Partner profile | Megafire Action

Written by: Jessica Alvarez, Communications & Content Manager

Megafire Action is the  first nonprofit focused solely on advancing federal and state policy to address the megafire crisis.  Launched earlier this year with the firm belief that the megafire crisis is solvable, Megafire Action has enlisted a team of fire practitioners, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and activists to solve it.

For the past 15 years, Megafire Action CEO, Matt Weiner, has been securing California’s priorities in Congress—an experience which has made it clear that we have the tools to solve megafire, but we need a movement to get it done. That movement was launched by Matt and his team in September 2022.

“We’ve gotten a ton of really overwhelming interest from people in the wildfire community, from the general public and from policymakers who really sense that there’s a need in this space for more support,” said Weiner.  “It’s hard to believe that until now there was never a single policy organization focused solely on prevention when it comes to fires and megafires in particular, which is unusual in the policy space.”

The driving force behind their work, according to Weiner, is that there needs to be a new and stronger constituency for success. What makes now the right time is that people are beginning to understand what needs to happen for us to get a grip on the megafire crisis but the problem is, there are very few people who understand the scale of the problem, and how fast we need to act to solve it.

“Just because people are starting to understand this problem does not mean that they understand the urgency of it, and does not mean they understand the scale at which we need to make change,” said Weiner. “If I could drive anything home, it’s that people need to wrap their heads around the fact that this is a solvable problem, and that we do not have the luxury of doing the bare minimum. We need to do whatever it takes to solve it and this is the first organization solely focused on that outcome in this space.”

In order to achieve what they set out to do, the team is currently focused on the big picture, on hiring as well as identifying their priorities for next year and while the goal is to eventually work at both the state and federal levels, given the big window of opportunity that exists at the federal level right now, that is where the bulk of their work is aimed.

“There is a big spending surge where you have the Bipartisan Infrastructure law, and the Inflation Reduction Act spending over five billion dollars on hazardous fuels mitigation, and it’s critical these funds are spent effectively,” he explained. “Congress also has a once-every-five-year opportunity to reauthorize the Farm bill, which authorizes a lot of forestry programs. There’s also this new Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission and they’re going to make a report to Congress in August that I think is going to really have a ton of influence in how policymakers think about this problem over the next few years.”

With all this in mind, Megafire Action, like Blue Forest and other innovative organizations, need to come together and do our part. “We need to bring in every new player we can to grow capacity,” concluded Weiner. Blue Forest is excited to see an organization like Megafire Action focused on advancing policy in this space as we all do our part to address the risk of catastrophic wildfire. We look forward to learning from Matt and his team in 2023!