Intentional Fire Fund

California’s landscapes evolved with fire, but a century of suppressing it has made them more dangerous, not safer. The science is clear: intentional fire must return. But prescribed burns and cultural burning remain limited by regulatory complexity, workforce shortages, liability concerns, and a chronic lack of coordinated funding. The gap between what we know and what we do is costing us. 

The Intentional Fire Fund (Fund) is a pooled investment vehicle that aggregates public, private, and philanthropic capital to get beneficial fire on the ground faster. Rather than funding isolated projects, the Fund operates as a portfolio, supporting a pipeline of shovel-ready prescribed fire, cultural burning, and post-fire re-entry projects across California. CWI manages the Fund end-to-end, coordinating implementation, building partnerships across jurisdictions, and documenting outcomes so that what works in one landscape can scale to others. 

The Fund grows directly out of CWI’s foundational work at the Teakettle Experimental Forest — a landmark 3,300-acre planned prescribed burn on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada. Given that Teakettle hadn’t burned since the 1860s, this project was designed to restore fire-dependent old-growth forest on the ancestral lands of the Western Mono peoples, reduce ladder fuels, and model what large-scale intentional fire planning looks like from start to finish. When the 2025 Garnet Fire burned through the unit before the prescribed burn could be implemented, it didn’t end the work — it redirected it. 

THE IMPACT: Beneficial fire at scale, on the ground, now — with each project acting as a replicable model, generating the applied learning and policy insights needed to accelerate intentional fire across California's most vulnerable landscapes. 

PARTNERS: California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, United States Forest Service, Fire Restoration Group, Sierra Resource Conservation District, Southern Sierra Research Station

Project Funding:

Funding for the Teakettle Prescribed Burn was provided by CAL FIRE’s Forest Health program, as part of California Climate Investments. California Climate Investments, a statewide program that puts billions of Cap-and-Invest, formerly known as Cap-and-Trade, dollars to work reducing greenhouse gas emissions, strengthening the economy, and improving public health and the environment — particularly in disadvantaged communities. For more information, visit the California Climate Investments website at: www.caclimateinvestments.ca.gov.