Aspen Wildfire x Insurance Summit 2026

Moving from Risk to Resilience

The stakes have never been higher. Wildfire risk is reshaping insurance markets across the West, forcing carriers to retreat from coverage, raise premiums beyond affordability, and reconsider their presence in high-risk communities. For mountain towns like Aspen, this crisis is not abstract, it threatens the long-term stability of property insurance itself. We know the stakes, and our valley is charting a different course.

Risk Reduction at Scale

Rather than accept the withdrawal of insurance capacity as inevitable, Roaring Fork Valley communities are investing seriously in what actually changes wildfire risk: landscape-scale fuels reduction, community-wide home hardening, advanced wildfire behavior modeling, real-time detection infrastructure, and coordinated emergency response planning. Over the past two years, the Wildfire Collaborative, Aspen Wildfire Foundation, Aspen Fire, and regional partners have moved from planning to implementation: deploying real capital, operational expertise, and leadership to measurably reduce the conditions that drive catastrophic loss.

The question now is unavoidable: Can verified risk reduction translate into verifiable changes in insurance confidence, capacity, and pricing?

From Alignment to Consequences

That conversation broke silos and created visibility across sectors working on the same challenge with limited awareness of one another's efforts. It sparked the formation of the Insurance Task Force and catalyzed development of the Aspen Community Wildfire Resilience Scorecard: a structured, credible tool for presenting verified mitigation activity, modeling outputs, and response capacity in formats meaningful to underwriting and risk evaluation.

The 2026 Summit is the next chapter, moving from visibility to leverage.

2026 Summit: Looking Forward

By summer 2026, Aspen will have a fully operational Resilience Scorecard ready to deploy. The mitigation work will be documented, measurable, and designed with insurer input, and we're ready to take conversations to the next level. This convening will bring 50 invited leaders back to the table to ask the questions that matter:

• What is truly limiting insurance capacity in Aspen today? Is it expected loss uncertainty, concentrated regional exposure, reinsurance pricing, capital availability, or something else entirely? We will ask insurance and reinsurance leaders directly what would need to shift for capacity to stabilize or grow here.

• Does Aspen's mitigation work materially change expected loss? At what scale, with what continuity, and with what level of verification would risk reduction begin to move the needle in underwriting decisions and pricing models?

• What level of sustained investment would meaningfully bend the curve? Beyond incremental improvement, what order-of-magnitude commitment would significantly reduce expected loss, and how does that compare to the cost of catastrophic loss and community displacement?

• If mitigation alone is insufficient, what's next? Rather than broad reinvention, we will examine whether targeted structural innovations, such as captive insurance, layered capital approaches, or mitigation-backed mechanisms, could unlock capacity in credible, disciplined ways.

Designed for Depth, Not Scale

This is not a large public conference or an ideas festival. It is a working convening: curated, intentional, and built for the kind of direct dialogue only a small room makes possible. Fifty leaders together for one day spent on focused sessions and real conversations with real stakes.

The guest list reflects expertise across insurance underwriting, reinsurance markets, wildfire science, detection technology, utility operations, real estate, and community leadership. Each seat at the table is there because the perspective and experience brought is essential to moving this conversation forward.

Summit Goals

By the end of the day, we aim to leave with:

• Shared clarity on what is truly limiting insurance confidence in Aspen and the broader Roaring Fork Valley

• An honest assessment of whether current mitigation efforts materially shift expected loss

• A realistic view of the investment required for meaningful change

• Defined next steps with clear ownership and accountability

By Invitation Only

The 2026 Aspen Wildfire x Insurance Summit operates by invitation. If you are interested in discussing how you or your organization might contribute to this work, or if you have expertise relevant to wildfire risk reduction and insurance resilience, we'd welcome that conversation. Contact us at Angie@RFVwildifre.org to discuss involvement.

Full agenda, speakers, and logistics will be shared with confirmed participants.