2025 Grunin Prize Finalist: California Wildfire Innovation Fund I, LP: Blue Forest Asset Management

Описание: Nominated Legal Team:
From Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe:

Perry Teicher
Andrew Vogeler
John Narducci
Ramon Galvan
Elizabeth Damaskos

The Project:
Catastrophic wildfire is immensely costly to the state of California and its neighbors, decimating communities, placing millions of homes at risk, threatening public health, and emitting more carbon in some years than the state’s entire transportation sector. Landscape-scale forest restoration–the use of manual interventions to remove hazardous fuels, maintain forest structure, and restore forests to a more resilient state–is a proven way to reduce the risk of wildfire and its intensity when it does occur.

By investing in private businesses that play a part in the forest restoration system, CWIF aims to move the needle on the pace and scale of forest restoration in the state. This includes companies performing restoration work on the ground, companies utilizing and up-valuing the byproducts (often referred to as ‘forest biomass’), and everything in between. The Fund is a novel model of mobilizing capital to meet this need, aligning a private insurance company in CSAA (motivated by the opportunity to invest its balance sheet in a way that stands to demonstrably reduce its risk exposure) and a California state instrumentality in IBank (motivated by public policy goals to catalyze private investment capital toward the wildfire challenge).