The Climate & Wildfire Institute (CWI), a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, connects science to public policy and decision-making to accelerate solutions to a fast-changing climate. As a boundary organization, we bring communities and cross-sector leaders together, putting science into action to build climate and wildfire resilience. Bringing climate and wildfire science to policy and decision-makers speeds the implementation of science-based approaches at the regional and local levels, a critical component to ensuring solutions are practical and accessible to even our more vulnerable communities.

Working At The Boundaries

While wildfires are by-and-large positive ecological processes, changing conditions have created more opportunities for wildfires that are catastrophic to human and ecological communities alike. Because of this, we need robust and sustained science and data infrastructure that allows for timely, accurate, and grounded policy solutions. These solutions are nothing without implementation, though; therefore, we aim to build a conduit between science, policy makers, and practitioners, to ensure that our data tools and knowledge sharing are useful to those doing the work to implement resilience measures on the ground. Learn more here.

We embrace an strategic operational approach to ensure we deliver on the following:

CWI’s initiatives are founded on the need to increase the pace and scale of projects that build forest resilience while reducing the impacts of catastrophic wildfires. To that end, we support and facilitate greater information sharing, primarily through open-source data integration, which can drive faster decision making and policy creation and, thus, implementation. Greater information sharing also extends to the conversations we are having around wildfire and climate change—including, importantly, the reorientation and revitalization of management practices that are informed by Indigenous land stewardship.

Building greater forest resilience isn’t something that happens through conversation alone; our projects exist to not only facilitate knowledge sharing, data integration, and essential cultural shifts, but also find the most meaningful ways to bring the resulting information to communities and land managers. Creating pathways for greater access to this information will refine agency ability to more rapidly build resilience where it matters—in fire-adapted communities and ecosystems across California and the West.