So picture this. The sky turns an eerie shade of orange. The air is thick with smoke and you hear the distant roar of flames and you know it's only a matter of time before they reach your doorstep. You grab whatever you can, your kids, your dog, photo albums and you speed away as your neighborhood disappears behind a wall of fire. Now this was the reality in California just a month ago as wildfires raged out of control.

consuming 16,000 homes, displacing entire communities and leaving devastation in their wake. But here's the thing, all this could have been prevented.

So welcome to The World in 2029, the podcast where we explore how today's innovations are shaping our future. I'm your host Lars. I'm an ambition to spread positive insights into how today's pressing issues like climate change, hunger and disease are being addressed by technologies that most people don't know about. I worked in the AI space for 10 years and have helped numerous tech startups.

So this is a topic I know well, and it is extremely close to my heart. And today we're tackling one of the biggest threats to our environment and our way of life, wildfires. They're getting worse, more frequent, more destructive. But what if we could predict them before they started? And my guest today is Ajay Goyal, founder of ForestSat, an AI driven startup working to revolutionize

wildfire prevention. Ajay has done everything from being a hotel manager of a hotel that almost burned down to sailing a boat he built himself in his garage, sailing it to Antarctica, risking his own life. So he's a maverick and he's also a straight talker, not afraid to talk about, you know, broken insurance models, fraudulent carbon offsets or wildfire porn.

And the last time we met was at a ski resort in Norway. And now we're back in India for the first time in 35 years. And your company is just about to register in the US. Ajay, it's fantastic to have you here. Welcome to the show.

Ajay (02:42)
Such a great pleasure and honor to be talking to you again, Lars.

Lars Rinnan (02:47)
I really look forward to this talk. Now, but before jumping into how your company was born, I'm sure I'm not the only one wondering what the hell is wildfire porn?

Ajay (03:03)
I got the name from poverty porn. For many years, people in India, Africa, Asia became used to Westerners armed with their cameras, their recording equipment arriving in slums of Manila, Mumbai, Mexico City.

and making films about the abject poverty of those places. And then going and getting sympathy for what they were recording and showing, putting together very large donations, monies from various foundations, from well-meaning people to try and go and elevate that party. And obviously,

hardly a small fraction, a single digit fraction of what was mobilized ever made its way to the people who were the subject of those films and documentaries. What we are seeing now is that all wildfires are almost being streamed in real time. And with each wildfire, I see press releases coming out about startups, technology companies,

proposing how to fight those wildfires. And to me it looked quite profane and vulgar that while the world is burning down, people are trying to put together some money with a false promise that they can fight these mega wildfires. So I called it wildfire porn. I think it's a very, it's itself

explanatory about the vanity and wastefulness of using these stark images, pain and suffering to try to monetize or capitalize on it with false promises.

Lars Rinnan (05:14)
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's an apt term. So this means you could actually sit on YouTube and just binge watch, you know, Forrest burning down. Yeah. But going back to Forrestat, I mentioned that you had a hotel that almost burned down. We need to hear that story, What happened that day?

Ajay (05:40)
So in 2012, I started a five-star hotel resort on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. A beautiful island, mean, a God-zoned country, and one of the most beautiful little rivieras in the Mediterranean in the north west of the island. What I did was I took a derelict 30-year-old

resort village which was spread on a massive territory between the hills, the grasslands and the Mediterranean Ocean. In the few years preceding that, when I was scouting for a property that I wanted to turn into this yoga, meditation, mindfulness themed resort, I traveled very extensively. And in

country after country, from Portugal to Spain to Italy to Greece to Greek islands, I saw the impact of regular wildfires. So while I was beginning the renovation of this resort property that I called Zenning, I commissioned aerial photography. And while those pictures came in taken by helicopters,

I noticed that the property was surrounded on two sides on the hillside with a lot of dead fuel, a lot of dead wood, a lot of just trash discarded. So I also just logged into where I could get land-side photography and high resolution imagery. And I noticed that there was quite an ocean of garbage and much of it was wood.

with the branches and trimmings from the little forest that was there on the property. And evidently, every season they would trim the trees, they would remove a lot of bush, they would remove a lot of grass, and they would just dump it outside. Besides that, there were fields where they would harvest various crops, and then they would just leave the bundles of grass over there. Sometimes they would remove it, sometimes they won't. And I realized that if there was a spark,

it was going to spread like a wildfire. So what I did was while the renovation was going on, using that imagery and then field inspection, I remember something like 30 dump trucks and tractors were brought in to remove all this fuel. Lo and behold, the resort starts summer of 2013.

I have over 400 people in the hotel and just about 2 to 3 miles away we notice that a hillside is burning. Very soon there were helicopters and airplanes dropping water on them and people were just watching at once in awe and also in fear.

with the speed with which that fire was moving towards where we all were. It did come very close. Yes, it came.

Lars Rinnan (09:08)
and you were situated between the fire. You were situated between

the fire and the ocean.

