By Olivia Rosane and Cristen Hemingway Jaynes
Quick Key Facts
- Methane is the second most important greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide and is responsible for around one-third of current global heating.
- Atmospheric methane concentrations have increased by 256 percent since pre-industrial times.
- Methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide but lasts for far less time in the atmosphere; over a 20-year period, methane traps 86 times more heat per unit of mass than CO2.
- Around 60 percent of methane emissions come from human-caused sources and 40 percent come from natural sources.
- Ninety percent of human-caused emissions come from three sources: fossil fuels, agriculture and waste storage.
- Currently existing strategies, if adopted, would be enough to curb methane emissions from these three sources by 45 percent by 2030.
- It is possible to cut methane emissions from oil and gas operations by 70 percent with existing technologies and methods and by 40 percent at no cost.
- Studies have shown that adding seaweed supplements to the diets of cattle can decrease their methane emissions by 82 percent for feedlot cattle, more than 50 percent for dairy cows and 42 percent for grazing cattle without harming the animals.
- As of 2023, only 13 percent of all methane emissions were covered by any sort of emissions-reduction policy.
- If everyone in the European Union limited their meat and dairy consumption by 34 percent, they would prevent six million metric tons of methane emissions per year.
What Is Methane?
What has no color or smell and is found in wetlands, cow burps and your basement furnace? The answer is methane — a powerful greenhouse gas that is the second most important contributor to the climate crisis after carbon dioxide (CO2). It is the primary component of natural gas, which currently generates around 25 percent of the world’s electricity.
Methane is a hydrocarbon composed of four hydrogen atoms bonded to a carbon atom. It is abundant in nature and can be formed by both geological and biological processes. Geologically, methane is typically created when heat and pressure are applied to decomposing plant and animal matter over millions of years. This is the source of most natural gas. Methane can also form deep underground without any organic matter through other processes. Biologically, methane is generated through something called methanogenesis, when certain underwater microorganisms called archaea produce methane as part of their oxygen-free respiration process. This is how methane is generated above ground, such as in wetlands or in the digestive tracts of termites and cows.
How Is Methane Measured?
Methane is measured via two main methods: bottom up and top down. These methods work almost exactly as they sound. Bottom-up approaches begin on the ground with a localized source of methane and expand outward. These assessments can either be based on direct measurements of a given facility’s methane emissions or by estimations based on general knowledge about the emitting animal or equipment. For example, to estimate the methane produced by a region or country’s beef or dairy sector, a bottom-up approach could multiply the methane emitted per cow by the number of cows being raised. A similar approach could be used to calculate the methane released by a county’s natural gas facilities or a region’s oil drilling operations.
Top down approaches often literally start in the sky with measurements of atmospheric methane, usually via airplane, high-altitude platforms or, increasingly, satellites. This data can then be combined with knowledge of where there are methane sources and sinks and used to create models of methane emissions.
Satellite image of methane emissions from a landfill in Kyrgyzstan on Feb. 4, 2021. GHGSat
As satellite technology improves, it is detecting super-emitting incidents that are not reflected in bottom-up approaches. For example, if a gas company assesses its methane emissions by multiplying the standard leak rate of a piece of equipment by the number of pieces of that equipment it uses, it will miss the five percent of extraordinary leaks that are responsible for more than half of all gas-industry leak emissions. Overall, direct measurements — whether from the ground or the air — are important for accurately measuring fossil fuel methane emissions in particular. One study found that direct measurements of U.S. oil and gas methane emissions were 60% higher than U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates. In general, improving methane measurements is essential for understanding and therefore controlling its emissions.
How Does Methane Contribute to the Climate Crisis?
Methane is a greenhouse gas, which means that, when it enters the atmosphere, it absorbs heat energy emitted from the planet and redirects it back toward the ground. There are natural methane sinks — namely soil and the troposphere, where methane is broken down into carbon dioxide and water vapor. These sinks are able to counteract naturally occurring methane emissions so that the gas does not build up in the atmosphere. However, human activities since the start of the industrial revolution — particularly the burning of fossil fuels, more intensive forms of agriculture and waste storage — have raised the concentration of methane in the atmosphere faster than natural sinks can absorb it.
As of 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, atmospheric methane concentration had soared by 265 percent to 1,934 ppb compared with pre-industrial levels. Around 60 percent of that methane was emitted due to human activities. That methane has contributed to around one-third of current global heating, second to CO2 at around two-thirds. If nothing is done to reduce methane emissions, they are projected to rise by 13 percent between 2020 and 2030.
Controlling methane emissions is essential for addressing the climate crisis because methane is both more potent than CO2 and also lasts for a shorter period of time in the atmosphere, approximately 12 years compared with hundreds. Over a 20-year period, methane traps 86 times more heat per unit of mass than CO2, which falls to 28 times more over 100 years. The combination of methane’s potency and relatively short atmospheric lifespan means that reducing methane emissions delivers a powerful bang for one’s buck in terms of rapidly curbing greenhouse gasses and stabilizing global temperatures. In fact, the Global Methane Assessment concluded that curbing methane “is very likely the strategy with the greatest potential to decrease warming over the next 20 years.” The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has calculated that methane emissions must be reduced by around 34 percent by 2030 when compared with 2019 levels in order to limit global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
What Are the Main Sources of Methane?
Methane comes from both human and natural sources, with human-caused emissions responsible for around 60 percent of atmospheric methane and natural sources around 40 percent. More than 90 percent of current human-caused methane emissions come from three sources: agriculture, fossil fuels and waste storage. The burning of biomass and the use of biofuels also emit methane but are less important, as they are responsible for around five percent of emissions. Wetlands and freshwater are the leading source of natural methane emissions, followed by geological sources such as gas-oil seeps and volcanoes, termites, oceans, wild animals and permafrost. In addition, there are natural sources of methane that could play a larger role in the future as the climate crisis triggers various feedback loops.
Agriculture
Around 40 percent of human-caused methane emissions come from agriculture. The vast majority of these emissions are from livestock, which alone generate around 32 percent of human-caused methane emissions. This is primarily from enteric fermentation, which is how ruminant animals like cows, sheep and goats digest their food. Microbes in these animals’ digestive systems break down nutrients and produce methane as a byproduct. When it comes to methane emissions, cows raised for meat or milk are the primary contributors. Another way that livestock agriculture can generate methane is through the storage of manure, particularly that of pigs and cows. As meat consumption increases, these emissions are projected to rise by six million metric per year by 2030.
