Quick Key Facts
- Despite covering only around 25% of Earth’s land area, mountains host more than 85% of bird, mammal and amphibian species.
- Many of Earth’s rivers begin in mountains, and more than half of all people use freshwater from mountains every day.
- Six of the 20 plant varieties that feed most of the world’s population originate in mountains: barley, sorghum, tomatoes, apples, quinoa and potatoes.
- Mountain visits make up 15 to 20% of global tourism.
- Since 1950, mountains have been heating 25% to 50% faster than the global average.
- Even if global warming is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, nearly all mountain glaciers will face considerable mass loss by 2100.
- The average Everest climber generates 18 pounds of waste, most of which stays on the mountain.
What Are Mountains and Why Should We Protect Them?
From the Alps and the Andes to Julie Andrews twirling in an alpine meadow in the opening scene of The Sound of Music, mountains have been a powerful force in human history and culture. They dominate our imaginations as they dominate our landscapes, towering over skyscrapers in cities from Tokyo to Seattle and forming islands from Hawaii to Iceland. A mountain, defined as a landmass significantly higher than its surroundings, comes in broadly four types: fold mountains, formed by the movements of tectonic plates; block mountains, created by rocks moving up and down; dome mountains, made from the movement of magma beneath the Earth’s crust and volcanoes.
While mountains are formed by geologic forces deep underground, they create space for unique ecosystems to form high above the Earth. Mountains’ harsh conditions and relative isolation have encouraged and sheltered varied biodiversity.
And what happens on mountains doesn’t stay on mountains. From crucial crops to glacial runoff, mountains have given many gifts to the human and non-human communities that live below them. Yet, society doesn’t treat mountains with the gratitude they deserve, threatening these majestic environments with the climate crisis, resource exploitation, pollution and overtourism. To preserve mountain ecosystems, it’s important for human communities to understand what mountains do for us and, in turn, what we can do for them.
What Are the Main Types of Mountain Ecosystems?
Mountain ecosystems vary wildly in climate and biodiversity. For example, mountains encompass the temperate European Alps and the Desert Mountains of Nevada to island-forming volcanoes like Hawaii’s Kīlauea and the world’s highest peaks in the Himalayas. The ecosystem changes within each individual mountain; this often depends on the altitude. For every 328 feet gained, the temperature falls by 0.9 to 1.1 Fahrenheit, and altitude conditions affect what species can survive and thrive in a particular spot. Similar plants and animals tend to thrive at similar altitudes (and latitudes moving north to south). These ecosystem bands are called life zones — below, we’ll detail out some of the most common.
Montane Forest
The first mountain life zone is the montane forest. Even if a mountain rises out of a lowland forest, the species in the montane forest tend to be distinct from those further below and will have more in common with trees that grow further north. In Europe, North America and temperate Asia, the trees in montane forests are typically conifers such as pines, mountain hemlocks and the unique larches of Washington State’s Cascades, with needles that turn yellow in the fall.
In the Southern Hemisphere’s temperate areas, montane forests are usually made up of one or two broadleaf species, such as eucalyptus in Australia, while in the tropics montane forests are usually evergreen rainforests. One unique tropical and subtropical type of montane forest is the cloud forest. These are evergreen rainforests whose moisture comes from clouds, which envelop the green in a constant mist. The clouds are first intercepted by the mountain slope and then filtered through the leaves. These forests, found in parts of Central and South America, Southeast Asia, Central and Southern Africa and Australia, are known for an abundance of plants like mosses, lichens and orchids that grow on other plants. The unique conditions that form cloud forests mean they’re home to many unique species, such as a carnivorous pitcher plant found in Borneo’s cloud forest called the Nepenthes hurrelliana.
Subalpine Zone
As altitude increases, climate conditions grow more extreme and trees have a harder time surviving. Eventually, they hit a point past which it is too cold, dry and low-oxygen for them to grow. This is called the tree line or timberline, and it typically occurs at the point on a mountain where temperatures during the warmest month average around 50 degrees Fahrenheit. The area immediately around the tree line is a transition area between tree-dominated and tree-free ecosystems. This is called the subalpine zone.