Ajay (09:14)
Yes, and you've seen those Greek fire images where people jumped into the sea, sometimes they managed to survive the Attica fire of Greece where nearly 90 people died and the firestorm even reached the people in water. But thankfully, that is something that happened elsewhere. In our case, all the work that I did in removing the fuel and ploughing the empty fields

Thus creating a natural fire breach meant that the fire never reached the hotel. So from that point on, I was extremely conscious of the fact that one needs to take preventive mitigative action to protect property in case there is a fire. And B, I realized that it is very easy to access aerial photography and satellite imagery

to be used as a decision support system to protect a property in a fire prone zone.

Lars Rinnan (10:20)
So that means that satellite imagery were actually already available in 2013.

Ajay (10:29)
So satellite imagery has been around, unfortunately, mostly for military purposes. But it's been around even in public domain for decades. The Landsat series of satellites, which give you excellent clarity of images. They are constantly growing, going around the Earth. And in every season, every minute, they are taking these pictures that have been uploaded over the years on NASA, ESA servers.

rationalized, cleaned up, time series layered up. So imagery has been available. On top of that, there are many remote sensing satellites. That is infrared, that is hyperspectrometers, that is LIDAR satellites, or different instruments that are on Earth observation satellites. And then there are commercial satellites. Many of them came in mid

2010s or late 2010s such as the planet satellites or the Marksmar satellites. But imagery in fairly good resolution plus aerial imagery, which is regularly commissioned by many countries and forest services data, there is enough data to give us the foundations from which we can deduce

and analyze which areas are prone to risk of fire.

Lars Rinnan (12:01)
Yeah, exactly. So this was actually your first learning about wildfires and how to mitigate them. But how did you go from nearly losing everything to founding a company that actually prevents these disasters?

Ajay (12:20)
So I eventually lost that hotel, not to a fire, but to fraud. And I found myself at the beginning of pandemic, having lost nearly all of my net worth, all my investments in that dream project. I thought, here we go again. I have to do something again. I was hoping after doing 14 different ventures in my life that that was going to be my last venture.

Lars Rinnan (12:23)
Ha

Ajay (12:49)
So the gods of fraud had a different plan. And through the pandemic and later, I took the time to go back to where I always go, which is in the middle of nature. So I always find time to go to the forest. I always like to be in the mountains. I always like to be in the middle of the nature. And I searched for what it was that I wanted to do.

A few things happened. My son was at that time involved in a project of launching satellites, first for Google X and then for a company that was launching the world's first IoT satellites. That company later got acquired by SpaceX. So I was having regular conversations with him. I was spending a lot of time in the nature.

And of course, I was looking at these news reports of various fires which were happening in Southern Europe, in Oregon, in US West, in California, and so on. And during those conversations with him and several other friends, I thought, I have been through this. I'm very passionate about nature. This seems to be technology that is reaching a point where a solution can be

built to try and predict which areas are at the risk of fire. So with that notion, the moment I realized that it is possible, I often say this, that if you feel that there is a solution possible to a major problem that you're passionate about, it's almost like a moral imperative. You cannot walk away from it. So I got obsessed with it and I thought,

Lars Rinnan (14:34)
Yeah.

Ajay (14:37)
I have to do something about it.

Lars Rinnan (14:38)
Yeah, of course you obviously felt quite strongly about it. mean, almost losing your hotel, seeing some, you know, early signs of how satellite data could be used. Your son joining Google X and SpaceX, which is, know, I kind of see all the different pieces of the puzzle coming together, but then there's probably also one more element. And this is of course the core of the problem. So

these wildfires seem to be getting worse and worse. And why is that? mean, wildfires have always been a part of nature. But today it seems like they're destroying the ecosystem. They're getting bigger and hotter and faster and spreading faster than ever before. And I think I also saw some research saying that if that we might...

we might be reaching a tipping point where fires become seen so frequent and destructive that entire ecosystems won't recover. So if we can't reverse this trend, what does the future look

Ajay (15:51)
Let me start with the last point you just made that the fires can become so intense and so frequent that the ecosystem may not cover. In fact, all of that has already happened in many places. So if you go to many areas of Portugal, central Portugal, you go to several areas in Spain, in Greece, the areas outside Athens, Attica and north of Athens, the fires seem to happen every five, seven years.

After each fire, the government, the NGOs get together and plant trees. Many of these trees obviously do not survive. Some that do, last need 20 years to become grown and mature and for the ecosystem to start restoring itself, to have the immunity and the resilience to restore itself. So many areas all around north of Equator,

are seeing this that fires happen within a cycle of 7 to 10 years. That cycle of 7 to 10 years unfortunately is also the cycle of very long droughts that are being observed in California, are being observed in Texas, that have been observed in many parts of Europe. On top of that, now coming back to the first part of your question, why are these fires becoming so frequent?

