Wildfire Risk & Insurance in California

Athena Intelligence
3 min readJun 26, 2024

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A look at Insurable Properties over Time

Athena’s Voice of the Acre® is a geospatial probabilistic model that excels in integrating geospatial analysis to capture changing conditions. Using conditional profiles, Athena’s prefire model generates probabilistic projections of catastrophic wildfire risk over the next 12 months. This assessment provides insights into potential wildfire risks in a given area, facilitating informed business decisions.

The model employs machine learning to generate geospatial risk rankings, reflecting the land’s propensity or capacity to host a catastrophic wildfire across complex landscapes. For each property, it generates a probability that can be used to price the wildfire risk premium. This probability expresses the likelihood that the property will be inside the footprint of a wildfire if one occurs in the county.

These probabilities are converted into a six-class index designed to assist actuaries, risk managers, and brokers in understanding the risk intuitively. The probabilistic future wildfire risk, expressed as a color, ranges from Very Low to Very High.

The following is an analysis of the performance of the Low Risk and Lowest Risk properties over time in California. Contact us to see the detail for each year, as this is just the summary for 2018 to 2023. We will be posting the dashboard with the details shortly on Tableau.

Wildfires are listed on the right. The number of profiles considered Low Risk/Green or Lowest Risk/Dark Green are shown. Their experience, relative to the actual fires, is categorized 3 ways: Inside the perimeter of a wildfire, Clear (more than 5 miles from any wildfire), and Outside of the perimeter of a wildfire (but closer than 5 miles).

Athena’s Voice of the Acre is a profiling engine, profiling the land’s capacity to host or participate in a catastrophic wildfire at any time during the next 12 months.

This is most similar to the way Google profiles your search experience and uses an algorithm to optimize you searches and which advertisements you see. Athena uses an artificial intelligence algorithm to determine which areas will appeal to a hungry wildfire.

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. (athenaintel.io)

Clients include insurance, electric utilities, communities and financial services companies, where Athena’s geospatial intelligence incorporated into wildfire mitigation plans (WMP) and public safety power shutoffs (PSPS), Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPP), property insurance underwriting and portfolio risk optimization.

Reach out to us at Info@Project-Athena.com and follow us on LinkedIn

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Athena Intelligence
Athena Intelligence

Written by Athena Intelligence

Athena Intelligence weaves vast amounts of disaggregated environmental data. Drop us a line (Info@Project-Athena.com), or visit www.athenaintel.io