The Missing Variable in Underwriting Wildfire Risk

In late 2025, Headwaters Economics, the wildfire analytics firm Pyrologix, and the U.S. Fire Administration published a two-part study with a deliberately boring title: Wildfire Risk Indices and the Built Environment. Part one is an inventory: the authors started with more than 150 wildfire risk models, narrowed down to 59 that met their criteria, and scored each on how well it captured the built environment and whether it could run at national scale. Part two is the interesting part: they interviewed 30 subject matter experts, including fire physicists, structural engineers, catastrophe modelers, and insurers who do this work, and asked them how models are broken today.

Buried in the findings is the reason we started OmniGeo.

This field of experts largely agrees that one of the most important datasets needed to reduce wildfire losses does not yet exist. That matters because wildfire is no longer just a forestry problem. It’s an insurance problem, a mortgage problem, a municipal finance problem, and increasingly, a household balance sheet problem.

The question isn’t whether a wildfire will burn in a particular area. We have a good understanding of this. Any area that abuts a moderate or higher wildfire risk area has the potential to burn, especially in areas with high wind potential. The question now is which homes burn, which survive, and whether we can predict the difference before the fire arrives. This study is remarkably transparent in asserting that our wildfire models still struggle to do that.

Read the full article on Substack: https://omnigeo.substack.com/p/the-missing-variable-in-underwriting