CNSI Co-Hosts 2024 Living with Fire Summit

On Wednesday, October 23rd, UCSB CNSI collaborated with the Community Environmental Council (CEC) to host the “Living with Fire Summit,” to spur new innovations in policy and technology to increase wildfire resilience in Santa Barbara County and beyond. The summit featured a series of panelists with “boots on the ground” who directly identified critical gaps and challenges where new innovations could save both lives and property while recognizing the important role wildfire plays in our ecosystem.

The summit brought together over 100 attendees with diverse perspectives and roles - including fire chiefs and land managers, to AI researchers, policy leaders, citizen-led fire safe councils, governmental agencies and academia.

Associate Vice Chancellor for Research in Earth, Environmental, and Sustainability Sciences, Kelly Caylor, commented, "The Living with Fire Summit highlighted crucial innovations necessary to improve wildfire resilience, from expanding data accessibility for better fire risk assessment to leveraging AI for advanced warning systems. By bringing together community members, practitioners, and researchers in meaningful dialogue, we can advance these innovations in technically sound and practically implementable ways—ensuring maximum impact for our community's safety and resilience."

The ideation of the event built off of the CEC’s 2019 Wildfire and Smoke Climate Resilience Roundtable, which identified pathways for strengthening community resilience against catastrophic wildfires, and CNSI’s Climate Action Award, a program around climate innovation and entrepreneurship, funded through a partnership between the UC system and the state, to develop strategies for tackling the climate crisis. 

The event featured three panel discussions on “Before,” “During,” and “After” Fire. “Before” discussed what new state and local policies need to be developed, and the discussion touched on points of defensible spaces, staffing needs, data efficiency, and insurance. 

“During” Fire provided feedback on the critical gaps and challenges that can benefit from technological innovation when fires break out. Panelists for “During” included UCSB Computer Science faculty, Rich Wolski and Xifeng Yan in conversation with Chris Danch, executive director of the Ojai Valley Fire Safe Council, and Rob Hazard, fire protection planner with 36 years as a firefighter, fire marshal, and wildfire planner. The conversation was lively, and there were evident opportunities to produce technology to help share real-time data among communities for personal decision-making, AI to understand complex vegetation-type data, and surveillance infrastructure. 

“After Fire” discussed gaps in understanding landscape management modeling and addressing obstacles for landscape adaptations or post-fire recovery. Panelists included UCSB Professors Alan Murray and Max Moritz, and the discussion highlighted the importance of cross-sector and community collaboration to build community wildfire resilience. Other topics touched on policy—how should we build our communities and neighbors for resiliency, and how can we reconceive evacuation strategies? 

The event finished with open-space sessions to collaborate on resilience strategies, followed by a reception for informal discussions and relationship building. The reception also showcased the critical wildfire research already underway at UCSB through a poster session led by UCSB graduate students.