A second important agricultural contribution to human-caused methane emissions is the cultivation of rice at eight percent. Rice is grown in flooded patties, an environment that encourages the growth of methane-producing microbes. Finally, around one percent of human-caused methane emissions are caused by the burning of agricultural waste.
Fossil Fuels
The extraction and burning of fossil fuels contribute around 35 percent of human-caused methane emissions. Primarily, this occurs through the extraction, transport and use of oil and gas, at 23 percent of human-caused emissions. Methane is typically released during venting, when unwanted gas is released into the atmosphere during the extraction process, as well as through accidental leaks from extraction to transport to use. Emissions from oil and gas are expected to increase by 10 million metric tons per year by 2030, in particular because of the use of natural gas.
Around 12 percent of human-caused methane emissions are released during the process of mining coal, or from leaks from abandoned coal mines. Methane naturally occurs along coal seams, and can be released in several ways during the mining process: through seepage when the coal is exposed to the surface, through drainage systems, through ventilation systems to reduce methane buildup in a mine for safety reasons and from the coal itself as it is removed from the mine. Underground mines tend to emit more methane than surface mines, at 70 percent of mine emissions.
Certain fossil fuel projects emit massive amounts of methane at once, usually due to leaks or venting. These are called “super-emitters” and are detectable through satellite imaging. In 2022, researchers detected more than 1,005 human-caused super-emitter incidents — 559 at oil and gas fields and 105 at coal mines. The worst, in Turkmenistan, spewed 427 metric tons of methane per hour, the equivalent of the hourly emissions of France. As methane emissions increased in the 2010s, experts think that fossil fuel activities contributed as much as agriculture and waste storage combined.
Landfills and Waste
Around 20 percent of human-caused methane emissions come from landfills and waste management systems. This is because microbes present in wastewater treatment facilities and landfills release methane as they decompose the waste. This can generate lots of methane at once: Of the 1,005 super-emitter events identified by researchers in 2022, 340 were from waste sites.
Because of population growth and projected development in poorer countries, emissions from waste are expected to grow faster than from any other human-caused methane source at 13 million metric tons per year by 2030. The amount of human-disposed solid waste overall is expected to rise by 73 percent by 2050.
Wetlands
Wetlands are the predominant source of natural methane emissions, accounting for around one-third of total methane emissions. This is because wetlands — which cover around six percent of the Earth’s land area — are defined by having their soils saturated with water for all or part of the year. This creates a wet, oxygen-poor environment that creates ideal conditions for the archaea responsible for methanogenesis.
While wetlands would produce methane no matter what humans do, the climate crisis has led to an increase in wetland methane emissions in recent years due to temperature increases and changing rainfall patterns. This is known as the “wetland methane feedback.” Between 2000 and 2020, wetland methane emissions increased by 1.2 to 1.4 million metric tons per year, which is a higher rate than anticipated by the most pessimistic emissions scenarios. Scientists noted that these emissions saw “exceptional growth” in 2020 to 2021 in particular. The researchers traced this increase to two sources: tropical wetlands and permafrost wetlands.
Tropical wetlands are expanding their area due to climate-fueled changes in rainfall patterns and were the major driver of increased wetland methane emissions in the early 21st century. Permafrost wetlands are located in the Arctic and, as the name suggests, are partially frozen in addition to being waterlogged. When warmer temperatures cause permafrost to melt, they also unfreeze the microbes that release methane. Arctic wetlands have also expanded by 25 percent during the summer due to a rise in precipitation.
Oceans
The ocean is responsible for one to 13 percent of natural methane emissions through various mechanisms including geological marine seepage; emissions from ocean sediments or melting underwater permafrost; emissions near coastal areas where groundwater enters the sea; and the destabilization of methane hydrates, which are ice-like formations of methane and water on the seafloor. The largest concentration of methane on Earth is stored in these hydrates, and there are concerns that, as the climate crisis causes oceans to warm, these deposits might melt and release massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere. However, there is no evidence that any methane from these hydrates is currently reaching the atmosphere.
Positive Climate Feedback Loops
A positive feedback loop occurs when a change to a given system triggers other changes that amplify that initial change. In the case of the climate emergency, a positive feedback loop occurs when the impacts of global heating interact with Earth’s systems in ways that trigger more warming. When these changes pass a certain threshold, it can alter the system in dramatic and irreversible ways. This is called a climate tipping point.
Methane is involved in several positive feedback loops, of which the wetland methane feedback is just one example. Another related example is the thawing of the Arctic permafrost, frozen soils on land as well as beneath the Arctic Ocean. The material that is frozen beneath the permafrost contains plant and animal matter, as well as microbes that would produce methane if they thawed out. The permafrost beneath the ocean contains methane hydrates. This means that the Arctic currently contains 2.5 times more carbon underground than exists in the atmosphere. Thawing the permafrost would release all or some of that carbon, triggering a major tipping point. This process has already begun, with Arctic and Boreal methane emissions increasing by 9 percent since 2002. Scientists don’t know exactly how much methane the melting permafrost might ultimately release, but the region is currently on pace to release the greenhouse gas emissions of a major industrialized nation if nothing is done to reduce warming.
Another positive climate feedback loop involving methane is the increase in the frequency, severity and size of wildfires. A warmer climate makes the hot, dry conditions that fuel wildfires more likely, and these fires in turn release carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere as they burn, fueling more warming. Larger fires also tend to release more methane. One study found that California’s record-breaking 2020 wildfire season contributed almost 14 percent of the state’s total methane emissions for the year.
Methane and the ‘Bridge Fuel’ Myth
Another reason methane emissions might spike in the future is the expansion of gas production, including an increase in exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG). The development and spread of fracking in the U.S., Canada and Australia in particular has made gas much more abundant and set off a construction boom in infrastructure to export and import the fuel. The U.S. has massively increased its LNG exports since it lifted a ban on them in 2016, becoming the No. 1 natural gas exporter in the world by 2022. These exports doubled between 2019 and 2021 and will double again in four years if they continue.
