The summer of 2023 also saw Canada’s most destructive wildfire season send huge plumes of toxic smoke drifting across much of the United States, turning city skies into something out of Blade Runner 2049 or Mad Max: Fury Road and creating hazardous health conditions for millions of people.
Then came the costliest wildfire disaster in history, which destroyed almost 12,000 homes and killed 31 people in Los Angeles in January 2025. That event alone cost an estimated $140 billion in losses and ranks among the top-five costliest natural disasters, according to an analysis published by the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment.
Another wind-driven wildfire combined with extreme heat to create South Korea’s largest wildfire on record in March 2025. Drought and heatwaves have also fueled wildfires across many European countries amid heatwaves in recent years, with the 2026 wildfire season threatening NASA’s Deep Space Communications Complex near Madrid and forcing more than 320,000 people to evacuate their homes in Spain and France alone.
Extreme wildfires have still been regularly burning through Canada’s boreal forests, destroying towns and forcing thousands of First Nations people to flee their homes. Such widespread wildfire smoke events have impacted US cities nearly every summer for four years, often leading to air quality alerts for more than 100 million people each time.
“We know that wildfires are becoming more intense, more frequent,” Santy said. “They’re even happening in places where it’s not a natural part of the landscape, like in the Amazon or up in tundra regions.”
There have been discussions about a possible follow-up XPRIZE competition focused on wildfires. But for now, the competition organizers are focused on supporting potential deployments of the most promising technologies with firefighting agencies.
“You want to be able to provide as many tools as you can, but also the right tools for the right environment,” Santy said. “And one of the things that we really focus on is ensuring that anything XPRIZE puts forth has been tested.”