Last year saw DRI’s inaugural global initiative aimed at advancing community resilience and adaptability in the face of rapid global change – AWE+, for an Adaptable World Environment. The event brought together hundreds of scientific experts, policymakers, resource managers, and other stakeholders to discuss ways to strengthen our communities against the growing threat of wildfires. To maintain momentum on the topic and continue building relationships that advance resilience, DRI’s 2025 AWE+ event sought to build on these conversations, again focusing on wildfire and bringing experts together from across the nation. The goals of the October 16, 2025 event included:

  • Highlighting and prompting the continuing and urgent need for community, regional, and state leadership in taking action to strengthen our communities to mitigate inevitable catastrophes that are compounded by changes in climate, land use, and population.
  • Promoting interdisciplinary, cross-sector collaboration as essential in strengthening the resolve for tough decision making on consequential impacts and challenges to achieve meaningful progress.

Conversations about the role of wildfire risk in our communities were heavily weighted with the memory of the year’s devastating Los Angeles fires. January’s Palisades and Eaton Fires, which turned into urban conflagrations that decimated entire neighborhoods, claimed at least 31 lives. This number doesn’t account for the broader impacts of the burns and their air quality impacts, however, with recent research from Boston University estimating that at least 440 deaths can be attributed to the fires. The fact that these blazes occurred in the middle of winter underscored how wildfires are growing not only in size and intensity, but across time.

“Wildfires are now endemic across the West — there’s no wildfire season anymore,” said Sean McKenna, Director of DRI’s Division of Hydrologic Sciences. “The other thing I’ve come to realize is that we used to think of fires as discrete events, like an earthquake. But fires aren’t a discrete event followed sometime in the future by another one. It’s really this continuum — this cycle of fire and the landscape changing.”

Read the full article about building wildfire resilience by Elyse DeFranco at Desert Research Institute.