Arbor Day Foundation Invests in Wildfire Resilience Technology Through its Impact Fund

The Arbor Day Foundation's Impact Fund has invested in two organizations working to reshape how communities prevent, detect, and recover from wildfire. The investments in Vibrant Planet and Convective Capital mark a new front in the Foundation’s long-standing commitment to helping forests and communities recover from disaster, extending that work upstream to help reduce the severity of wildfires before they start.

“Wildfires in the U.S. and around the world are burning longer, hotter, and more often than in the past. Fire seasons that were once measured in months now stretch into a year-round threat across much of the West,” said Dan Lambe, CEO of the Arbor Day Foundation. “We have spent decades replanting in communities and forestlands in the aftermath of some of the nation’s most devastating wildfires and we’re elevating that recovery work by supporting solutions that could help limit future wildfires.”

The Impact Fund is the Arbor Day Foundation’s impact investing initiative, created to support companies and funds developing new approaches to forest health, resilience, and restoration.

Vibrant Planet is a public benefit corporation (PBC) helping communities, governments, utilities, and land managers move from reactive wildfire response to proactive landscape resilience. Its data-driven planning platform integrates geospatial data, climate models, and treatment recommendations to identify areas of greatest wildfire risk and prioritize forest management actions across entire landscapes. By enabling stakeholders to evaluate treatment scenarios, coordinate across ownership boundaries, and direct investments toward the highest-impact interventions, Vibrant Planet helps reduce the severity of future wildfires while supporting healthier forests, safer communities, and more strategic post-disaster restoration efforts. As global temperatures continue to increase, Vibrant Planet provides critical decision-support tools that improve resilience before disasters occur and guide recovery afterward.

Convective Capital is a venture fund focused exclusively on wildfire resilience and climate adaptation technologies. Through its portfolio of fire-tech companies, Convective supports solutions spanning wildfire prevention, early detection, vegetation management, grid resilience, emergency response, risk modeling, and community protection. Its portfolio companies help identify ignitions faster, reduce hazardous fuels, improve utility infrastructure safety, and provide tools that enable firefighters and local governments to respond more effectively. Collectively, these technologies help protect forests, watersheds, homes, businesses, and critical infrastructure from increasingly severe wildfire events.

“We will always show up to help forests and communities recover after a wildfire to bring a sense of hope and healing to people and the planet,” Lambe said. “But recovery can only do so much if the fires keep getting bigger. As a leader in this space, we feel a responsibility to help shape better outcomes, and that means investing in the data, technology, and expertise of organizations that are building the future solutions this crisis demands.”

Through the Impact Fund, the Arbor Day Foundation intends seek out and support organizations that align with our mission and are working to advance forestry and tree-related initiatives within the following sectors: land use management; climate and Earth data; forest carbon technologies; as well as other tree-related technologies.

Learn more about the Impact Fund at arborday.org/impactfund.