The answer is very simple, human behavior and evolution. We are becoming urban species. We've stopped taking care of nature lands. And over the last 200 years, especially in the US West, where some of the worst forest fires have been seen, the natives were forced to abandon their lands. And the natives had a very friendly relationship with fire.

they would be nomads, they would go and settle and they would live in a place and before they moved on, they would create a small fire. It would restore the whole ecosystem. And fires, as you said, are a very natural part of nature. They always played a restorative role of bringing back many species that would go into

temporary migration or that would suffer because of invasion of some invasive species a fire would come in invasive species of flora and fauna would get burnt out and the native species would return. That cycle got broken about 150 years ago when humans decided fires were bad and that is because they were building wooden homes they still do very stupid.

And they thought as soon as we see a fire, we have to put it out. So they had this smoky beer campaign in United States after the Second World War when they had to give employment to all the soldiers returning from the front. And they had all this equipment that was just sitting waste. So I said, what to do? Let's put out all these posts. And as soon as somebody sees smoke within 24 hours, we will put out that fire.

What has that done? Over a hundred years it has built mountains of fuel. Dead wood just waiting for a spark and off it goes into flames. And then the last element which is global warming. So when you have this protracted warming, when the seasons, the summers are getting more extreme, when the rains are less and lesser,

When the winters are very extreme, happens is that every small fire acquires the risk of becoming a mega fire, a big wildfire and every mega fire then runs the risk of becoming a fire storm. What we saw in California was a fire storm. It's like a fire hurricane and there is no way

Lars Rinnan (20:06)
Hmm.

Ajay (20:15)
no equipment that it's like humans believing that they can stop a category four hurricane by flying some airplanes. That's how this problem has progressed. So lot of it is natural and evolutionary, but a lot of it is manmade and a lot of it is climate change driven.

Lars Rinnan (20:25)
No.

Yeah, exactly. This is probably not linear either. It's probably exponential, I would guess.

you know, the development of the severity of the wildfires. So this probably adds, you know, an increases for every year. Is this right?

Ajay (21:01)
It is right, we are beginning to see almost all fires seem to acquire an intensity which used to be very rare. So for example, the fire in Hawaii in Maui in 2023, no one remembers in living memory a fire of that scale, a firestorm of that scale in Hawaii. The fires in Canada, the scale, the size, the number of fires,

It's unheard of. There's no historical record of that size of fires. The same thing is being experienced in Southern Europe, in Italy, France, Greece. yes, climate change is making every fire event an intense one. It's like you are sailing on the oceans. You see a squall coming. Suddenly the squall or this storm becomes a hurricane and this hurricane goes from

one to four in no time. That is what we are experiencing with these wildfires.

Lars Rinnan (22:03)
Yeah.

Yeah, so everything is getting more more extreme. I'm thinking, is there also like a loop here? I mean, as forests take up so much CO2, which I guess is being released during these fires. So is there also kind of like a, what's it called, like a loop that kind of fuels also the development, making it even more extreme?

Ajay (22:37)
So these fires in themselves are quite destructive. Australian bushfire of 2018, a report says that nearly three billion animals died in that bushfire. And many of the species of Australia probably went extinct. Then we are talking about the loss of trees and

flora and fauna itself.

3rd part is what is emission caused by wildfires?

Lars Rinnan (23:40)
Yeah.

Ajay (23:41)
What we do not understand is that this smoke is toxic and the contribution of these wildfires to CO2 and other toxic greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is staggering. There are some efforts to measure them but I think anyone can see that it is simply enormous. So on one hand,

Yes, you are losing one of nature's major carbon sinks. For decades to come after a fire, that soil which has also been degraded will not be a sink for carbon. A. And B. While it is dying, that forest has let out all of the emissions into the atmosphere. It is a domino effect.

Lars Rinnan (24:41)
Yeah, it's really worrying. What you're saying now, I think this is quite under communicated in the media. I mean, you don't hear much about these toxic clouds and how that kind of degrades air quality. And also, mean, three billion animals in one wildfire. That is...

definitely under communicated or maybe I'm just reading the wrong newspapers. don't know. But you kind of imagine that these animals have some kind of internal early warning system or something. But I guess it's just it's just too big, too severe, too, too rapidly moving. Again, as you said, caused by by high winds.

Ajay (25:33)
Absolutely. They are getting trapped. The fires, they do not spread in a linear predictable manner. Many models have been created to try to predict how a fire might spread depending on the geophysical features of the land, the wind speeds, the temperatures and so on and so forth, or where the fuel might be. Most of those models have not been very helpful.

because we have seen from experience that these fires are nearly impossible to control. Till the rains come, till the weather changes, the firefighters doing heroic work, smoke jumpers jumping into the middle of the fires, starting fire breaches, doing all kinds of superhuman work, these fires really are uncontrollable.

