In June 2025, members of the G7, alongside “non-enumerated member” European Union and non-member leaders from Australia, India, Mexico, South Korea, and South Africa, signed the Kananaskis Wildfire Charter, to:
“boost global cooperation to prevent, fight and recover from wildfires by taking integrated action to reduce the incidence and negative impacts of wildfires and ensure our readiness to help each other, and partners, when needed.”
In response to this Charter, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) led the establishment of an International EO Wildfire Coordination Group within CEOS. This group, a subgroup of the Land Surface Imaging Virtual Constellation (LSI-VC), provides a venue to help coordinate public and non-public, current and planned, wildfire EO missions and provide documented feedback with input from the Global Observations of Forest Cover and Land-use Dynamics (GOFC-GOLD) Fire Science Team.
The LSI-VC Wildfire Subgroup is co-led by CSA, NRCan, ESA, and SANSA, with membership from EC, HSC, INPE, NASA, and UKSA. It provides a venue to support coordination between agencies producing EO data used to generate wildfire monitoring products and the downstream community, to enhance reliability and support wildfire management with current and future satellite missions.
The initial scope is active fire and potentially recent burned area products, but this could expand to other areas, for example, pre-fire assessment, in the future. Activities include:
- Assessing the existing and planned implicit virtual constellation of fire monitoring satellites.
- Documenting the case for sustained, refined and improved fire EO products.
- Supporting interoperability of fire EO data and missions, and supporting the development of harmonised user and mission requirements for wildfire monitoring.
- Supporting development of EO fire product best practices/endorsement processes.
CEOS Wildfire Portal
The CEOS Wildfire Satellite Missions Portal (ceos.org/wildfires) is built on the CEOS MIM Database, and lists all CEOS Agency missions with the potential to monitor active wildfires, delineating missions by their orbit.