Advocates of natural gas have argued that it is a “bridge fuel” from coal to more renewable sources of energy. This is because when burned for energy, coal emits twice as much carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour as natural gas. In the U.S., direct power plant emissions decreased by almost 40 percent in the first decades of the 21st century, as gas overtook coal as the country’s leading electricity fuel source. Proponents of exporting U.S. LNG argue that it would similarly displace coal use in Europe and Asia. However, this ignores the methane that leaks during the process of extracting and transporting LNG. If only 0.2 percent of methane leaks, it makes LNG as climate-warming as coal, and new data, including satellite imagery, suggests that the amount of methane leaks have been vastly underestimated. A 2023 study calculated that, when methane leaks are taken into account, LNG has a 33% greater global warming potential over 20 years than coal. Further, the Department of Energy recently concluded that LNG exports are more likely to replace renewable energy sources than coal.
This new understanding comes as more gas fields and LNG export and import terminals are being planned. A 2022 analysis found that there are 55 “methane bomb” gas fields whose future methane leaks would equal 30 years of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. The current and proposed construction of LNG export terminals in the U.S., meanwhile, would cancel out any climate progress the nation has made, keeping its greenhouse gas emissions frozen at 2005 levels. As U.S. climate campaigner Bill McKibben warned, “If the LNG build-out continues — here and in Canada and Australia — its sheer size will overwhelm our efforts to rein in global warming.”
What Are Other Benefits to Reducing Methane Emissions?
While stopping the acceleration of the climate crisis is a major argument for reducing methane emissions, these emissions don’t just heat the atmosphere. They also contribute to ground-level ozone, which forms as methane reacts to the atmosphere. Ozone at ground level is a major public health and environmental hazard because it damages human lung tissue, triggering respiratory ailments, and harms plants including agricultural crops. Currently, methane-generated ozone causes about half a million extra deaths per year. However, every million metric tons of methane emissions avoided would also prevent 1,430 yearly deaths from respiratory and heart diseases; 4,000 asthma-related emergencies and 90 hospitalizations per year; and annual losses of 145,000 metric tons of wheat, soybeans, maize and rice.
What Can Be Done to Reduce Methane Emissions?
There are many ways to reduce methane emissions that range from large-scale transformations of energy and food systems to smaller technical fixes. Most likely a combination of methods will be necessary to control methane emissions to reduce global heating and ozone pollution. However, currently existing methods, if adopted, would be enough to curb methane emissions from the three main human-caused sources — fossil fuels, agriculture and waste — by 45% by 2030, in line with the IPCC’s pathway to 1.5 degrees.
From Agriculture
There are two main ways to reduce the amount of methane produced by the food system. The first is to transform the food system altogether by reducing meat and dairy production. This can be done in part by reducing food waste, as 30 to 40 percent of all food produced is lost and does not make it to a person’s stomach. According to one calculation, the waste of ruminant and rice products is responsible for around 50 million metric tons of methane per year, and reducing it could cut those emissions by around 20 million metric tons. Another way is to shift toward more healthy, sustainable or plant-based diets, including by reducing overall consumption in wealthier countries. According to the IPCC, doing so would reduce greenhouse gas emissions overall by 5.3 to 20.2 gigatons of carbon-dioxide equivalent by 2050. Potential emissions reductions from dietary shifts run from 0.7 to eight gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year by 2050, under scenarios ranging from half of the planet adopting a “healthy” diet that includes less than six grams of animal protein per day to a global embrace of vegetarianism.
The second main strategy for reducing methane emissions from agriculture is to make changes to existing production so that it releases less methane. One way to do this is to increase the efficiency of animal agriculture so that more meat or milk is produced per animal, especially in poorer countries. This can be done without sacrificing animal welfare by feeding animals better diets, including highly digestible feed; improving animal health overall; and breeding. Another solution is to add enteric methane inhibitors to the diets of ruminants, which prevent methane production in their guts. Promising examples are the chemical 3-NOP and seaweed. Studies have shown that adding seaweed supplements to the diets of cattle can decrease their methane emissions by 82 percent for feedlot cattle, more than 50 percent for dairy cows and 42 percent for grazing cattle without harming the animals in any way. Researchers are also working to breed ruminants who produce less methane and to develop a vaccine that would limit gut methane production.
Another major source of agricultural methane that can be targeted for reduction is manure storage. Solutions include reducing the amount of time manure is stored; covering tanks holding semi-solid waste; separating liquid and solid manure; and adding acid to manure storage facilities, which inhibits the growth of methane-producing microbes. Another solution that has been adopted in recent years is the use of manure digesters, which turn manure into biogas, reducing manure’s methane emissions and providing a non-fossil form of energy. However, there are emerging concerns that methane leaks from these machines may undermine their impact.
Finally, emissions from rice can be curbed by various methods. One strategy is to grow either higher yield or lower-methane varieties of rice, which reduce the amount of methane emitted per kilogram. Planting lower-methane rice could cut emissions by 22 to 51 percent. Another option is to change how rice is grown by using Alternative Wetting and Drying. Instead of keeping rice paddies flooded, this method involves letting them dry out completely before flooding again and can decrease emissions by 40 to 45 percent. Finally, adding phosphogypsum and sulphate to rice fields can decrease microbial methane production.
From Fossil Fuels
The No. 1 way to reduce methane emissions from fossil fuels is to phase out their use entirely as soon as possible while rapidly transitioning to renewable forms of energy that do not emit methane and in particular to halt the buildout of LNG infrastructure. However, there are also ways to reduce the methane emissions from fossil fuel infrastructure still in use, and in fact reducing methane emissions from ongoing oil and gas operations is considered the strategy with the most short-term potential for significant methane cuts.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), it is possible to slash the oil and gas sector’s methane emissions by 70% with existing technologies and methods and by 40% at no cost. These methods include leak detection and repair, installing devices to detect methane and phasing out equipment that releases methane when used. For coal, it is more difficult to reduce emissions while still mining and burning coal, but there are strategies such as requiring new mines to use degasification wells and drainage boreholes to capture methane and capturing and reusing methane in existing mines. It is also possible to avoid methane emissions from equipment no longer in use by capping abandoned gas wells and flooding retired mines.
From Landfills and Waste
Ideally, the best way to reduce methane waste from landfills would be to move toward a zero-waste circular economy that reuses all material throughputs. Specific strategies toward this goal include reducing food waste, keeping organic waste out of landfills and diverting it toward composting systems, capturing methane emissions from landfills and covering landfills with soil containing organisms that can break down methane.
Reducing methane emissions from wastewater can mostly be achieved by upgrading treatment facilities. This includes replacing latrines with actual wastewater treatment plants and making sure that facilities that provide primary treatment — removing solid pollution — also provide secondary treatment — removing organic matter and nutrients with the help of bacteria and microorganisms — and tertiary chemical treatment. Wastewater treatment plants can also be built to capture and reuse biogas.
