Drones join fight against wildfire devastation

TELUS Pollinator Fund for Good and Flash Forest accelerate post wildfire recovery in ways conventional solutions can’t achieve.

Severe, frequent and frightening: there’s no doubt you’ve seen the headlines – and perhaps inhaled the smoke – emanating from recent wildfires across Alberta, Nova Scotia and Quebec.

Every year, wildfire season seems to get worse, particularly during periods of increasingly hot weather and drought. In Canada, wildfires burn about

2.5 million hectares annually, devastating communities, destroying homes and infrastructure and, tragically, claiming human lives. This year, more than 29,000 people have already been evacuated from their homes in Alberta. As the impacts of climate change intensify, the impacts are being felt all around the world.

Wildfires don’t just affect our communities, they also transform the natural world, killing billions of trees that are essential for creating oxygen and supporting life on earth. Historically, wildfires have been a normal and important process in ecosystems, though in recent decades they have become more severe and larger in scale, due to climate change, poor management practices and other factors. When wildfires are high in severity, the forests struggle to regenerate naturally.

With so much on the line, it’s critical for us to act quickly and strategically to rebuild and reforest whenever and wherever we can. That’s why the TELUS Pollinator Fund for Good, one of the world’s largest corporate social impact funds, has invested in Flash Forest, a Canadian reforestation company that uses technology to regenerate post-wildfire areas – a partnership directly aimed at combating climate change. Earlier in 2023,the Pollinator Fund co-led a Series A investment in Flash Forest to support the development of automated solutions and help plant trees in burn areas using drones. The TELUS Environment and Sustainability team also concluded a multi-year commercial agreement with the startup to help businesses from various industries achieve their own environmental goals using Flash Forest’s end-to-end digital forestry solutions. This elevates TELUS’ deep commitment to sustainability, and advances its goal of becoming a zero-waste, carbon-neutral company by 2030 or sooner.

The efforts of both organizations also mean that areas affected by fires can be replanted faster to create living, breathing, and critically, biodiverse forests. This is vital because trees are one of the most important tools in the fight against climate change, as they function as carbon sinks, absorbing twice as much carbon as they emit each year. In Canada alone, 26.8 million hectares of tree cover was lost due to fires over a 20 year period beginning in 2001, averaging 1.3 Mha lost each year.