Insurance-Driven Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPPs)
How Neighbors Can Protect Themselves from Wildfires Together
In the era of megafires, community safety is a shared responsibility — and Homeowners Associations (HOAs) are uniquely positioned to lead. Many neighborhoods are waking up to the same realization: wildfire risk doesn’t end at the edge of each lot.
Too often, wildfire conversations start with fear and proceed to insurance cancellations, rising premiums, uncertainty. Understanding how insurers see the home and neighborhood shifts the narrative toward empowerment, traceability, and proactive investment in mitigation. Today, HOA’s are turning to a new tool: Insurance-Driven Community Wildfire Protection Plans.
From Plans on Paper to Risk Reduction in Practice
Traditional Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPPs) were developed to coordinate fuel reduction and emergency response. But too often, they stopped there — serving as static documents disconnected from the financial realities of property insurance and underwriting.
The Wildfire Insurance Solutions Hub (WISH) is changing that. Through a partnership with Athena Intelligence, WISH brings the next generation of CWPPs to life: Insurance-Driven CWPPs connect geospatial wildfire data directly to the metrics used by property insurer to evaluate community and structure-level risk.
The WISH platform leverages Athena’s geospatial AI technology which transforms raw environmental data into precise wildfire probabilities for every parcel within a community. These insights form the backbone of Insurance-Driven CWPPs, allowing HOAs to demonstrate credible, data-driven mitigation to insurers, member and community leaders alike.
Seeing Risk, Quantifying Value
Maps make risk visible — and actionable.
This example from a Northern California community shows how Insurance-Driven CWPPs integrate terrain, vegetation, wind corridors, and historic fire behavior to produce a neighborhood-wide wildfire risk map.
Each structure is assigned a Wildfire Risk Class. WISH delivers a report for each home: an individual report with risk to both the neighborhood and their house, in context of the entire community. The example above shows data for both the likelihood and intensity of potential wildfire.
For this HOA, 149 out of 163 structures had a Wildfire Risk Class categorized as Moderate yet 9.4% of the landscape carried a Very High burn potential. Fourteen of the homes had more exposure than the others, but the net result to the community was all homes had a more nuanced Risk Score of 6, on a scale of 2 to 10. This is a clear signal to the community’s leadership and gardeners where to prioritize vegetation management and which homes to aggressively monitor for defensible space near the homes.
WISH works with multiple partners, each with different tools to help the community with its mitigation and wildfire detection. The Athena software recomputes the risk the following year, quantifying the effectiveness of the mitigation efforts.
These layers of insight turn a standard CWPP into a risk management document homeowners can trust. Since some insurers use the same Athena data for underwriting decisions, the HOA members may have more insurance options and insight into how to manage their insurance premiums.
Data Driven Decisions
Each homeowner receives an individualized report featuring satellite imagery, structure characteristics, and vegetation context — paired with community-level analytics. Together, these two perspectives form the foundation of WISH’s Wildfire Smart product: it is an insurance focused document or plan that reflects collective responsibility yet recognizes individual accountability.
The reports are designed for homeowners and property managers but can be shared with fire departments, and municipal disaster planners, or insurance brokers. By aligning local action with underwriting criteria, these Insurance-Driven CWPPs should help stabilize premiums, expand insurability, and reduce loss exposure for entire neighborhoods.
Empowering HOAs as Risk Managers
The WISH product enables HOAs to act as micro risk pools — coordinating defensible space projects, applying for mitigation grants, and working with WISH partners such as Know Wildfire, N5 Sensors, Path & Focus, and others.
When HOA members understand their aggregated risk and how it aligns with insurance models, they become active participants in resilience. WISH clients bridge the gap between community action and insurance confidence.
In wildfire prone areas, insurance conversations often start with fear: uncertainty, policy cancellations and rising premiums. Understanding how insurers see the home and neighborhood shifts the narrative toward empowerment, traceability, and proactive investment in mitigation.
The same data Athena provides to utilities, insurance underwriters, and municipal bond investors is now available to communities. WISH makes it accessible, visual, and actionable — giving HOAs the ability to speak the same language as insurers and work knowledgably with fire departments, civic leaders and other local resources.
Because the best defense isn’t paperwork, it’s useful and accessible data.
Building the Wildfire-Smart HOA
In the past, HOAs focused on paint colors and parking rules. In today’s wildfire environment, they’re becoming hubs of safety, risk reduction, and financial resilience.
With WISH and Athena Intelligence, every HOA can develop an insurance-driven Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP) that reduces risk to lives, property values, and insurability — a new model of shared responsibility, powered by data and guided by science.
Better data drives better decisions. Better decisions build resilience. And resilience starts with someone willing to lead.
WISH (Wildfire Insurance Service Hub) is dedicated to enhancing community and homeowner wildfire resilience. Transparently connecting wildfire insurance availability with established, tangible and proven wildfire mitigation strategies, features, maintenance and education creates a positive cycle of wildfire resiliency for communities, neighborhoods, and individual homeowners — leading to a loss reduction for insurers, and more affordable premium prices for the insured.
Athena Intelligence is a data vendor with a geospatial, conditional, profiling tool that pulls together vast amounts of disaggregated wildfire and environmental data to generate spatial intelligence, resulting in a digital fingerprint of wildfire risk.
Athena’s clients include financial services companies, insurance, electric utilities, and communities, including HOAs. Athena’s geospatial intelligence is incorporated into multiple products that can be accessed through an online portal. Athena’s data is currently used in wildfire mitigation plans (WMP) and public safety power shutoffs (PSPS), property insurance underwriting and portfolio risk optimization.
Reach out to me at Elizabeth@AthenaIntel.io and follow us here, on LinkedIn or Energy Central.
