Property Guardian, a leader in wildfire risk intelligence for the insurance industry, today announced the launch of its Canadian Wildfire Risk Score + Insights, a property-level wildfire risk score purpose-built for underwriting real property risks in the Canadian Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI).

Developed with Canadian wildfire science research partner ApexRMS, Property Guardian’s Canadian Wildfire Risk Score + Insights is based on a physics-based modelling approach that includes the latest 30-meter national fuels dataset and runs 10,000+ Monte Carlo simulations to model burn probability, fire intensity, flame lengths and rate of spread.

The result is a property-level wildfire risk score, from 0–100, delivered alongside six contributing factors. This level of transparency helps underwriters pinpoint the drivers of the wildfire exposure and more confidently defend their risk selection and pricing position to insureds, brokers, reinsurers, and other stakeholders.

The six contributing factors include:

  • Fire Spread: The probabilistic core: can it burn, and how likely

  • Wildfire Recurrence: Fire frequency and vegetation regrowth cycles

  • Suppression Effort: How hard the terrain is to reach and defend

  • Ember Exposure: Downwind, wind-driven spot-fire exposure

  • Fire Intensity: How hot and receptive the fuels are

  • Urban Conflagration: Structure-to-structure fire spread

Each subfactor can also be used on its own, allowing carriers to drop individual signals directly into an existing pricing or underwriting model without a full integration over existing scores or methods.

“We developed the score and insights with our Canadian partners over two years to make sure we delivered the new standard in wildfire risk data,” said Pat Blandford, Founder & CEO of Property Guardian. “We wanted to give underwriters more than another postal-code lookup. Our property-level score is grounded in physics-based modelling that tells an underwriter what’s actually going to happen at a specific structure and shows them the underlying indicators. That’s the standard this peril deserves.”

The launch comes as wildfire has become one of the fastest-growing loss drivers in the Canadian P&C market. According to the Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC), insured damage from severe weather reached a record $9.2 billion in 2024, the costliest year on record for the industry, with the Jasper wildfire alone accounting for close to $1.3 billion, making it the second-costliest insured fire event in Canadian history. In British Columbia, the 2023 McDougall Creek and Bush Creek East wildfires caused a combined $720 million in insured losses, the costliest insured event the province has ever recorded. IBC’s early 2025 tally already shows severe weather losses exceeding $2.4 billion for the year, a reminder that annual losses once considered exceptional are becoming the norm.

Few individuals have witnessed the growing need for precision wildfire risk analytics more than Roch Lacroix, a 35-year insurance industry veteran who has worked with more than 30 Canadian insurers. Lacroix brings his expertise to the Property Guardian team as the company introduces the Canadian Wildfire Risk Score + Insights to regional underwriters, brokers, and carriers.

“Canadian insurers have been asking for a tool like this for a long time,” said Roch Lacroix, an independent advisor to the Canadian P&C insurance industry and principal at Indatech. “Wildfire has moved from a regional concern in British Columbia and Alberta to a national underwriting concern, and the market has largely been working with fire-protection data that predates today’s exposure. A property-level, explainable score grounded in the subfactors that actually drive losses is the kind of tool this industry has needed as the peril has grown, and it’s a meaningful step for precision data standards in the market.”

Availability

Property Guardian’s Canadian Wildfire Risk Score + Insights is available in three ways:

  1. API integration for embedding the score directly into underwriting workflows

  2. On-demand, single property lookups within Property Guardian Direct

  3. Bulk Analysis Services for portfolio-wide review

To learn more, visit propertyguardian.com/products/canadian-wildfire-risk-score or contact Brian Bastian, Head of Product, for a personalized demo at brian.bastian@propertyguardian.com.

About Property Guardian

Property Guardian delivers advanced wildfire analytics that help carriers, MGAs, and insurance professionals select, price, mitigate, and monitor risk in wildfire-exposed markets. By combining cutting-edge science with expert-backed wildfire intelligence, Property Guardian transforms thousands of wildfire signals into clear, actionable insights at the property level. Its intelligence supports smarter underwriting, stronger portfolio management, proactive loss control, and profitable growth across the insurance lifecycle. Learn more at www.propertyguardian.com.

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