Los Angeles Wildfires 2025: Technology’s Critical Role In Managing Wildfire Risk In The Built Environment

Los Angeles Wildfires 2025: Technology's Critical Role In Managing Wildfire Risk In The Built Environment

Wildfires are tearing through Los Angeles and Southern California, leaving a trail of devastation in their wake. Since 7^th January, at least five separate wildfires have scorched tens of thousands of acres, affected over 13,000 structures and claimed 27 lives. Causing an estimated $250 billion in damages, the immense scale of the destruction has sounded alarm bells around the world, underscoring the need for decisive action - not only to double down on climate initiatives, but also to ramp up efforts to safeguard against intensifying climate risk.

When the smoke clears, the focus for some will shift towards strategies to safeguard real estate: against a backdrop of soaring insurance premiums, climate risk is projected to drive property premiums up by as much as $183 billion by 2040. Reflecting this, Verdantix survey data show that climate risk is finally garnering attention, with 70% of real estate and facilities executives placing a high or medium priority on reducing the climate risk of their building portfolios. Meanwhile, as-yet-unpublished research reveals that 49% of senior risk management leaders believe that their firm's physical operations will face significant risk from climate change between now and 2030.

As Verdantix predicted in 2024, a raft of new solutions are emerging to meet growing demand and enable building owners to assess and mitigate climate risk. For example, Climate X's Spectra and Adapt solutions identify and forecast impacts of climate-related threats to commercial and residential real estate portfolios, quantify asset-level financial loss metrics, and provide recommendations for climate adaption capital expenditures. Equally, hardware solutions are gaining traction, such as Intelliclad's building sensor system, which detects and alerts emergency services to the location of wildfires, thus lowering the risk for insurers.

Despite the leaps being made by vendors in developing innovative technologies, these solutions are still typically retrofitted post-construction. To mitigate wildfire risk in the long term, buildings must be designed and constructed with wildfire-resistant infrastructure in mind. Learnings can be taken, for example, from the survival of a 'passive house' structure in the Pacific Palisades despite the neighbouring destruction. The unique design concept integrates fire-resilient design principles including heat-resistant exterior insulation, airtight construction to block ember intrusion and fire-resistant roof materials.

These wildfires serve as a stark reminder of the current vulnerabilities of global real estate to climate threats, and spotlight the need to rethink building design as reconstruction commences. As climate change accelerates, the frequency of extreme climate-related hazards is expected to rise further. For instance, the number of wildfires occurring globally is projected to increase by 50% by 2100, according to the UNEP. Concerns are amplified by the current unpredictable political landscape, driven by President Trump's threats to withdraw from or roll back key sustainability policies like the Paris Agreement. Leveraging technology and adopting wildfire-resistant design will be essential to futureproof the stability and resilience of the global built environment.

To learn more about advances in technology that are aiding the mitigation of wildfires worldwide, listen to the Verdantix podcast episode, California Burning: Lessons in Combatting Wildfires. For further reading on confronting the vulnerability of the built environment, keep an eye out for our upcoming report, Market Insight: Resilient Buildings - Will It Sell?