Canada's last three wildfire seasons have ranked among the ten worst on record, according to Dr. Penelope Kourkouli (pictured), wildfire product manager at ICEYE, and this year has continued that pattern, with sustained activity across northwestern Ontario and B.C.'s interior.
Kourkouli said the escalation traces back to a combination of climate and development pressures building at the same time.
"Sustained drought, above-normal temperatures, and heat waves are creating fast-moving fire conditions in multiple regions at once, while continued development near forested and wildland-urban interface areas puts more structures in harm's way when it happens," she said.
That combination has exposed a gap in how insurers and risk managers actually track a wildfire once it starts, Kourkouli said. Most available tools can confirm that a fire is burning and roughly where its perimeter sits. What they can't do is tell an insurer which specific buildings have been affected, information that has traditionally depended on people physically reaching the affected area.
"The core gap is between event-level awareness and structure-level certainty," she said. "Insurers and risk managers need to know which specific buildings are affected, and that's historically only come from field inspections or aerial surveys that can take days or weeks, especially when smoke or darkness ground visibility right when decisions are most urgent."
That delay can matter well beyond the initial damage assessment. The longer it takes to establish which structures were affected, the longer insurers may have to wait before they can size their exposure and begin the reserving process.
Smoke and reduced visibility during an active event are, in Kourkouli's telling, one of the hardest constraints for insurers trying to size their exposure in real time.
"Getting reliable, structure-level information while an event is still active and smoke is grounding visibility" is the hardest part of the job right now, she said. ICEYE's own product was built around that specific limitation, she added.
"We use SAR satellites specifically because they can see through smoke, cloud, and darkness, and we aim to deliver a first structure-level damage assessment within 24 hours of a fire meeting activation thresholds, with updates roughly every 24 hours after that," Kourkouli said. "That speed matters when insurers need to size exposure and activate reserving well before ground-truth data exists."
She said satellite-based damage assessment is intended to close the gap between event awareness and structure-level certainty by giving insurers near real-time answers instead of waiting on inspections or aerial surveys.
"Satellite-based building damage assessment is closing that gap, giving the industry structure-level answers in near real-time instead of waiting on ground truth," she said.
Kourkouli said the capability is already running continuously through the length of an active wildfire, rather than producing a single report after the fact.
"We're already doing a lot of this today, delivering structure-level building damage assessments to clients roughly every 24 hours for the duration of an active event, not just a single after-the-fact report," she said. With Ontario and B.C. both under sustained pressure this season, she said that kind of continuous visibility across a fire's full lifecycle is exactly what the industry needs to keep pace with events on the ground.
Looking further ahead, Kourkouli said she expects wildfire intelligence to push earlier into the event lifecycle, well before the damage-assessment stage.
"I think the industry should be watching for wildfire intelligence expanding earlier into the event lifecycle, not just assessing damage after the fact, but capabilities like early detection, spread prediction, and broader burnt-area mapping that give insurers and risk managers a fuller picture from ignition through containment," she said.
That shift, she said, would move the industry from a reactive posture to something closer to genuine risk management.
"That would let the industry move from reactive damage assessment toward genuinely proactive risk management," Kourkouli said.