The trees that grow in the subalpine zone are often shorter than those below it. Some will grow in the shadow of rocks and won’t grow higher than the rock’s protection. Others will grow out instead of up. These low, wind-twisted trees are called krummholz, the German word for “crooked wood.” Between the krummholz are subalpine meadows where many species of wildflowers flourish, depending on the region. In temperate ecosystems, common flowers are heather, daisies, lupins and pasqueflowers.
Alpine Tundra and Grassland
Above the tree line, conditions grow even harsher, which limits what can grow. The plants that survive grow low to the ground year-round and include grasses, sedges, forbs and lichens. Grasses grow most frequently in alpine meadows, which are created when weather conditions have eroded rocks sufficiently to create soil. Alpine flowers have evolved to have hair on stems and leaves that protect them from the wind. One example is the Edelweiss, or Leontopodium nivale, which grows in the Alps and Carpatihians, a national symbol for several countries in the region. Other alpine flowers have red pigment to help turn the sun’s rays into heat or blue to protect against ultraviolet radiation, such as the Clusius’s gentian in the Swiss Alps.
Many alpine ecosystems around the world will have similar types of plants, including heather, gentians, plantains and buttercups. Tropical alpine regions in the Andes, the Himalayas, East Africa and Pacific islands feature a unique type of plant, a large herb with a rosette structure that can grow to be over 10 feet tall. WWF considers montane grasslands and shrublands to be their own biome. These ecosystems occur all over the world from the Páramo in the Northern Andes to the steppes of the Tibetan plateau. Even higher up, some mountains see ice and snow year-round, conditions that are inhospitable to most life. However, some organisms still find a way, such as ice worms and red algae in the North Cascades or the microbes that have been discovered beneath mountain glaciers.
What Are the Benefits of Mountains?
Mountains have a myriad of benefits, from housing ample biodiversity and providing freshwater to being recreational destinations where people can hike and ski.
Habitats and Biodiversity
Despite only covering around 25% of Earth’s land area, mountains are essential havens for biodiversity, hosting more than 85% of birds, mammals and amphibians and one-third of terrestrial species. They also include almost 25% of the world’s forests. The tropical Andes in South America are home to 45,000 plant species, while the mountains of New Guinea alone host 20,000 plant and animal species. Unique animals that shelter on mountains include iconic species like bighorn sheep, red pandas, orangutans, snow leopards, Rocky Mountain goats, the Himalayan tahr and the California and Andean condors.
The biodiversity importance of mountains comes in part from their elevation and their relative isolation from the landscape below. Their altitude and cooler temperatures allowed them to act as a refuge for cold-weather species as planetary temperatures warmed following the last Ice Age. In more recent history, they provide a haven for species pushed out of the lowlands by human activity. At the same time, the contained environments of mountains enable species to evolve and diverge relatively quickly, so that different but related species can survive on nearby mountain peaks, boosting overall biodiversity. Mountains can also support the biodiversity below them. For example, snowmelt from Mount Kilimanjaro waters the swamps of Amboseli National Park, which shelters 420 bird species and 50 large mammal species.
Water
Mountains are essential to the global freshwater supply, so much so that they’ve known as the “world’s water towers.” Mountains store water in glaciers, snowpacks, lakes and reservoirs that flow downhill at increased rates during warmer weather. Most of the Earth’s largest rivers begin in mountains, and more than half of all people use fresh water from mountains every day for drinking, sanitation, agriculture, electricity, industry, transportation, recreation and fisheries.
Certain ranges are especially important as regional water sources. Scientists have identified 78 mountain “water towers” that are especially vital, providing water to 1.9 billion people. The greatest number of people are dependent on the Indus river system coming out of the Himalayas in Asia. More than 200 million people in the region and 1.3 billion people downstream rely on water from the Hindu Kush-Himalayan mountain region alone, which is sometimes called the world’s “Third Pole” for its abundance of mountain glaciers. Other important “water tower” mountains are the European Alps, the U.S. Rockies and the southern Andes in South America. Cities that rely on mountain water include Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, New York, Nairobi and Melbourne.
