Around the world, wildfires are increasing in intensity, frequency, and destruction — yet innovation to detect and manage wildfire events has not kept pace with the mounting challenges. Wildfires often start in hard to- reach areas and are fueled by climate change-related extreme weather events, such as severe droughts, extreme winds, and heatwaves. As more people move into wildfire-prone areas, the risk of ignition and impacts on human life and infrastructure increase tremendously. Current detection and delivery of resources are often too slow, insufficiently coordinated, and not precise enough, leading to delayed responses and risk of wildfires becoming destructive.

XPRIZE Wildfire is a 4-year, $11 million competition incentivizing the innovation of firefighting technologies that will end destructive wildfires so that humanity and beneficial wildfire can safely co-exist. The prize aims to transform current wildfire management approaches through the development of new technologies that can rapidly and accurately detect, characterize, and respond to wildfires before they become destructive.

The winning technology in the Space-Based Wildfire Detection and Intelligence Track, presented by The Minderoo Foundation, will address the greatest barrier to how we currently fight fires by rapidly and accurately detecting all fires across a vast and remote area, and transmitting data to ground stations. Teams may use space-based sensors, AI, machine learning, and other technologies to expedite space-based detection of incipient wildfires across landscapes larger than states. The winning team will accurately detect and precisely characterize all fires 10m² in size and smaller, toward 1m², and report with the least false positives to decision makers on the ground within ten minutes.