Fighting fires with finance: A summer at Blue Forest

Anna Fisher Lopez (she/her)
Hometown: Takoma Park, Maryland
Major: Physics, '25; Computer Science, '26
Internship: Blue Forest

During Anna Fisher Lopez's internship at Blue Forest, she took part in work that brings together unlikely partners to better protect forests from wildfires.

Looking out over the conifer forests covering the rolling hills sprawling in front of us, it was hard to believe that anything beyond a force of nature could exert control over the sea of biomass below. Indeed, just an hour before, our site visit to the Upper Mokelumne River Basin had taken us to a burn scar from the 2021 Caldor fire which had scorched entire swaths of forest into blackened toothpicks. All of us gathered there -- the gray-haired water utility board members, the 20-something guys working at the forestry companies, the corporate sponsors from Amazon and Pepsi, and the project development managers and interns from Blue Forest -- were quite familiar with the havoc that wildfires can wreak upon forests in the western United States.

As individuals, our power to do something about wildfires is limited. Each of us separately might have the money, the industry knowledge, or the organizational bandwidth to implement the forest management practices needed to prevent something like the 2021 Caldor Fire, but any one of those tools alone is not enough. And so when I looked out over forests that extended beyond my field of vision, I looked not to the trees but to the people around me to see how Blue Forest's Forest Resilience Bond puts all of the pieces into place to make 200,000 acres of forest (more than 300 square miles!) more resilient to wildfires.

After returning home from our site visit, I had renewed motivation to work on my piece of the puzzle at Blue Forest: building an interactive database to quantify the impacts of wildfires on water utilities. Alongside my co-intern Eric from Brown, I interviewed water utility professionals and water resource scientists, dove into economic reports to understand the financial impacts of wildfires on water utilities, and experimented with different UI and UX features. The database, which we called EMBER, is now public and is used by Blue Forest employees to shape project planning. We’ve also sent it out to the water utility partners we interviewed who expressed interest, and it’s available for anyone who wants to learn more about the overlap between wildfires and water utilities in the western United States.

I’m honored to have been a member of the village it takes to bring one of these forest resilience projects to life. And I'm newly inspired by the potential of nonprofits to mobilize large amounts of capital on timelines that take the pace of climate change into account. Blue Forest is just one player, though a very important one, in the wonderfully vast community of those protecting the country’s forests, and I’m grateful to have spent my summer learning from them.