Food and Flowers
Because their harsher conditions put stress on plants, mountain soil is less nutrient-rich overall than lowland soil. Therefore, mountains aren’t used for agriculture on a large scale. That said, several important food crops and beloved garden flowers originated on mountains. These include six of the 20 plant varieties that feed most of the world’s population: barley, sorghum, tomatoes, apples, quinoa and potatoes. Potatoes, for example, were first domesticated in the Andes around 8,000 years ago. Gardens would also be noticeably less bright without mountains, as many popular flowers originated in mountains. More than 60% of wild tulip species evolved in the mountains of Central Asia.
Culture
Currently, between 0.3 billion and 2.3 billion people call mountains home. Communities who have lived on mountains for centuries have developed their cultures based on their alpine lifestyles.
The Sherpas live in the most mountainous part of the Tibetan and Nepalese Himalayas. They’ve become so well known for their mountaineering prowess that the term “sherpa” is now used for any mountain guide in the region, regardless of ethnicity. Switzerland’s iconic yodeling singing style originated from shepherds calling to each other across the Alps. In fact, most mountain ranges are home to Indigenous peoples and local communities who depend on them for sustenance and identity.
Many of these communities have developed unique Indigenous knowledge systems, such as languages, traditions and ways to make use of the land. Many cultures also consider certain mountains and glaciers sacred. Mount Kailas in Tibet is honored by Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism and Bon. Other mountains that hold spiritual significance to different groups include Mount Everest, Mount Fuji, Mount Ararat, Mauna Kea, the Mount Olympus (of Greek mythology) and Mount Shasta, where the Winnemem Wintu people of California believe all of life bubbled up from a mountain spring.
Recreation
Mountains provide ample opportunities for recreation in nature, such as mountain and rock climbing, hiking, mountain biking, backpacking, camping, downhill and cross-country skiing, snowboarding and snowshoeing. They also host sites of cultural or historical significance, such as the Incan ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru, which draws millions of visitors annually. In fact, mountain visits make up 15 to 20% of global tourism. Mountain and snow tourism generated at least $4.9 billion in 2023, which is expected to grow to $8 billion by 2033.
Main Threats to Mountains
When you see craggy peaks towering above the lowlands or spewing ash and lava into the sky, mountains may seem invincible to the whims of humans. Yet their size and power can’t protect mountain ecosystems from the same environmental pressures that human activiy is placing on the rest of the world.
Climate Threats
Scientists have warned that climate change (driven by the burning of fossil fuels), is the greatest threat to mountain ecosystems.
Climate Shift
For every degree that lowlands warm, mountains warm on average 1.8 degrees Celsius. And since 1950, mountains have been heating 25% to 50% faster than the global average. This speed of warming can alter ecosystems faster than plants, animals and humans can adapt, increasing the risk that diseases or invasive species will rise to new mountain life zones and harm native species. The shifting of mountain life zones could threaten unique alpine species with mass extinction.
This rapid warming also threatens the snow and ice that shape alpine life, culture and recreation. One study found that the U.S. ski industry lost $5 billion between 2000 and 2019 due to a lack of snow and the cost of making artificial snow to compensate. Another calculated that 1 in 8 current ski areas wouldn’t get any natural snow cover by 2100. This would threaten local economies that depend on tourism as well as mountain biodiversity, as ski slopes are constructed in higher, more remote areas to chase the remaining snow, shrinking the undisturbed habitats home to mountain life.
Glacier Melt
Perhaps the climate mountain threat that could harm the largest amount of people is the melting of mountain glaciers. This threatens mountains’ status as the world’s water towers, putting the freshwater and energy of over a billion people at risk.
Non-polar glaciers lost around 267 metric gigatons of mass per year between 2000 and 2019 and doubled their rate of thinning during the same time period. A 2023 study found that even if warming is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius, nearly half of all glaciers will melt by 2100. If warming is allowed to reach 2.7 degrees Celsius, 68% would melt. If it reached four degrees, 83% would disappear. Beyond the impact on mountain or mountain-reliant communities, the melting of these glaciers would also contribute to sea-level rise, pushing up water levels by just under 4 inches in the 1.5 degrees scenario and 4.5 inches in the 2.7 degrees of warming — submerging an area where more than 10 million currently live.