Direct Removal
While it is important to rapidly move to reduce human-caused methane emissions, some scientists are investigating methods of directly removing methane from the atmosphere to augment these efforts. This can be achieved in two main ways: by bolstering the abilities of natural ecosystems to remove and store methane and through direct geoengineering.
On the ecosystem side, scientists have discovered that tree bark has remarkable methane-absorbing abilities, as it contains organisms called methanotrophs that essentially eat methane. Preserving forests, reforesting or intentionally planting tree species that have greater methane-storing ability could all be ways to take advantage of this nature-based solution.
A potential geoengineering method would be to release iron salt into the atmosphere. This would mimic what happens when dust from Sahara sand storms collides with the sea spray of the Atlantic — instigating a chemical process that breaks down methane. However, more research is required to determine if and how this could be done both safely and effectively. Ultimately, it is safest to rely on the methods that we know work to stop methane from reaching the atmosphere in the first place.
What Progress Has Been Made to Reduce Methane Emissions So Far?
At the COP26 United Nations climate change conference in 2021 in Glasgow, Scotland, the UK and United States launched the Global Methane Pledge. As of January 2025, a total of 159 nations had joined the pledge. Pledge members agreed to work toward cutting global methane emissions by 30% of 2020 levels by 2030. Doing so would be consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and could prevent 0.2 degrees Celsius of warming by 2050. While the pledge’s website claims that it has “generated unprecedented for methane mitigation,” this is yet to manifest in real-world reductions.
Methane emissions broke a new record in 2023, the most recent year for which data is available. Even though the oil and gas sector offers the most possibility for rapid methane cuts, and roughly 80% of that sector falls under a methane-reduction pledge, its total emissions have continued to rise since 2020 and remained past 120 million metric tons per year in 2024. All methane pledges made by governments and companies as of 2023 would in theory be enough to reduce fossil fuel methane emissions by 50% by 2030, but to do this the industry must close its implementation gap. Further, there are major gaps in these commitments. As of 2023, only 13 percent of all methane emissions were covered by any sort of emissions-reduction policy.
What Can Individuals Do to Reduce Methane Emissions?
The two simplest, most effective things that people can do to reduce their individual methane emissions are to switch to lower-methane diets and to reduce their daily food waste through measures such as meal planning, buying “ugly” foods and composting. If you feel intimidated at the thought of going entirely vegetarian or vegan, even just reducing your meat and dairy consumption can make a difference. One study found that if everyone in the European Union limited their meat and dairy consumption by 34%, they would prevent six million metric tons of methane emissions per year.
If you are a homeowner who either cooks on a gas stove or receives heat via a gas furnace, you can replace your gas range with an electric or induction option and swap your furnace for an electric heat pump. Renters may not be able to swap out appliances, but they can still reduce their gas use by finding creative ways to save energy — such as air-drying clothes — or supplementing gas heating and cooking appliances with electric devices like space heaters, rice cookers, microwaves or induction burners.
Ultimately, methane emissions — like all climate pollution — are the products of complex energy, food and waste systems that are kept in place partly because they benefit powerful people who are currently profiting from them. Reducing your personal methane emissions will not remake those systems on its own, but you can also join together with like-minded people to campaign for change. This could range from lobbying your city government to create a municipal composting system to joining or supporting groups like 350.org, Third Act, Oil Change International, Louisiana Bucket Brigade and South Texas Environmental Justice Network that are working to stop the LNG buildout globally, nationally and in their communities.
Takeaway
Methane emissions present both a threat and an opportunity. Because methane is so much more potent than carbon dioxide, it can further turbocharge the global heating that is already raising the thermostat and fueling more extreme storms and other weather events. However, its shorter atmospheric lifespan means that acting urgently to cut its emissions would enable us to make important and timely headway on combating the climate crisis overall. That is why it’s important to spread the word about methane — how it’s released and how to reduce it — and to put pressure on political and business leaders to act on that knowledge.
The post Methane 101: Understanding the Second Most Important Greenhouse Gas appeared first on EcoWatch.
https://www.ecowatch.com/methane-facts-ecowatch.html
Stewart Brand, who popularized the “blue marble” photograph that changed humanity’s perspective on the fragility of the Earth, points out that Californians and Europeans use half the energy of the typical American, without losing any quality of life. This quote comes from Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary, and Brand is also the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog.
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The post Earth911 Inspiration: Half The Energy and Doing Just Fine appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/inspire/earth911-inspiration-half-the-energy-and-doing-just-fine/
Green Living
Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: Project Repat Is Saving US Jobs & T-Shirts From Landfills
Project Repat, founded by Ross Lohr and Nathan Rothstein, had prevented more than 11 million T-shirts from landfills while bringing some sewing work back to the United States when we talked with them in 2019. They’re still going strong. Tune into a classic conversation as Earth911’s Mitch Ratcliffe talks with Rothstein about the inspiration behind Project Repat and the massive changes in U.S. T-shirt manufacturing over the past 30 years. After migrating to Mexico, T-shirt printing jobs have gone overseas and few American companies still make them.
Project Repat has a better idea: turn old shirts into keepsake quilts hand-sewn using T-shirts sent by customers. Instead of tossing a T-shirt in the donation bin, it can be turned into a part of a memorable and snug quilt. Love a sports team? Make a quilt of the team T-shirts and jerseys you’ve purchased over the years. Want to remember a school or a company where you worked? In all likelihood, you have the makings of a Project Repat quilt. Reasonably priced based on the size, Project Repat takes your order and receives your shirts by mail, then turns them into fleece-backed quilt.
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Editor’s note: This epsiode originally aired on October 7, 2019.
