FireAId attempts to provide a solution to fighting wildfires, leveraging advances in technology and overcoming existing barriers to scale such efforts.

The rise in occurrence and intensity of wildfires is an unfortunate consequence of climate change. Wildfires are, in themselves, nothing new – they have been a natural phenomenon for millions of years. There has nonetheless been a dramatic increase in both the frequency and severity of wildfires, stoked by climbing average and peak temperatures, prolonged periods of heat and altered rain weather patterns. In the United States alone, the amount of land scorched by wildfire expands unabated. Since 1983, when reliable wildfire tracking data was made available by the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), every year an average of 3 million acres of land has gone up in flames. Recalculating that average since 2000, there are now 7 million acres of burned area, a total that has more than doubled in just over 20 years.2 In South Africa, what once was seasonal has become a more regular phenomenon. The February 2021 wildfire near Cape Town grew to more than 13,000 hectares and spread into the outskirts of the city, engulfing university buildings in the conflagration.3 In Australia, drier and hotter conditions – eight of the 10 hottest years on record since 2005 – have set the stage for the largest fires in its history, killing or displacing more than 3 billion animals.4 In Europe, wildfires continue to ravage Mediterranean countries and extend into regions previously not prone to fires. Combined with record heatwaves and drought periods, wildfires endanger finely balanced ecosystems.5 The trend is expected to continue: the World Meteorological Organization projects a global increase of extreme fires of up to 30% by 2050 and up to 50% by the end of the century