Property Guardian, a Chicago-based wildfire risk analytics provider, has launched a Canadian version of its property-level wildfire risk scoring tool, aimed at underwriters working in Canada's wildland-urban interface.
The Canadian Wildfire Risk Score, developed with Canadian research partner ApexRMS, uses a 30-metre national fuels dataset and runs more than 10,000 Monte Carlo simulations to model burn probability, fire intensity, flame length and rate of spread at the individual property level, producing a 0-100 score alongside six contributing risk factors.
The launch is pitched squarely at a real and growing problem. Insurance Bureau of Canada figures confirmed insured damage from severe weather reached $9.2 billion in 2024, the costliest year on record, with the Jasper wildfire accounting for close to $1.3 billion, the second-costliest insured fire event in Canadian history behind the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfires.
British Columbia's 2023 McDougall Creek and Bush Creek East wildfires caused a combined $720 million in insured losses, the province's costliest insured event on record. Those figures are independently verified against IBC's own reporting and aren't in dispute.
The score breaks wildfire exposure into six components: fire spread probability, wildfire recurrence tied to vegetation regrowth cycles, suppression difficulty based on terrain accessibility, ember exposure from wind-driven spot fires, fire intensity based on fuel conditions, and urban conflagration risk from structure-to-structure spread.
Property Guardian said each subfactor can be used independently, letting carriers plug specific signals into existing pricing models without a full system overhaul.
"We wanted to give underwriters more than another postal-code lookup," said Pat Blandford, Property Guardian's founder and CEO. "Our property-level score is grounded in physics-based modelling that tells an underwriter what's actually going to happen at a specific structure."
Roch Lacroix, an independent advisor to the Canadian P&C industry and principal at Indatech, who has joined Property Guardian's team for the Canadian rollout, framed the gap this way: "The market has largely been working with fire-protection data that predates today's exposure."
Brokers and underwriters evaluating this launch should know Property Guardian is not entering an empty field.
AISIX Solutions already offers a wildfire risk scoring tool in the Canadian market, including a consumer-facing app that uses insurance-style risk factors, historical fire activity, human-versus-natural ignition likelihood, and spread potential, to generate a simplified risk score for individual properties nationwide.
Property Guardian has also been expanding its own distribution through a separate channel partnership with catastrophe analytics platform EigenRisk announced earlier this year, suggesting the wildfire risk-scoring space is becoming more competitive and more embedded into existing underwriting platforms rather than consolidating around a single vendor.
For carriers considering this tool, the practical questions aren't really about the marketing language, "the standard this peril deserves" is a claim from the vendor, not an independent assessment, but about fit -- how the physics-based Monte Carlo approach compares against models already in use, whether the underlying 30-metre fuels dataset offers a meaningful accuracy improvement over what a carrier's current provider uses, and how the score performs against a carrier's own historical loss experience in wildfire-exposed portfolios.
Property Guardian's own published commentary has separately acknowledged that a wildfire hazard score alone doesn't capture structure-level survivability, since two properties in the same environmental risk zone can have very different outcomes depending on construction materials, defensible space and vent protection, a limitation that presumably applies to its own score as much as to any competitor's.
The tool is available through API integration, on-demand single-property lookups, and portfolio-level bulk analysis, giving carriers flexibility in how deeply they integrate it.
Whether it delivers a meaningfully better underwriting outcome than existing tools is something individual carriers will need to test against their own book, not something a launch announcement can settle on its own.