The post Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: Project Repat Is Saving US Jobs & T-Shirts From Landfills appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/podcast/earth911-podcast-october-25-2019-saving-us-jobs-and-t-shirts-from-landfills-with-project-repat/
Every wildfire starts small. The problem is that by the time most are detected, minutes have already passed and, under increasingly common conditions driven by a warming climate, a fire can grow beyond any tanker truck’s capacity to contain. The gap between ignition and coordinated response currently averages around 40 minutes. Firefighters have long understood the math: a spoonful of water in the first second, a bucket in the first minute, a truckload in the first hour. The XPRIZE Wildfire competition is an $11 million global effort to prove that autonomous systems, including AI-enabled drones, ground-based sensor networks, and space-based detection platforms, can collapse that window to 10 minutes. Our guest is Andrea Santy, who leads the program. She came to XPRIZE after nearly two decades at the World Wildlife Fund, where she watched conservation projects fall to wildfire. That experience sharpened her understanding of the stakes: wildfires are now the leading driver of deforestation globally, having surpassed agriculture. In places like the Amazon, the Congo Basin, and parts of tropical East Asia, a single fire can eliminate species found nowhere else on Earth. In cities, it can destroy entire neighborhoods in hours. On January 7, 2025, Santa Ana winds drove flames through Pacific Palisades and Altadena, destroying more than 16,000 structures, killing 30 people, displacing 180,000 residents, and generating between $76 billion and $130 billion in total economic losses from a single event. Annual U.S. wildfire costs, when healthcare, lost productivity, ecosystem damage, and rebuilding are included, are estimated between $394 billion and $893 billion. XPRIZE announced the five autonomous wildfire response finalists just over a year after the LA fires: Anduril, deploying its Lattice AI platform with autonomous fire sentry towers and Ghost X drones; Dryad, running solar-powered mesh sensor networks that detect fires at the smoldering stage; Fire Swarm Solutions, coordinating heavy-lift drone swarms that can deliver 100 gallons of water autonomously; Data Blanket, building rapidly deployable drone swarms for real-time perimeter mapping and suppression; and Wildfire Quest, a team of high school students from Valley Christian High School in San Jose who used multi-sensor triangulation to locate fires that can’t be seen from monitoring positions, solving the literal over-the-hill problem that any fire detection system faces.
The conversation covers what the finalists demonstrated during semi-final trials at 40-mile-per-hour winds, why the decoy fire requirement — distinguishing a wildfire from a barbecue, a pile burn, or a flapping tarp — is one of the hardest AI classification problems in the competition, and how autonomous systems would integrate with existing incident command structures. Santy is direct about where progress is lagging: the testing is ahead of the regulations. Autonomous drones operating beyond visual line of sight and coordinating with manned aircraft in active fire emergencies require FAA frameworks that don’t yet exist at the necessary scale. There’s also the deeper ecological tension — the growing scientific consensus that many fire-adapted landscapes need more fire, not less, and that indigenous fire stewardship practices developed over millennia have a place alongside autonomous suppression technology. One XPRIZE finalist is already working with an indigenous community in Canada to pilot their heavy-lift drone system in a remote area where that community is exploring how the technology fits their land management approach. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s FY 2026 budget proposes eliminating Forest Service state fire capacity grants, cutting vegetation and watershed management programs by 30%, and zeroing out $300 million in forest research funding — maintaining suppression spending while gutting the prevention and detection infrastructure that could reduce what there is to suppress. The engineering, Santy says, has arrived. Whether the institutions can move at the speed the crisis demands is the harder question.
You can learn more about XPRIZE Wildfire and follow the finalists at xprize.org/competitions/wildfire.
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Interview Transcript
Mitch Ratcliffe 0:09
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.
Fire season is coming, and we’re going to dig into how new technology may catch and contain fires in the first few minutes after ignition. There’s a saying among firefighters: you can fight fire in the first second with a spoonful of water, in the first minute with a bucket of water, and in the first hour with a truckload of water. The problem is that by the time most wildfires are detected, minutes have already passed, and in those minutes, under increasingly common conditions, a fire can grow beyond any tanker truck’s capacity.
On January 7, 2025, hurricane-force Santa Ana winds drove flames through Pacific Palisades and Altadena in Los Angeles, and in a matter of hours, more than 16,000 structures were destroyed. Thirty people were killed, and 180,000 residents were forced to flee. The total economic losses are estimated to be between $76 billion and $130 billion from a single fire event. And that was just one week in one city. In 2025, the U.S. recorded more than 61,500 wildfires that burned nearly 5 million acres, leading to annual U.S. wildfire costs of between $394 billion and $893 billion when you factor in the cost of healthcare, lost productivity, ecosystem damage, and the expensive task of rebuilding entire cities.
So there’s an identifiable gap in the current best practices, which take roughly 40 minutes from ignition to deliver a coordinated response. What if you could cut that to 10 minutes, when only a few buckets of water could extinguish a threat? And what if autonomous systems — AI-enabled drones and ground-based sensor networks — could detect a fire, distinguish it from a prescribed burn, and suppress it before getting a human on the radio?
That’s the challenge behind the XPRIZE Wildfire program, an $11 million global competition now entering its final year, and our guest today is Andrea Santy, the program director leading it. Andrea came to XPRIZE after nearly two decades at the World Wildlife Fund, and before that she spent time at the Smithsonian Institution, leading conservation and academic programs.
On January 29 — just after the one-year anniversary of those LA fires — XPRIZE announced the five finalist teams advancing in the autonomous wildfire response track of the competition. They include:
Andruil, a defense technology company deploying a Lattice AI platform with autonomous fire sentry towers and Ghost X drones that watch for fires at the moment they break out;
Dryad, a German company running solar-powered sensor networks that detect fires at the smoldering stage;
Fire Swarm Solutions, a Canadian team coordinating heavy-lift drone swarms that can carry 100 gallons of water autonomously to the point where a fire begins;
Data Blanket, building a rapidly deployable drone swarm system for real-time perimeter mapping and suppression; and
Wildfire Quest, a team of high school students from Valley Christian High School in San Jose who partnered with two aerospace companies to use multi-sensor triangulation to locate fires that cannot be seen from monitoring locations — because, after all, a lot of fires happen just over the hill.
A separate track of the competition, the space-based wildfire detection and intelligence program, includes 10 finalists from six countries who are heading to Australia in April for their own finals. Those teams will have one minute to detect all fires across an area larger than a state, and 10 minutes to deliver precise reports to firefighting decision-makers on the ground.
We’re going to talk with Andrea about what the finalists demonstrated during live trials, why the decoy fire requirement is one of the hardest AI classification problems in the competition, and how these autonomous systems would actually integrate with existing wildfire incident command structures. We’ll also dig into the tension between suppression technology and the growing scientific consensus that many landscapes need more fire, not less, and whether indigenous fire stewardship practices have a place in this conversation.
You can learn more about XPRIZE Wildfire at xprize.org/competitions/wildfire. Can autonomous drones and AI-driven sensor networks actually detect and suppress a wildfire in less than 10 minutes? Let’s find out right after this brief commercial break.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Welcome to the show, Andrea. How are you doing today?
