Fighting Fire with Innovation: Why U.S. Wildfire Technology Fails to Reach Scale

The RAND Corporation finds that U.S. wildfire technology is advancing quickly, but innovation stalls because wildfire management is fragmented, underfunded outside of suppression, and poorly coordinated. The report calls for a neutral national coordinating body to help move proven technologies from pilots to widespread use across prevention, response, and recovery.

The RAND Corporation, through its Homeland Security Research Division and with support from the Resources Legacy Fund, set out to understand why the United States continues to struggle with wildfires despite rapid advances in technology. Wildfires are becoming larger, more destructive, and more costly as climate change lengthens fire seasons and development expands into fire-prone areas. Nearly one-third of U.S. households now lie in the wildland–urban interface, where homes and flammable vegetation meet. The damage goes far beyond burned forests: wildfires disrupt housing markets, strain insurance systems, damage infrastructure, and divert public money toward emergency response instead of long-term solutions.

Although technology offers real hope, through better detection, forecasting, mitigation, and recovery tools, the report finds that innovation is not moving fast enough from development to widespread use. The problem is not a lack of ideas or talent, but the way wildfire management itself is organized.

Why Innovation Gets Stuck

Wildfire management in the United States is highly fragmented. Responsibility is shared among federal land agencies, state and local fire departments, tribal governments, utilities, insurers, nonprofits, researchers, and private companies. Each operates with different missions, rules, budgets, and timelines. While fire moves seamlessly across landscapes, innovation does not. Data are siloed, standards differ by jurisdiction, and procurement processes vary widely, making it difficult for new tools to spread beyond isolated pilots.

Funding patterns reinforce this fragmentation. Most wildfire spending is directed toward suppression, putting fires out once they start, rather than prevention, preparedness, or recovery. As a result, companies are drawn to build aircraft, engines, and firefighting equipment, where clear buyers and large budgets exist. Technologies that could reduce risk before ignition or help communities recover afterward often struggle to find stable funding or long-term users.

Who Innovates, and Who Uses the Technology

The report describes the wildfire innovation system as made up of three groups: innovators, accelerators, and users. Innovators include government laboratories, universities, defense contractors, and a fast-growing group of start-ups developing satellites, sensors, drones, artificial intelligence tools, and robotics. Accelerators help ideas move forward by providing funding, pilots, connections, or legitimacy. These range from federal agencies and state programs to philanthropies, venture capital firms, prize competitions, and individual “champions” who push projects forward.

Users are firefighters, land managers, utilities, insurers, local governments, and communities who must rely on these technologies in real conditions. Their feedback ultimately determines what succeeds. However, most innovations are designed for large federal or state agencies because they have the biggest budgets, leaving smaller or rural users underserved. This limits scale and keeps markets for non-suppression tools weak.

Lessons from Other Innovation Systems

To understand how wildfire innovation could move faster, RAND examined four successful U.S. innovation organizations: DARPA, ARPA-E, the Defense Innovation Unit, and In-Q-Tel. These agencies operate in different fields, but they share common practices. They actively connect government users with technologists, clearly communicate what problems need solving, scan emerging technologies, fund high-risk research, help innovations cross the gap from prototype to adoption, and use government backing to attract private investment.

The key lesson is that innovation does not scale on its own. It needs an organization focused not just on research, but on coordination, transition, and long-term follow-through. In wildfire management, no such backbone currently exists.

A Path Toward Faster Progress

The report’s central recommendation is to create a neutral, government-anchored coordinating entity to serve as a backbone for wildfire innovation. Rather than controlling the system, this organization would help it work better by connecting innovators, accelerators, and users across sectors. It would support shared testing and evaluation, improve data standards and interoperability, guide technologies through procurement pathways, and balance investment across prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery.

Such an entity would need stable federal funding, the ability to work with philanthropies and the private sector, and governance that reflects the diversity of wildfire stakeholders. RAND emphasizes that creating a new organization is not the only way forward, but without stronger coordination, promising technologies will continue to stall while wildfire risks grow. The report concludes that the future of wildfire management depends not just on better tools, but on building a system capable of delivering them at scale, before the next fire season arrives.