Mountain Disasters
Warmer temperatures and glacial melt also increase the risk of mountain disasters such as landslides, rockslides and floods. When glaciers retreat and mountain permafrost melts, this can cause flooding, as there is more water running down the mountain more quickly. It can also destabilize the ground, increasing the risk of land movements like landslides, rockslides and avalanches in warm or thick snow. The climate crisis has also increased the risk of a specific type of flood known as a glacial lake outburst flood. These floods occur when glacial meltwater pools in lakes that are then destabilized by an earthquake, rain storm or dam breach, sending massive amounts of water down the hillside. The number, volume and area of these lakes have increased by 50% since 1990, and 15 million people are now threatened by these types of floods, especially in the Himalayas and the Andes.
Other Threats
The high biodiversity of mountain ecosystems also makes them vulnerable to human threats. Because mountain species have evolved to succeed in such unique environments, they can be easily harmed if that unique ecosystem is threatened. For example, the Taita thrush is only found in the Taita hills of Kenya; it can’t survive in the drier grasslands below.
Habitat / Biodiversity Loss
Human activity can threaten mountain ecosystems directly through development, deforestation and the introduction of invasive or pest species. When a larger number of humans move up into the mountains to live or farm, this can displace native plants and animals and increase human-wildlife conflict when the wild mountain species eat crops or livestock. Poachers also target lower mountain mammals.
In the past, mountain forests haven’t experienced aggressive deforestation like lowlands have. However, this is starting to change. Between 2000 and 2018, humans cleared 78 million hectares of montane forest. The main causes of this deforestation were commercial logging, tree clearing for agriculture and wildfires. The most deforested mountain areas tended to coincide with tropical biodiversity hotspots.
One example of this trend is Southeast Asia, which is home to around half of all tropical montane forests. There, upland forest loss has accelerated in the 2010s, accounting for 42% of the region’s total as of 2019. Mountain forest loss can also increase the risk of flooding and erosion, worsening water quality and affecting native flora and fauna. Species that might need to shift their range to accommodate rising temperatures have less habitat to work with. Southeast Asia’s mountain forests are also especially adept at storing carbon compared with lowland forests, so removing them makes it harder to keep both local and global temperatures lower.
Pollution
The main sources of pollution for mountains are human activities like logging, mining, logging, agriculture, grazing and recreation, as well as the transport of smaller pollutants through the atmosphere. Air pollution from urban or industrial centers can travel to mountains, where it not only worsens air quality but also enters plant tissue, soil and water. This pollution has harmed forests in the Carpathian mountains and brought smog to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where at one point ozone had harmed almost half of the black cherry trees and 79% of milkweed plants sampled. Microplastics have also been found high in mountain ranges, from Mount Everest to the Alps.
Overtourism
While mountain recreation can provide an economic boost to local communities and offer visitors a chance to learn about and appreciate mountains, it has a downside. Sometimes, mountain tourists are not as respectful as they should be or tours are not designed to account for the impact of visitors to vulnerable ecosystems.
Increased visitors can bring more construction of tourist infrastructure like ski lodges or cabins, increased vehicle traffic that emits air pollution, noise and light pollution that disturbs animals, problems with proper waste disposal, disturbance of mountain wildlife and negative encounters with local communities.
One example of overtourism gone wrong is Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain from sea level and a major climbing destination. So much waste has accumulated on Everest that it has been called the “world’s highest garbage dump.” Around 100,000 people visit Everest’s Sagarmatha National Park every year, and around 600 try to summit the mountain every climbing season. The average climber generates 18 pounds of waste, most of which stays on the mountain. In addition to larger debris like abandoned tents, oxygen canisters and even dead bodies, climbers also leave behind human waste. With increased melt and runoff from climate change, some of this waste has begun to flow into the local water supply, putting people downstream at risk from dangerous diseases like cholera and hepatitis A.
How to Protect Mountains
Humans have the power to harm mountain ecosystems, but we also have the power to protect them. The decisions we make as citizens, consumers, policymakers and tourists can have a positive impact on these magical environments.