Andrea Santy 5:34
I’m doing great, Mitch. Thanks for having me.
Mitch Ratcliffe 5:34
Well, thanks for joining me. We’ve had XPRIZE leaders on the show a number of times, and you do such interesting work. You announced the finalists just at one year after the catastrophe in LA. How did that reshape the urgency and direction for the XPRIZE Wildfire competition?
Andrea Santy 5:34
It definitely focuses a more intense light on the competition and the need for these solutions. Climate change is driving more intense, more frequent wildfires all around the world, and so I think the urgency was already there. But when you have a disaster at the scale and scope of the LA fires, it absolutely changes the way that everybody thinks about wildfires.
Mitch Ratcliffe 6:04
What’s the realistic timeline for these technologies in the competition to potentially start changing the way that we fight fire and the outcomes of those fires?
Andrea Santy 6:14
So I’ll start by saying we were in LA when the fires started. XPRIZE has a lot of LA-based staff, and we’re originally LA-based, and we were having our staff meeting — so our entire staff was there. We knew from our prize that it was going to be very high risk, and so we were in touch with fire chiefs as the fires were starting. We were able to go out and see where the fires had gone through the Palisades and part of the city — basically 24 hours after it had happened.
It really, I will just say, definitely had a huge impact in terms of being able to see a landscape, communities, homes, schools, and businesses that had been devastated. A lot of the technology being integrated with these solutions can be deployed almost immediately. I think that as the fire agencies begin to get their hands on more of this technology, we’re going to have a hopefully relatively quick uptake. Cameras, sensors, satellite data — a lot of this is already being deployed. So we’re looking at how quickly and under what conditions it can help improve our detection. And then we have other components that I would say are going to have a longer timeline to full deployment.
Mitch Ratcliffe 7:56
It sounds like part of the problem, then, is just knitting all this together. Does that also apply to areas outside of major cities? Do we have the resources to do this on a nationwide basis?
Andrea Santy 8:10
Yeah, absolutely. We’re doing our testing for our space-based competition in Australia, so we’re looking at how you detect fires over vast areas from satellites as quickly as possible and deliver that information down within 10 minutes, with 15-minute updates. For our autonomous track, we’re testing in Alaska — so it will definitely be a real-world scenario where we can understand the capabilities of these technologies in forested areas, in really vast terrain, and under different environmental conditions. Part of why we’re working with these partners is because they’re great partners, but it also allows us to validate this technology under real-world, challenging conditions.
Mitch Ratcliffe 9:03
So how does the wildfire strategy change when this technology is in place? You’ve already mentioned that the climate crisis is accelerating the size and pace of these fires. Is the goal to suppress more fires earlier so that available resources can be deployed to those that actually break out? What’s the big-picture change in policy here?
Andrea Santy 9:26
XPRIZE really decided to double down on early detection and autonomous response, and we have two tracks. I’ll talk about the detection piece first because it’s digestible for everyone. Every wildfire starts small. They don’t start as a huge catastrophe — they start small, often in pretty remote areas. Sometimes they burn really fast, sometimes slower, depending on the conditions. But if you can address a wildfire at its very smallest phase, essentially post-ignition, that gives you the best chance to address it — either through autonomous suppression systems or through your fire service. If you have more eyes, ears, and noses on the landscape, the better your chance of getting that alert as soon as possible, which allows the fire service to decide how to prioritize their resources.
The second component we’re advancing is autonomous detection and response. Sensors and cameras handle the detection; the autonomous response system deploys, verifies there is a fire — that it’s not a barbecue but an actual wildfire that needs suppression — and places suppressant fully autonomously. That’s what we’re going to be testing in Alaska: can they execute this full end-to-end system? Is the technology integrated? Will it reach the scale and scope of the challenge and the geography? Because 1,000 square kilometers — which is our testing area — is roughly the size of San Antonio, Texas. The teams will have to find multiple fires and demonstrate persistent monitoring and persistent response. Imagine having a fire starting in a ravine: if you can get something out there in minutes, your chance of knocking it down — even just deterring the spread enough that firefighters can arrive — we hope will be a game changer.
Mitch Ratcliffe 12:13
We’re talking about autonomous drones. But one of the things that happened in the LA wildfire was that Santa Ana winds were so extreme, fixed-wing aircraft couldn’t fly. Can a drone perform in those conditions?
Andrea Santy 12:27
During our semi-final testing, our team traveled the world to observe these solutions in action. While not at scale, each of the five finalists was able to demonstrate that they could detect a fire, navigate to it, and suppress it fully autonomously over a small area. Coincidentally, relatively strong winds followed us — nothing like the Santa Ana winds, but we had 40-mile-per-hour winds pretty consistently during testing. It was odd, but it was helpful in terms of validating the technology.
Because you don’t have a human pilot, it’s not that helicopters and planes can’t fly — it’s that they can’t fly in that type of wind without putting a human at risk. This approach removes at least that human element. It’s going to continue to be a challenge, but many of the drones have a relatively high wind tolerance, and as the technology improves, the systems themselves are providing the input to stay balanced.
Mitch Ratcliffe 13:54
These systems are also being combined with sensor networks. Can you talk about how those are being deployed?
Andrea Santy 14:01
Some teams are really focused on ultra-early detection by deploying a sensor network — many, many sensors connected through a mesh network — allowing small, distributed sensors across a large area, which gives you great coverage. All of the different teams are competing under the same scenario, so we’ll get to see which technologies work under which conditions. There’s no single silver bullet that works in every condition, every geography, and every forest type. We’re also working on a pilot phase post-competition so the teams can continue to test and deploy, gaining even better understanding. Building trust with fire agencies — so they know what the technology can do under critical situations — is really important.
Mitch Ratcliffe 15:24
Do the fire agencies participate in these trials as well?
Andrea Santy 15:28
Absolutely. We have partners from different fire agencies in Australia — we’re doing our testing with the Rural Fire Service of New South Wales, which is a testing partner. Many of our judges come from different fire agencies across the United States and around the world. From the beginning, that was really an ethos we set forward — making sure this was done hand in hand with the fire agencies.
Mitch Ratcliffe 15:59
You’ve mentioned decoy fires. I’m curious how the trials will incorporate them. You mentioned barbecues — are you going to have people setting up small fires to lure the competition’s sensors?
