Wildfires, Climate Change, and How Philanthropy Can Make a Difference: an Interview With Alan Kwok

Alan Kwok began his job as director of climate and disaster resilience at Northern California Grantmakers in November of 2018.

Barely a week later, sparks from a faulty electric transmission line ignited the Camp Fire, which began its devastating spread through Northern California’s Butte County. The blaze became the most destructive and deadly wildfire in the state’s history, burning an area nearly the size of Chicago.

“There was so much philanthropic interest in supporting communities impacted by the Camp Fire in and surrounding the town of Paradise,” Kwok said in a recent interview.

Since then, the American West has experienced many more wildfires and other related events, including a historic drought. Kwok’s charge has been to support donors in California and beyond in their disaster-response efforts as well as encourage investment in emergency preparedness and resiliency efforts. In addition to his work leading climate and disaster-resilience efforts for the 48-county service area in the northern part of the state, Kwok helps coordinate strategy statewide through Philanthropy California.

Patrick T. Power

He spoke with the Chronicle about what foundations can do to address wildfires and why this work matters — even for causes other than the environment. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Tell me about your role.

Philanthropy California is an alliance of Northern California Grantmakers, Southern California Grantmakers, and Catalyst of San Diego & Imperial County. We have over 700 members across our three regional associations, and my role is to lead our work around galvanizing, coordinating, and connecting funders to really make impactful investments in climate resilience and disaster resilience. It makes sense that our climate and disaster efforts have a statewide purview. Wildfires and other climate-driven events do not respect political boundaries.

Our sister organizations — like Philanthropy Northwest, Philanthropy Colorado, Grantmakers of Oregon and Southwest Washington — we are all looking to do joint programming, and we are connecting with each other because all of our states are experiencing the same thing.

How has philanthropy addressed these issues in the past?

The majority of disaster philanthropy — over 50 percent — goes to disaster response and relief. Like, we see people are suffering. We see vulnerable communities are impacted. Let’s put in a lot of money just to make sure that people don’t get further impacted by whatever they experienced from the event.

We are bandaging a problem, but we are not really solving the crisis that we will continue to see in the coming years. Wildfires are not going to go away. Communities are going to be in harm’s way.

Climate change has exacerbated the intensity as well as the frequency of these natural hazard events here in the state. And climate change is not the only thing that is driving the intensity and the scale of wildfires. We are seeing people moving into more of these wildland-urban areas where houses and other structures meet undeveloped wilderness. We have decades, if not 100-plus years, of mismanagement of our natural resources, especially how we suppress wildfires at all costs.

I want to dispel this idea that wildfire is a bad thing. We have had wildfires since the dawn of day — they’re just becoming more damaging to people and properties. Our goal is not to suppress every single wildfire in California. We don’t want to go back to where we were and how we’ve managed wildfires in the last 100 years. What we’re trying to do is to live with wildfires. We want to make it good for people and communities and the economy. Every year is a historic wildfire season. Next year is going to be historic, too. The year after that is going to be historic.

Where is the funding most needed today?

We are really trying to move money upstream — before these mega fires happen, before drought happens. We are trying to broaden the philanthropic role to engage in prevention and mitigation. That role has always been done by the government, but the government has continued to under-resource mitigation and prevention. Most of the mitigation and prevention funding from the federal government only occurs when a disaster happens. But then we are not seeing the same type of funding from the government to other at-risk areas.

Some philanthropies say, ‘This is not our role; this is the government’s role.’ But there are tremendous opportunities for philanthropy to invest in prevention, mitigation, and preparedness. And we are seeing more and more funders looking into this.

Of course, we still need to support equitable disaster relief and long-term recovery, especially for the most vulnerable communities. But we also need to equally invest in preventing or reducing the harm and risk of these disasters.

There are conversations happening around that, and I think that it’s really the start. I’m quite hopeful that these conversations will lead to more investments in the upstream space of wildfire resilience.

Where do you see the money flowing to address wildfires right now? What are your members focused on?

We’ll probably have the data on where the money is going this year by next year or in two years. Usually there’s a lag time in getting data.

We created a wildfire resilience funders network, which has three subgroups. One group focuses on state and federal policies on wildfires, really looking into not only resource management but also other types of policy issues that will enhance the way we manage our forests.

The second group is looking into how technology could be used as a tool to help decision makers, like fire departments, gather real-time data to address any wildfire risk. Technology is just one of the tools in the toolbox to enhance wildfire resilience, from detection and early-warning systems to monitoring to responding.

The third group is looking at social justice and wildfire resilience. We are really focusing on the equity angle. Wildfire and droughts have disproportionate impacts on our BIPOC communities and our tribal communities. They are more at risk to these events and face greater impacts socioeconomically and health-wise.

We are also seeing funders looking at the intersection of forest management and Indigenous sovereignty. Controlled burning on Native lands as done in Indigenous tradition as well as prescribed burning on other types of lands, like state or federal lands or private properties — they all have been done with great success for hundreds of years.

What are some of the biggest challenges going forward?

One of the challenges we face is this whole narrative around wildfires. Funders do not see themselves in this space. It is not a strategy for many of them. Health funders or housing funders or criminal-justice funders — they don’t see themselves as disaster funders or climate-change funders. But ultimately, we need to change that.

Funders need to start putting a climate lens or disaster lens on their funding. If you’re a housing funder, you need to make sure that you fund housing solutions that are also climate resilient, that have air conditioning or triple-pane windows or whatever. If you’re looking into criminal-justice issues, a significant proportion of the firefighting work force is made up of incarcerated or formerly incarcerated folks. If you’re a health funder, we also have to address policies around heat waves and wildfire smoke, which is toxic. We don’t really know the extent of the impacts of wildfire smoke on low-income communities and those who have pre-existing health conditions and those who are medically vulnerable.

All of these things are going to get exacerbated in the coming years. Funders need to start thinking about integrating a climate lens to everything that they do because if a climate-related disaster happens, all of the previous investments that they’ve made will go to waste.