And I'm afraid a lot of animal species just get trapped. Coming to, I'd just like to make one more point. was a University of London study into the California fire of 2018 or 2019. And they came up with an economic loss number of nearly $150 billion from one fire event. What they said was,

that we do not know what is the loss to human health, long term loss from inhalation of smoke in the areas where this smoke spread. That is, Northern California moving into Nevada, going into the other areas and mind you, animals also breathe. So while humans might be suffering, we do not know how much of health impact

Lars Rinnan (27:22)
course.

Ajay (27:29)
these fires are having on animal life, both domesticated and pet and especially the wild ones. So the consequences are just too enormous. Why do we not read about it? Because we live in a world driven by the latest news cycle, the latest tweet. So we all knew for about two weeks about wildfires when Los Angeles was burning.

Lars Rinnan (27:57)
Yeah, exactly.

Ajay (27:58)
Does anyone

even talk about it? Will it show up on your YouTube shorts? Will it be on your Instagram and Facebook? Is anyone sharing those stories? No. lot of hard work is now beginning there. People are coming back to find their houses burned. Communities are going to come together. Rebuilding will start. Resettlement will start. But what are we all talking about? Politics.

Lars Rinnan (28:25)
Yeah, exactly.

Ajay (28:26)
Unfortunately, this problem is still treated as one of the many other problems and that's why I use the word wildfire porn. People get some excitement from a momentary event by looking at a video, they share it, but has it brought

scientific community, political community, policymakers, corporate groups together to say what can we do about it? No, that hasn't happened.

Lars Rinnan (29:00)
No, sadly. But let's try to amend that and let's try to get the information out there. That's why I'm talking to you, Ajay. You're the expert on this. So wildfires are getting a lot worse. What happens if we are unable to control or prevent the wildfires? Is it really the situation that some areas might become unlivable?

Ajay (29:31)
Several reports indicate that the forest loss from wildfires and the destruction of the ecosystem is apocalyptic. And once these systems get destroyed, if no other fire event occurs, they might restore over a period of 20 to 25 years. In some cases, maybe 100 years.

Lars Rinnan (29:59)
Hmm.

Ajay (30:00)
What we will see is that a lot of isolated fire events will cause very large areas which are interdependent with each other in hydrological resources, in honey bees, in butterflies, in pollination, in the natural progression of life, so to say. That cycle of life would get interrupted.

it. I don't think anyone can predict when it might happen, in what areas it might happen. But look, the planet is not getting cooler. Global warming is a reality. Droughts are a reality. So what we might see is that in the areas that are most commonly, most routinely impacted by fires, which is southern Europe, the Mediterranean,

United States, US West and now even Canada that many of them would become wastelands a few decades from now.

Lars Rinnan (31:09)
Hmm. Yeah, that's a really bleak outlook. you know, luckily there is a solution. So, I mean, what if we could see a wildfire coming weeks in advance or months, maybe, I don't know. And you can send out, you know, crew to clear out the areas, cleaning dry vegetation before a single spark flies and, you know,

This answer that should have happened never does. That would be fantastic. And of course, that's what Farsat is working to create. Now, I suspect that this solution is quite complex, but break it down for us in simple terms. What do you analyze and how does AI predict a fire before it even starts?

Ajay (32:04)
At the heart of this solution, which is about prevention and risk mitigation, is gathering data primarily from satellites of where is fuel built up for multiple reasons. Now, those reasons could be, again, extended droughts. They could be trees cleared out. It could be

human habitat expanding, could be industrial projects that poached into the forest, it could be changing patterns of rainfalls. So if we monitor it continually, we have the data to see on what forest lands the forests have fallen, the forests have died and there is fuel on the ground.

To verify that, you acquire more layers of data. You can fly an aeroplane above these forests. You can use remote sensing data. You can measure, you can almost measure how much fuel is on the ground. Once you know that picture, you proceed with an assumption where there is a fuel, there will be a fire. There's an old saying, where there's smoke, there must be a fire. But what we are saying is there's always going to be a possibility

The of an idiot with matches by the way nine out of ten fires are started by humans Some of the biggest California fires were started by a baby party of Announcement of what gender the baby was going to be and it caused one of the biggest fires in history of California So people doing a barbecue innocuous they cannot know that their barbecue can cause some sparks that are going to

Lars Rinnan (33:36)
Mmm.

Ajay (33:59)
burn down a million hectares of forest. So where there is fuel, there's a possibility of fire being started either by humans or by a utility company. A lot of electricity grid is very old in United States. It has not been modernized or it could be a thunderstorm, a lightning strike and so on. So we assume that a fire might start. By measuring the fuel and the extent of that fuel, we have been able to

Lars Rinnan (34:15)
Hmm.

