The investment case for forest resilience is going global

Every year, smoke from high-severity fires blankets the skies of American communities, sometimes originating nearby, and other times carried by wind from hundreds or thousands of miles away. High-severity wildfire smoke is distinctly harmful to public health, producing far more fine particulate matter than low-intensity prescribed and cultural burns. When fires burn through developed areas, they can also combust household and industrial chemicals, adding toxic compounds to the smoke and further amplifying the health risk. A 2025 study published in Nature estimated that smoke from Canada’s record-breaking 2023 wildfire season caused approximately 5,400 acute deaths and 82,100 premature deaths across North America and Europe. Forests carrying decades of accumulated fuel load are a significant driver of the conditions that make seasons like that one possible.

Prescribed burns and thinning treatments could save $7 billion in annual health costs over 25 years by reducing wildfire smoke emissions, according to long-term projections from research Blue Forest conducted with the California Council on Science and Technology. This research was cited in a white paper published earlier this year by the World Economic Forum (WEF), ‘From Wildfire Risk to Resilience: The Investment Case for Action.’ The report draws on that research to build a wider ‘avoided loss’ investment case: every dollar not invested in wildfire preparedness could cost more than $22 in lost future economic activity.

Forest restoration is, in other words, an economic intervention. When its benefits can be quantified — in avoided losses, such as protected water supply — they become something water agencies, utilities, and public funders can evaluate as an investment. The WEF cites the FRB as a working model for this approach, and is currently standing up the Future Forests Alliance to advance global market-based solutions to the wildfire crisis.

And yet capital still flows overwhelmingly toward suppression and recovery rather than proactive upstream treatments. One sector where this gap is especially visible is insurance, where short-term pricing cycles and the absence of standardized avoided-loss metrics mean that mitigation work rarely translates into better coverage terms for the communities and land managers who have done the work, or into the pricing confidence insurers need to remain in high-hazard markets.

Blue Forest is proud to be part of a growing group of organizations proving that innovative models for achieving forest resilience exist and are working. In late February, Morrison Mast joined the WEF’s Global Wildfire Leadership Network gathering in Geneva, where leaders across insurance, utilities, finance, and land management are working to translate this framework into coordinated global action. It was an opportunity to bring Blue Forest’s perspective on growing the capital stack needed to finance solutions at scale, and to explore what these models might mean beyond the landscapes where we’ve built them. Translating that momentum into lasting market change requires the cross-sector coordination and institutional legitimacy that the WEF and organizations like it are uniquely positioned to drive.

The WEF has also launched the Forest Future Alliance, building on learnings from the Global Wildfire Leadership Network convening, to support private sector and philanthropic investors in navigating the complexity of forest conservation, restoration, and stewardship, helping channel capital toward the kind of prevention-first, market-based approaches that Blue Forest’s work demonstrates on the ground.

Blue Forest colleagues Gregg Verutes, Micah Elias, and Tessa Maurer are among those listed in the white paper’s acknowledgements. Access the full document here.