Protecting Mountains From Climate Change
As previously discussed, climate change is one of the biggest threats to mountains and glaciers.
Mitigation
The most important way to protect mountains from the climate crisis is the same as the most important way to protect the entire Earth: We must phase out fossil fuels as rapidly as possible. This means both preventing development of new fossil fuel deposits, replacing oil, gas and coal with renewable sources of energy like wind and solar and transitioning from gas-powered cars to electric vehicles while improving public transportation options. In its most recent assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recommends nearly halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and reaching net zero by 2050 in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
The second main driver of the climate crisis is the destruction of natural carbon sinks through deforestation and other forms of land-use change. This means that protecting mountain habitats has a double benefit for mountains: It preserves an individual ecosystem from immediate disturbance and it lowers the impacts of climate change on all mountains.
Adaptation
Even if world leaders succeed in winding down the use of fossil fuels and limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming — something that seems increasingly unlikely — mountain communities will need to adjust to the climate impacts they’re already experiencing and the ones that are projected to continue, such as the loss of nearly half of mountain glaciers by 2100.
Some are already taking action. Resort employees on Switzerland’s Mount Titlis have started covering the mountain’s glacier with protective polyester fleece during the summer. Venezuela is restoring wetlands to deal with water shortages. And in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region of Pakistan, communities are working to establish an early-warning system for more frequent floods. The Adaptation at Altitude program seeks to help mountain communities become more resilient to climate change by researching effective solutions and sharing them across alpine regions.
Unfortunately, the IPCC found that current mountain adaptations are not fast, expansive or substantial enough to respond to a high level of climate risks. Policymakers can boost the adaptive ambition of mountain regions by fostering international collaboration. They can developing holistic projects that consider all the needs of mountain communities, support more research and data gathering and making sure mountain communities have the funds they need.
Protecting Mountains From Other Threats
Beyond climate change, there are other issues that can harm mountains.
Exploitation and Deforestation
Governments, corporations and individuals can take steps to protect mountain ecosystems from exploitation. Research into mountain deforestation found that deforestation was less likely to occur in protected areas, so conserving mountain ecosystems — and safeguarding the land rights of any Indigenous communities that steward them — is one immediate way to prevent further habitat and biodiversity loss.
Scientists say these protected areas should be large enough to give species space to move. Governments can also regulate extractive industries and support ecological restoration and agroforestry efforts. They can plan dams and other infrastructure in such a way that won’t disturb waterflow or wildlife. Restoration or reforestation projects should replant a variety of native species rather than single tree species in monoculture plantations.The international community could also negotiate treaties to specifically protect mountain ecosystems.
Tourism companies can follow best-practices to make sure that they are being mindful of the limits of mountain ecosystems and the rights of local communities. Larger food or lumber corporations can make sure that their supply chains are deforestation-free. Consumers can choose to support companies that respect mountain ecosystems and avoid those that don’t.
Responsible Climbing and Tourism
One of the most important ways individuals can protect mountains is to behave responsibly when they visit them. This means following the principle of “leave no trace” and taking anything you bring to a mountain with you when you leave. Other things you can do are travel during off-peak season or to less popular destinations, rely on non-fossil fuel transport when possible, support sustainable tourism companies, be respectful of Indigenous or local communities you encounter, buy second-hand gear or share equipment with others and spread awareness of these best practices to other hikers. If you are lucky enough to trek Mount Everest, make sure to offset your climb by bringing your waste back down with you.
Takeaway
“The mountains are issuing a distress call,” said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres at a 2023 United Nations climate change conference.
That distress call comes in the form of melting glaciers, sudden floods, snowless ski slopes and falling forests. If human societies choose to ignore that call, they could usher in a future in which mountains are unrecognizable, as glaciers, snowpacks and entire niches of species disappear. However, if we can learn to work with mountains to stop exploitation, the outlook for mountains might be brighter.
The post What Mountains Provide and Why They Need Protection appeared first on EcoWatch.
https://www.ecowatch.com/mountains-protection-conservation-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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