Ajay (34:29)
map which areas are at very high risk of fire. And if those fires occur, we can very easily using satellite imagery, and we have been able to do it, we can map which buildings, infrastructure, communities might also be at risk. And then we are able to use AI after we have machine learning processed all of this data. And we've come up with

a very clear picture of where are the risk areas of the fire, AI is great at providing a decision support system to the local communities, to the forest officers, to the decision makers as to where should they intervene, not just a few weeks in advance, Larsh, but a year in advance to remove the fuel, to make the area safe

even if there is a fire. And then there are prescribed actions which forestry officials know very well. These are traditional actions of forest care. It's smart forest management. As you create forest breaches, you create firebreakers, you green some areas, you remove some fuel, whether it is mechanically or as it used to be in the United States, is you deliberately start a fire. You start a small fire.

in winter months, in rainy months to get rid of the fuel. So actually it's a very common sense and straightforward process except that in the last few years, machine learning capability, AI and exceedingly high quality of satellite data has now made this into a very accurate science.

Lars Rinnan (36:24)
Yeah, fantastic. yeah, so I'm thinking this all sounds very common sense. So why hasn't this been done before? Did they lack the solutions or was it a very reactive kind of way of thinking?

Ajay (36:52)
It's the latter. It's a very short-termist. I find that while the whole world has been talking last 15, 20, 25 years about the impacts of climate change, there is no shortage of awareness, at least in the highly educated segment of business, corporations, banking, finance, about carbon markets.

carbon emission risk mitigation tactics. So you have a highly enlightened community that knows about these problems and this risk. At large, the governments, as we know, they like to take an approach of boys with toys. If there's a problem, we'll send airplanes, we'll send tractors, we'll fight it like we are firefighters. We can contain a fire, we can fight it.

Lars Rinnan (37:46)
Yeah.

Ajay (37:50)
So it's very reactive with this arrogance and egoism that we can fight every fire. We can put down every fire. the third part is that unless a fire touches a community, people don't think it's coming for them. And I've seen that happen in Norway in three years when I have been going and meeting with forest owners, private forest owners.

Lars Rinnan (38:10)
Hmm.

Ajay (38:18)
forest insurance groups, you'd be very surprised. Three years, I could not get an appointment with Norway's forest insurance agency. And I always got the answer, we are Norway, we're in the north, we don't have a problem with forest fires. This attitude, unfortunately, is very wide and very common, even in the Mediterranean.

Lars Rinnan (38:38)
Yeah.

Ajay (38:47)
Even in the places where the neighbouring community might have burnt down last summer season, people are not removing the fuel from near their houses, from near their towns and villages because they think, yeah, what can go wrong? So I have personally seen in Greece when I went to monitor and observe a fire, when the mayor of a small town who took us

Lars Rinnan (39:03)
Yeah, yeah.

Ajay (39:14)
complain about how the government does nothing while we were watching a hill, a mountain burn very short distance away, was complaining about the government doing nothing while he was smoking and throwing his cigarettes into the dry brush on the ground. It's lethargy, it's ignorance, it's whatever you may call it. Unfortunately, no sincere

Lars Rinnan (39:31)
Yeah.

Ajay (39:43)
serious scalable effort has been made towards risk mitigation and prevention.

Lars Rinnan (39:51)
Yeah. And I also see the same thing that you mentioned there. You know, the focus on, on, you know, new, new gadgets, new technology that can actually fight the fire. But it's always reactive. You know, I've seen some articles about, you know, drone swarms, you know, flying out. have, I mean, you are monitoring the forest. You see a fire, you send out a drone swarm.

I don't know how big that should be. And then you release some amount of water and you're good. But that seems like a solution that might have worked some years back before climate change made these fires into mega fires and firestorms. But I'm guessing that these solutions have no value whatsoever right now and in the future.

Ajay (40:48)
Unfortunately, you're right. These solutions are not real solutions. Again, I salute firefighters. These are now better equipped teams. They are extremely professional. They put their lives at risk. They get satellite data. They react very fast. They arrive at the scene. European countries...

cooperate collaborate with each other. is multinational effort. So listen, I'm a great admirer of firefighting. But when it comes to these so called solutions, I think these solutions come from people who think a great forest fits in the palm of their hand on a smartphone. So just because they can zoom in and zoom out, the solutions would be as simple as that. They do not understand the scale of the problem and perhaps they don't.

Want to?

Lars Rinnan (41:46)
Yeah, exactly.

What about insurance companies? Because they definitely play a part in this whole picture.

How do you see them play this kind of role? Should governments invest in this technology or is it insurance companies? I think insurance companies could actually save a lot of money if they actually did this, but it depends on how you look at it, I guess.

Ajay (42:21)
So look, should and would, should, could and would are three different questions. Should they? Yes, they should. It's a natural solution for them considering how cheap the solution is and how positive the long-term consequences of an early intervention into removing the fuel and restoring a forest or planting a new forest or restoring an ecosystem.

positive dividends of that are so enormous that you would imagine that all of the above insurance companies, governments, even corporations would say hey let's do it. Insurance companies unfortunately work on the business model of risk premium. When they become aware of a risk, what they do is they simply increase the premium. And the risk of these wildfires

has become a very profitable business for insurance companies because they collect enormous premiums. Are they doing anything proactive to reduce that risk? It would be common sense for them to do it, but they are not doing it. I have not seen any insurance companies fund a serious effort to mitigate a risk of a wildfire

Lars Rinnan (43:38)
Bye.

