Most wildfire guidance on the market promises a single answer: adopt this framework, deploy this stack, follow these phases, and the problem becomes tractable.
It’s a tempting pitch. It’s also the wrong starting point for most utilities facing wildfire risk today.
The frameworks getting passed around were built for California’s largest utilities, over fifteen years and billions in spend, and they describe a finished program, not a way to build one. For a utility in the Carolinas, the Gulf South, or the Upper Midwest, importing that playbook means spending years building competence in a program that doesn’t match the risk on the ground.
Our new field guide takes the opposite position.
There is no universal playbook, but there is a discipline for building your own.
Drawing on insights from the Wildfire Frontiers Summit 2026 and co-authored with vegetation-management expert Heath Frewin, it shows utility leaders how to build a wildfire mitigation program that fits their risk, their data, and their maturity.
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The Frontier Has Moved, and It Doesn’t Look the Same Twice
Wildfire is no longer something that happens to other people’s service territories.
Risk is surfacing in places whose utility programs were never structured for it, and no two regions are presenting the same way.
A warming climate doesn’t arrive everywhere as a hotter summer; in one region it’s accumulated storm debris that won’t decompose, in another it’s standing dead timber, in another it’s an unusually wet winter that grows fuel which later cures and burns.
That variation is the whole problem. A mitigation that’s decisive in one territory can be wasted in the next.
The guide maps how risk is materializing differently across the new-vanguard regions, and why a well-funded, well-documented framework can still be the wrong one for your network.
Inside the Guide
Written for the practitioner, the leader who has to turn “best practice” into a program their board will fund, their regulator will approve, and their crews can actually execute, the guide walks through a clear, buildable discipline rather than a fixed template:
- Diagnosis before commitment — how to read your own network’s ignition pathways, fire-spread corridors, and consequence before deciding what to mitigate
- An honest data and capability self-assessment — the gap most utilities discover when they look under the hood, and why naming it is a strength in front of a regulator, not a weakness
- Prioritization and sequencing — finding the two or three moves that actually shift your risk posture, and why trying to advance every program at once leaves nothing finished
- Where operations beat capital — and where they don’t — the case for fast operational wins first, and the specific conditions that justify high-cost capital like undergrounding
- Technology as a force modifier — how satellite, LiDAR, weather, and asset data amplify good judgement, and the decisions they will never make for you
- A leader’s self-check — a practical tool to identify the maturity tier you can genuinely defend, and the right next move to defend a better one next cycle
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Built on Frontline Expertise, Not Vendor Theory
This isn’t a synthesis of marketing claims.
The guide is grounded in candid contributions from people who have built, regulated, and operated wildfire programs at the highest level, quoted with attribution throughout:
- Melissa Semcer — Principal, CWE Strategies; former Deputy Director of California’s Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety, who helped build the modern Wildfire Mitigation Plan regulatory framework
- Larry Kahn — Professor and Director, Tulane University Law School Utility Vegetation Management Institute
- Shawn Holder — Senior Director of Operational Mitigations, Pacific Gas & Electric
- Chris Kelly — VP of Product Strategy, Arcos
It’s co-authored by Heath Frewin of UVM Strategy, who advises utilities on vegetation-management maturity, and Andreas Naujoks of LiveEO, who convened the Summit.
Why It Matters
A wildfire mitigation plan isn’t a compliance artifact or a funding request, it’s the organization’s strategy for reducing risk, and it has to hold up under scrutiny from regulators, boards, and (when it comes to it) insurers and courts.
Plans that over-reach their data don’t just underperform. They erode a utility’s standing cycle after cycle, forcing painful retrenchment or repeated overreach.
A program that commits to what it can defend, and improves each year, builds the opposite: regulator confidence, operational focus, and measurable risk reduction where it counts.
This guide helps you get there, on your terms, at your pace, on the evidence you actually have.
Who Should Read This
- Wildfire mitigation VPs, directors, and program leads
- Vegetation management and asset management teams
- Utility executives accountable for integrity, operations, and compliance
- Anyone building, defending, or pressure-testing a Wildfire Mitigation Plan, especially in a region newly exposed to fire
Build a Program You Can Defend
The leading Western utilities didn’t start with a playbook, they built one through discipline, before the frameworks and the vendors existed. That same discipline is available to any utility willing to start from an honest picture of its own risk.
Download There Is No Universal Playbook: A Field Guide for Utility Wildfire-Mitigation Leaders and start building a program that fits the network you actually run.