Andrea Santy 16:11
I can’t say too much because testing hasn’t happened — I can’t give away the secret sauce. But yes — the teams do know they will have decoys and will need to ensure their technology ignores them. It can be anything from something flapping in the wind that resembles the color of fire all the way to barbecues or pile burns — anything that would confuse the technology.
Mitch Ratcliffe 16:52
And that could happen any day of the year. Really interesting. One of the most compelling things about the competition is the breadth of sources of ideas and the range of approaches — including even a high school team from Valley Christian High School in San Jose. What does that diversity tell us about where wildfire innovation will actually come from?
Andrea Santy 17:15
At XPRIZE, we believe that ideas can come from anyone, anywhere, and I think XPRIZE Wildfire really demonstrates what that looks like. We had teams from over 55 different countries enter the competition. We currently have six countries represented through our finals teams, and the range spans from Valley Christian — a high school team — through universities, startups, and all the way up to major industry. That truly spans the whole spectrum.
What I really love about our competition is that for many of the teams, this is both a company and a passion. Wildfires happen in so many places, and so many teams have been personally impacted. The high school team talked about growing up in areas where wildfires are a constant presence — they are very cognizant of the need for these solutions. Something remarkable: one in six Americans live in an area of wildfire risk, and 25% of Californians.
Mitch Ratcliffe 18:57
It’s a very tangible problem for so many of us, particularly in the West. And the smoke from fires in Canada is now familiar on the East Coast — it’s changed the very shape of life. This is a great place to take a quick commercial break. We’ll be right back.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s return to my discussion with Andrea Santy. She is Program Director of XPRIZE Wildfire — a competition headed into its final year with two groups of finalists vying to win shares of an $11 million prize to help commercialize their technologies.
Andrea, the autonomous competition requires teams to detect and suppress a high-risk wildfire in a 1,000-square-kilometer area — roughly the size of San Antonio — and do it within 10 minutes, while ignoring decoy fires. That’s four times faster than current best practices. Have any of the teams met that benchmark yet in the trials?
Andrea Santy 19:57
As I mentioned, the five teams advancing to finals all demonstrated they have end-to-end solutions to autonomously detect, navigate, and suppress a fire. Our semi-final testing was at a much smaller scale, and while some teams did it in less than 10 minutes, this finals competition is at a very large scale — and it is going to be challenging. Every XPRIZE is very audacious. We really want to push the limits, but we’re very confident we’re going to have a team that can do it. Still to be seen, but that is what finals is for.
Mitch Ratcliffe 20:42
Absolutely. It’s great that we’re testing in such diverse settings. Australia and Alaska seem very different. Is that actually the case, or are wildfire conditions globally roughly the same?
Andrea Santy 20:59
Very different. In Alaska, it will be wildfire season, and we’re testing in an area of much lower risk. The vegetation is different. The geography is different. The fuels — the plants and trees — are different. In Australia, the teams will be arriving as it comes out of summer and goes into fall, which means we don’t actually know exactly which specific days we’ll test, because the Rural Fire Service has to execute prescribed burns when it’s safe. We have a two-week testing window, with five planned days of testing, and approximately 20 fires of varying sizes that the teams will need to identify under different conditions and vegetation types.
Mitch Ratcliffe 22:11
Let’s talk a bit about the space-based prize. Lockheed Martin is adding a million dollars for the teams that can demonstrate the fastest and most accurate detection. Is detection turning out to be the harder technical problem — or is it the transition from detection to action, that coordination piece we talked about?
Andrea Santy 22:40
Lockheed Martin is supporting the autonomous wildfire response track — which we call Track B. The autonomous track requires teams to detect, navigate, and suppress, with all teams using drones. There’s a lot of different detection technology, from sensors that detect particulates up to cameras, and sensors and cameras mounted on drones.
Getting that detection into these autonomous response systems is really the step change — having something that communicates without human intervention, with drones that can fly under wind conditions and navigate to the right location, confirm there’s a fire, and then suppress it accurately. The teams will be testing on a moving fire — not a barrel of fire, but an actual fire that will be dynamic and small-scale but moving. That’s really challenging and requires quite a bit of system training. During semi-finals, accurately hitting the target was one of the harder challenges.
Mitch Ratcliffe 24:43
As you talk about it, it sounds like the transition from detection to addressing the fire appropriately — choosing the right suppression mechanism — is something you’ll continue to work on.
Andrea Santy 24:58
The teams are definitely still working on their systems. They have until June to have all of their systems working. Yeah, it requires a lot of different components.
Mitch Ratcliffe 25:20
And obviously that’s part of the bigger challenge — coordinating technological responses to a changing climate and acute situations like fire. As you observe the environment with these systems, are we also potentially identifying opportunities for prescribed burns in order to reduce fire risk?
Andrea Santy 25:45
Absolutely. While our competition is focused on detection and response to incipient-stage wildfires, I do think this technology can be utilized across many different scenarios — including prescribed burns, where you want to monitor large burn areas to ensure nothing escapes. That is definitely a use case, and anything that reduces our risk. Personally, I think it could provide peace of mind: if you have something on hand that can prevent a prescribed fire from spreading when weather conditions change unexpectedly, that’s enormously valuable.
Mitch Ratcliffe 26:43
Indigenous communities have managed fire for millennia using these kinds of burning practices. Have you engaged with tribal fire practitioners? Do they see autonomous technology as complementary to, or in tension with, their traditional fire stewardship programs?
Andrea Santy 27:02
We have engaged with some. I was just at a meeting where I was able to meet with a representative from an indigenous community in Canada, and they are actually going to pilot-test one of the team’s technologies — specifically a team with a heavy-lift drone. It was really exciting to talk with them and learn more about how they envision it being used. Their community is quite remote, and understanding how this technology could work within their context was a great conversation.
Mitch Ratcliffe 27:41
When I think about the swarm of drones approach to fire management, the regulatory landscape seems like a significant challenge. The FAA has been grappling with drone airspace management. Does the regulatory framework need to change significantly to accommodate these systems?
Andrea Santy 28:06
That’s an excellent question. Current regulations and protocol don’t allow drones in airspace with manned aircraft. As the technology gets better, there are definitely ways this can happen — there are pilots and tests already occurring with other partners looking at shared airspace for heavy-lift drones operating at higher altitudes. Beyond visual line of sight is one area where the testing is definitely ahead of where the regulations are.
Mitch Ratcliffe 28:55
What has your conservation career taught you about how technology deployment can shape our relationship with nature?