Ajay (43:48)
burning down an object that they have insured. It's just not happening. From what I know of the insurance industry business models, it's not going to happen. When it comes to the government at a local scale, and that's what our target is, because there are a lot of global efforts towards mitigation of climate change risk and carbon credits.

Many of that have turned out to be completely fraudulent and it has put off a lot of people. this argument that if we stop the planet from warming, your backyard fire will not happen. If we somehow control the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees, your forest won't burn down and your life would not be hurt. It needs to be understood.

that even if now, tomorrow, we reach net zero, the process of global warming will still catapult forward for another 20, 25 years. So the solution that we are focused at is to engage at the micro level with small communities, with forest management officials, with counties and municipalities.

to give them the information and the tools so they can intervene in so to say their front yard and their backyard. And one community at a time, one hectare at a time, one small forest area at a time, we will be able to protect a forest from the risk of

Lars Rinnan (45:37)
Yeah, which you know, also should profit the insurance companies really, I mean, the kind of payments they made now are, you know, they're astronomical. And of course, this should be so profitable for the insurance companies as well. But I get what you're saying about about the business model. But

Let's look at the success story to kind of make this understandable. Can you share a real world example of your system, you know, preventing a wildfire or predicting, minimizing its impact to make it understandable for the audience?

Ajay (46:25)
So our system is, if I were to say a system stage one to 10, where I can roll it out at scale for small communities to use as easily as people use Google Maps. my success would be if I'm able to put a layer on Google Maps where not only can you see risk of fire, but you can also see

If you click there, you'll be able to see, hey, if you take measures one, two, three, four, five, you can reduce that risk. And in the next few days, as you take those measures, satellites are coming and looking at what you've done. And we would say your risk is going down and the whole community is watching it. Everybody's involved in it. That is level 10 readiness of my system for me. I'm at level seven, 7.5. So I have not been able to give

a fully interactive automated decision support system to my potential clients. What we have been able to do is we've been able to give them kind of a picture, if you may imagine, and say, look, we are seeing that very large areas outside your town seem to have accumulated a lot of fuel. And one of the success stories, and these stories are not sung about, is

While LA fire was going on, there were communities in Arizona which were very quietly removing the fuel from near and around their towns. So look, while we are talking about California fire damage being a hundred billion dollars, I believe two counties spent less than $75,000 and removed the fuel, which by the way, eliminates the possibility

Lars Rinnan (48:17)
Sadly.

Ajay (48:22)
of a mega fire. Again, a small fire can happen, a small fire event can happen, but I'm sure the firefighters will show up and contain it. these success stories are so unglamorous, Lars. It's about taking care of your backyard. It's like removing, you know, the winter season is over, removing dead plants and in spring planting new ones.

Lars Rinnan (48:24)
Exactly.

Hmm.

Ajay (48:52)
the people who do it love it but will you have people sitting in stands watching it and applauding you while you do it? No, it's not such an exciting sport. Not as exciting as airplanes dropping red colour fuel over a fire.

Lars Rinnan (49:04)
Excellent.

Ajay (49:11)
These success stories at community level are proven to be effective. Any area where we have advised no major fire has happened. On the other hand, are areas where carbon credits hunters showed up. We're planting trees, one of the biggest wildfires in Spain.

was started by a Belgian company which bought carbon credits, came to this area, cleared the fields, did not remove the fuel, were planting the trees, started a fire, burnt the whole area down. It's very ironic that you are earning carbon credits and planting trees without really taking care of the ecosystem. And another problem with that is,

Lars Rinnan (49:57)
That's very ironic.

Yeah. Yeah.

Ajay (50:09)
that a lot of these in the name of smart forestry, in the name of smart forest management, a lot of trees which are being planted are not native species. When you plant non-native species with a view that they will grow very fast and you will be able to create better carbon credits to show the canopy size,

and how green the area has become. You're actually putting that area at a greater risk of burning down because those trees are prone to burning down very, very fast. We've seen this in the great Greenwall project of Sahel where there was a great plan to plant a many miles wide corridor of trees so that the Sahara won't spread northwards.

and almost all those trees died. So we have to be very careful that we do not give in to this instinct of immediate gratification that we did something great or getting some carbon credits and get rich very quickly in the name of forest conservation. This is slow, hard,

Lars Rinnan (51:07)
Mm.

Ajay (51:35)
careful committed work. It's not sexy.

Lars Rinnan (51:40)
I think that's a really, really good point. But we still need to do the non-sexy things. We need to do the boring maintenance things. We do that in our own backyard. And of course, we should do that with our forests, and especially if they are in an area which is prone to wildfires. So yes, let's do more of the unsexy things.

