantmaking strategies, many worthwhile projects fall outside the scope of our funding priorities, and we do not accept unsolicited grant proposals.
Overview
After a century of fire exclusion, ecosystems and communities across Western North America now face a growing threat from extreme wildfire. In part, this reflects changes in climate that have yielded hotter, drier seasons. Other factors contribute too: ecosystem fragmentation, historic clear-cutting, pathogens and invasive species, increasing sprawl and development at the wildland-urban interface, and a related increase in human-caused ignitions.
But fire is an essential element within many of these landscapes. For their long-term integrity, fire needs to be able to retain its integral function.
The Wildfire Resilience Initiative aims to support a transformation in the role that fire plays and is perceived to play in Western North America, from an unwanted, destructive threat to a vitalizing element in our landscapes.
Long-term vision
The long-term vision for the initiative is to establish wildfire resilience in Western North America, where beneficial fire is the dominant contributor to annual area burned.
Targeted philanthropic funding can help realize that vision by supporting:
Deeper understanding. Increased knowledge and understanding of wildfire and changing fire regimes through a multidisciplinary, coordinated fire research agenda.
Early fire interventions. Accelerated advances in science, technology, and data integration for improved monitoring, early fire detection, consequence assessment, and safe and effective response.
Pre-fire community interventions. Aligned incentives and stakeholders to implement wildfire mitigations that disrupt fire pathways into communities and structure to structure with them, and ensure that communities can coexist with the impacts of wildfire and smoke.
Pre-fire ecosystem interventions. Accelerated, tested, demonstrated, and adapted stewardship models at the watershed scale, to reduce vulnerability to ecosystem conversion and to enable beneficial fire.
Measurement and evaluation. Science-based key indicators, implementation dashboards, and outcome scorecards of wildfire resilience for watersheds and communities in Western North America.
Enabling conditions. A framework that helps integrate wildfire resilience efforts across sectors, inspires others to collaborate and invest in ways that augment and accelerate collective goals, and fosters conditions for success and durability