Bay Area hills and open space meeting the edge of a community.

Living with Wildfire

Using greenbelts and open space as buffers that protect Bay Area communities from wildfire — and help them recover.

The challenge

Fire and the wildland-urban interface

Across the Bay Area, homes and neighborhoods increasingly sit at the wildland-urban interface — the edge where the built environment meets grasslands, chaparral, and forest. As the climate warms, longer dry seasons and hotter conditions make that edge more vulnerable, and more people live along it than ever before.

How we grow shapes how we burn. Sprawl pushes development deeper into fire-prone landscapes, adding risk and making communities harder to defend and evacuate. Protected greenbelts and open space work the other way: kept in the right places, they can slow a fire's spread, create defensible space around communities, and give firefighters room to work.

Living with wildfire means planning for it — pairing smart land use and conservation with community preparedness so that the Bay Area's people and natural lands can withstand fire and recover from it.

Our approach

Greenbelts as fire buffers

We work to protect and steward open space at the edges of communities so it can serve as a buffer — slowing wildfire, creating defensible space, and keeping new development out of the highest-risk landscapes.

Community resilience planning

We help local leaders and residents plan for fire and other climate impacts, connecting land use, open space, and preparedness so neighborhoods are better positioned to withstand and recover.

Policy & land-use advocacy

We advocate for policies that direct growth toward safer, climate-smart locations and away from fire-prone edges — making resilience part of how the region decides where and how to build.

Connected work