Ajay (52:07)
Absolutely! At

our age, Lars, what else can we do?

Lars Rinnan (52:13)
Yeah, let's not go there. Absolutely. Let's jump to California instead, because, I mean, that's so recent. And of course, California has been the hub spot for some of the disastrous wildfires in history. And of course, the one a couple of weeks back in January was the worst ever. 29 fatalities, more than

57,000 acres burned. And I know that the estimates vary a bit, but I've also seen estimates of about $200 billion in damage and also repair costs, which is staggering. I think it's the most expensive natural catastrophe in our time in recorded history. So how...

What made that fire so devastating?

Ajay (53:15)
a number of causes which are very well documented and well understood before this fire. And I would then bring to what we are going to do in California now. The reasons were that the urban areas and the interaction between the urban areas and forest areas in California

is patches of urban sprawl that make their way into the forested areas. Many of those forest areas are well maintained. Then golf courses show up. Then there's a lot of irrigations there. So it's a lot of landscaping. And forests are kept there like a feature of the landscape. Nevertheless, they are there. And then when they build,

In the States, they build fast and furious. And they use a lot of wood. They use a lot of MDF. They use a lot of industrial materials to build. And that's why those houses simply burn very fast. What they do not do is that there are interconnected empty areas which connect you from the grasslands to the forests.

the urban areas. Those interconnected areas have trees, have bush, have hedges, have grass and over the years a lot of them again for drought for lack of availability of water, lack of availability of irrigation, sometimes it's shortage of water, sometimes you expand the urban area, you disrupt the natural hydrological

features and functions of that land and you do not do not replace it. You need to provide some irrigation to the forest areas. It was not done. So over the last few decades, the fuel just built up. Once the fire started, it's like blood flowing through the arteries. The fire spread through a thousand little pathways where there was fuel. As soon as that fire reached a few hundred homes,

which were all, like I said, cinder boxes, they just burned.

Lars Rinnan (55:45)
Mm.

Ajay (55:47)
Lars, more than anything else. It's stupidity. It's ignorance.

Lars Rinnan (55:51)
Yeah, they

didn't do the unsexy maintenance, the boring maintenance and stuff.

Ajay (55:58)
Yes, they simply

did not take lessons from the previous fires, especially the Hawaii fires, because Hawaii fires should have been a wake up call. They were in an area which is rarely on fire. The urban areas burned down. There was plentiful water, but they just did not remove the fuel. So Los Angeles fires are human incompetence and

Lars Rinnan (56:06)
Yeah.

Ajay (56:26)
and negligence. What we intend to do is, that's why we are now incorporating in the United States, we want to finish a solution that is very easy to use by any stakeholder. By a stakeholder, mean an individual living in an area that cares about their home. B, a community group that cares about

Lars Rinnan (56:28)
Yeah.

Ajay (56:55)
their playgrounds, features of landscaping, government officials who want to save the property, corporations that would like to save their industrial warehouses and their factories and their homes, insurance companies that would like to contribute and give back to the society some of the premiums that they have earned and instead of paying huge paybacks,

Lars Rinnan (57:11)
Mm.

Ajay (57:25)
after the event to spend some money on mitigation. So our solution would be made available, I expect, in the next 12 to 14 months at the community level to every stakeholder where they can see the risk. Depending on what role they play in the decision-making hierarchy, they will have more tools that will

exactly and very precisely tell them where to intervene, when to intervene, so that comes summer next season. By the way, this is February, right? Los Angeles burned in January. It's not even summer, which is scary that this kind of fire can happen in winter season or or mild season. So what we would do is we would be able to say to them, listen,

Lars Rinnan (58:06)
Exactly.

Ajay (58:18)
There will be a summer every six months or every 12 months. Intervene now, take action now and keep taking action so that you are A, mitigating the risk of a potential major fire and B, you're restoring the area. You're restoring the nature. And the positive impact of that is cleaner atmosphere, cooler streets, cooler temperatures, more shade.

more birds and bees and in general a better quality of life.

Lars Rinnan (58:53)
Yeah, absolutely. So the $200 billion question is, of course, could ForestSat have predicted what was going to happen in LA so that if they did the right actions, the unsexy, boring maintenance jobs, it could have been prevented. Could it really have been prevented?

Ajay (59:19)
The short answer is yes There are nuances and technical details, but with certainty, with great amount of certainty, the answer is yes. If this awareness, a deliberate effort was made to be aware of the environment, of the risk of the fire, then mitigation action would have saved almost 90 % if not

Lars Rinnan (59:32)
Yeah.

Ajay (59:48)
all of the properties that burned down. Action needs to start now to potentially mitigate the risk that is in future. So what we are doing is we are showing in a very clear, stark way, orange color, extreme risk. Come with us into the field and you will see with your own eyes what this risk perception is based on.

