Making California More Fire Resilient at Scale: De-Risking the Grid, Land, and Capital

​California’s wildfire crisis is no longer just an environmental challenge — it is a systemic risk impacting the power grid, insurance markets, housing affordability, and the broader economy.

​As wildfire frequency and severity increase across diverse ecosystems, the state must shift from reactive disaster response to proactive risk management.

This panel explores how wildfire resilience can become an investable private-market opportunity, aligning capital, policy, and technology to reduce risk at scale. Panelists will examine how risk is currently distributed across utilities, insurers, landowners, and the public sector — and how new models of risk profiling, incentives, and financing can unlock more effective prevention and mitigation.

Topics include grid health and monitoring, land management across varied biomes, insurance dynamics, and the role of data and technology in enabling earlier intervention. The discussion will focus on what it would take to move California toward a more coordinated, economically viable approach to wildfire resilience — one that makes peace with fire while reducing its most catastrophic outcomes.

Panelists:

• ​Meredith Fowlie (Professor, Agriculture and Resource Economics and Director, Haas Energy Institute, UC Berkeley)

• ​Dan Myers, COO, Vibrant Planet

• ​Aren Page, CEO and Co-Founder, GridIQ

• ​Nancy Watkins (Principal and Consulting Actuary, Milliman US)

​Moderator:

• ​Paula Reinman, Principal, Impactful

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