Andrea Santy 29:07
I got into this position in part because many of the projects I was working on at the World Wildlife Fund were being lost to wildfire, and I felt we hadn’t really understood the impact of wildfires on conservation. Wildfires are now the main driver of deforestation globally, having surpassed agriculture. In places like the Amazon, the Congo, and parts of tropical East Asia, there’s such critical biodiversity — and I think if we can use technology to monitor these areas, understand where fires are happening, and deploy appropriate responses, my hope is that we can save really, really important places. There are endemic species that only live in very, very small areas, and one fire could wipe out an entire species.
I also worked for a long time on projects where your goal was 20 to 50 years away. Being able to work with XPRIZE, where in three years we’ve seen an absolute transformation in both what the technology can do and how people understand what technology is for — I think we need more of these competitions, more technology applied to conservation problems. I’m really hopeful.
Mitch Ratcliffe 31:23
After three years with XPRIZE Wildfire, do you feel like we can turn back the rising incidence of wildfire and all the costs we’re seeing pile up when cities burn?
Andrea Santy 31:35
I think so. Communities and citizens around the world are understanding the problem at a deeper level. This is going to be all hands on deck. You need citizens and homeowners making sure they have zone zero — no vegetation around their homes. You need communities, city and state incentives, industry engagement. You need prescribed fire and better forest management policies that allow good fire on the landscape, and communities that encourage it. All of these factors together are what will get us to a new paradigm.
Mitch Ratcliffe 32:29
You mentioned raising awareness — this competition actually sounds like really good TV. Have you thought about how to tell this story of wildfire innovation so that people can get engaged with and behind this kind of activity?
Andrea Santy 32:49
We’ve discussed at length how we would be able to document some of the testing. For the autonomous wildfire response, it is a very big, vast area, and turning it into good TV is probably a step beyond us — but I think the teams have amazing stories to tell. We’re going to capture a lot of imagery to share that story out. We have a resource page that provides a lot of different information to homeowners and individuals about other really amazing organizations doing great work in the wildfire space.
Mitch Ratcliffe 33:47
How can our listeners follow along as you complete the project?
Andrea Santy 33:51
We’d love to have them follow along. The easiest way is xprize.org/wildfire — we have lots of information about the competition and the teams, lookbooks to learn about which teams are competing, social media updates, and a newsletter you can subscribe to. During the testing events we’ll be sharing quite a bit of good information. The events are in fairly remote, closed-system locations, so we can’t invite everyone there — but we’ll definitely be exploring how to make sure as many people as possible can get their eyes on what we’re doing.
Mitch Ratcliffe 34:42
Andrea, thank you very much for spending time with us today. It’s been a really interesting conversation.
Andrea Santy 34:48
Thank you so much. We hope all your listeners think deeply about wildfire and what they can do. Our goal is that collectively we can all work together to reduce this wildfire risk and keep good fire on the landscape.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Mitch Ratcliffe 35:11
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Andrea Santy, Program Director of XPRIZE Wildfire, an $11 million global competition now in its final year. Learn more and follow the finalists at xprize.org/competitions/wildfire.
This conversation revealed, at least for me, that solutions to wildfire are arriving — but perhaps faster than the systems built to receive them can accept and use them. We’ll need more public funding to deploy these technologies, and right now we’re moving in the wrong direction. As wildfire damage grows, total federal wildfire spending is holding roughly flat at around $7 billion a year. However, the Trump administration’s FY 2026 budget proposes eliminating the Forest Service’s state fire capacity grants, cutting vegetation and watershed management programs by 30%, and zeroing out the $300 million in forest research funding that was in the budget previously. So we’re maintaining the suppression budget while cutting the prevention, detection, and research infrastructure that could reduce what we have to suppress.
Fortunately, we have XPRIZE Wildfire to take on some of the burden — but it’s not enough. Consider what Andrea said about early detection: every wildfire does start small. If autonomous systems can get suppressant on a fire quickly enough, it might not even need to be fully extinguished — just deterred enough that firefighters can arrive to finish the job. The technology to do that end-to-end and autonomously is already being demonstrated in the field. But Andrea was equally direct about what’s lagging: the testing is ahead of where the regulations are.
Consider autonomous drones operating beyond visual line of sight and coordinating with manned aircraft during active fire emergencies. For that to work, the FAA’s frameworks for widespread drone operations need to be reinvented. The recent closure of El Paso International Airport over nearby counter-drone laser testing is evidence of how unprepared we truly are for the innovations that are coming.
In short, the engineering has arrived, but institutions need support to integrate that engineering into their operations. A similar gap is evident in who’s doing the innovating: teams from over 55 countries entered this competition, and a high school team from San Jose made the finals by solving the problem of locating fires beyond ridgelines using multi-sensor triangulation — not because they had institutional backing, but because they had access to a well-defined problem and the drive to solve it, along with the incentive of XPRIZE’s $11 million award.
The XPRIZE premise that ideas can come from anyone, anywhere — it turns out — is literally true. But recognizing that changes nothing if the regulatory, procurement, and deployment systems still favor incumbents and slow-moving approval processes.
Underlying all these challenges is what Andrea brought to this work from nearly two decades at the World Wildlife Fund: wildfires are now the leading driver of deforestation globally, having surpassed agriculture. The game has changed, but policy is still anchored in now-outdated 20th-century strategies. One fire in the wrong place can drive a species to extinction, or it can burn a city to the ground.
Andrea said she’s hopeful — not because the problem is easy, but because in three years she’s watched a transformation in what technology can do and how people understand what technology is for. That hope is well earned. But it will only translate into outcomes if institutions move at the speed the crisis demands — citizens, homeowners, communities, industries, and policy, all moving together. The competition creates urgency; the systems around it need to act on and use the innovations being delivered.
So stay tuned for more conversations with people actually making sustainability happen, and I hope you’ll check out our archive of more than 540 episodes. There’s something worth sharing with anyone you know. Writing a review on your favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us — because, folks, you are the amplifiers that spread ideas to create less waste. Please tell your friends, your family, your co-workers, and the people you meet on the street that they can find Sustainability In Your Ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or wherever they get their podcast goodness.
Thank you for your support. I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks — take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.
The post Sustainability In Your Ear: The XPRIZE Wildfire Competition Heats Up appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/podcast/sustainability-in-your-ear-the-xprize-wildfire-competition-heats-up/
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