We are taking in-situ data. We are taking data from the forestry departments. We are taking data from the fire departments. We are just layering up, layer upon layer upon layer of data, going all the way to 500 miles above the earth to the low earth orbit satellites and saying, all these layers show us which are the risk areas. Intervene now, send in a tractor now, remove the fuel mechanically.

do a controlled fire, do a controlled burn, and the fire is not there. The only thing that our solution will deprive people of is there would be no titillating images of everything burning down.

Lars Rinnan (1:01:03)
Yeah, no wildfire porn. No, no, no, but that's fine. mean, I think I'm going to buy some shares in your company, because if you could just get a little cut from that $200 billion and that's just one wildfire prevented. And yeah, but let's not go into the financials. You talked about the future.

Ajay (1:01:06)
I won't be able to entertain people. Yeah.

Lars Rinnan (1:01:29)
Of course, this podcast is called The World in 2029. So let's fast forward to 2029. So are we still seeing, you know, auto-control wildfires or have it turned the tide? Will devastating fires still be a yearly crisis or will AI and satellite technology for a set make wildfires a thing of the past?

Ajay (1:01:56)
I would like to think that our solution will be so rational and such a logical choice and so common sense and cheap solution to implement. I would see communities all around the world, especially in the fire prone areas, use it beginning next year. And by 2029,

I can say with a degree of confidence that the number of very large wildfires would start to reduce large. Right now it's on the upturn. Right now you are seeing more fires, bigger fires, more intense fires. What we need to do is we need to make sure the fires are not mega fires, that they start

being smaller, that they are easily contained so that firefighters when they intervene, they're able to achieve success in putting out those fires. then over a period of time, these fires would become as they should be, as they should have been or would have been 500 years ago, which is just a natural part of the ecosystem, sometimes started by humans, sometimes started by nature.

but never achieving the scale and scope that we are seeing now. 2029 could be the turning point where for the first time you will see a very significant reduction in the size of wildfires. We cannot reduce, we cannot change the fact that these fires start, but we can change the fact that

Lars Rinnan (1:03:39)
Mm.

Ajay (1:03:50)
If a thousand fires start, they would be contained within 10 hectares, 100 hectares, and they would not become mega fires. That's, I think, very achievable in the next four years.

Lars Rinnan (1:03:59)
Yeah.

Absolutely. So we would go from this unnatural extreme variant that we have now into a more natural wildfire variant that we've always had, which is unproblematic. I would like to see that future happen. Absolutely. So.

Ajay (1:04:26)
It's,

we've come, Lars, we've come very far. It's well within grasp. And the way, you know, GPT, chat, GPT leapt out at us. We were all experimenting with 2.0 and then suddenly comes out this latest version and everybody started using it. And we said, wow. So I think we are at a point where we are going to see a lot of machine learning and AI driven applications.

Lars Rinnan (1:04:31)
Yeah.

Ajay (1:04:54)
real life, real world applications, which will be decision support systems for humans to act. AI is not going to go and put out a fire. AI is not going to go out and remove the fuel. AI is not going to go plant a tree. We have to do that. So we have to shake ourselves out of that lethargy. And we have to give up on this feeling that this problem is too large for us to tackle. It's not. We can tackle this problem.

Lars Rinnan (1:05:21)
Yeah.

Ajay (1:05:23)
can overcome this problem. With the help of AI and satellite data, we can reduce the risk of these fires, reduce these fires and overcome this problem.

Lars Rinnan (1:05:35)
You're actually making the world a better place, is a fantastic calling. It's a fantastic way to spend your days making the future even better. So I think we should wrap up on this positive note. I think this conversation has been very eye opening for me and hopefully for also for all the audience. And maybe it's also changing some of the audience.

pessimistic views of the future when it comes to wildfires and turning it into an optimistic one. I really hope so. mean, wildfires have been a rapidly increasing risk for so many people in areas prone to such disasters. And, you know, like the recent California wildfire, it's so much harm on so many levels. And of course, many fear for the next one. And this is not just about California.

The wildfires are a major factor in deforestation. Billions of trees are turned into ash, reducing carbon capture even more. So this affects the global climate, as you said. And that means it affects everyone and you too. It affects everyone on the planet. But now we know that with AI and satellite data and some really clever people, we don't have to accept them as

as inevitable. So prediction and prevention are the future of firefighting. And of course, it takes an ex hotel manager who nearly lost his hotel to wildfires to make such a brilliant solution. I really love that. And of course, to our listeners, if you want to learn more about how AI is transforming wildfire prevention, check out Forestsat at forestsat.space.

And Ajay, it's been an absolute pleasure listening to your insights on this issue. Thank you so much for joining us today and for the important work you are doing for the planet.

Ajay (1:07:47)
Thank you, Lars.

Lars Rinnan (1:07:48)
To all our listeners, thanks for listening to The World in 2029. Don't forget to subscribe, leave a comment and join us next time as we uncover the next big idea shaping our future. And remember, the future is better than you think. Until next time.