Can quantum computers stop or prevent wildfires? The short answer is, of course, no. But we’re learning that they can mitigate some of the risks and damage done by wildfires, once we recognize that quantum isn’t some esoteric technology that will have practical applications ten or twenty years from now. As we’ve been stressing at the Hudson Quantum Alliance Initiative for years now, the quantum revolution is here, and it can make life easier for millions—including helping us wage war on wildfires.

The devastation wildfires can cause has been highlighted most recently in Hawaii, with nearly one hundred lives lost, and in Canada, where they have burning and smoldering for months causing ten of billions of dollars of damage. Sadly, the damage is only going to get worse. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, the likelihood of catastrophic wildfires worldwide could increase by a third by 2050 and by more than 50% by the turn of the century.

The critical question is how to respond rapidly once these devastating conflagrations start, often in remote locations with limited resources at hand.

For governments and emergency services, the answer to that question depends on Incident Management Teams (IMTs) who take on the job of managing the response to large wildfires. As you might guess, IMTs operate in a high-pressure environment. They have to make complex, time-sensitive decisions about how best to allocate available resources—firefighters, firefighting equipment and materials, other first responders such as police and EMT’s—to protect lives and property in various locations at once. That job gets particularly difficult with wildfires, because wildfires often change direction and velocity with bewildering speed.

Wildfires pose the ultimate logistics/supply chain issues—with lives and entire communities at stake. Fortunately, this is the kind of challenge that quantum computers and their classical-based cousins, quantum annealers and simulators, are ready to deal with.

Simply put, the question of how to allocate existing resources in this high-pressure environment is an optimization problem. This is when you look for the best of many possible combinations of variables like what’s the cheapest, quickest route for delivering a stack of products to multiple locations in multiple cities. These are complex puzzles classical computers, even super computers, can’t figure out, but quantum-based systems can.

As I explained in a previous Forbes column:

“Thanks to the unique properties of the quantum bits or qubits that are linked up or “entangled” for processing data—including being in two different physical states at once—these machines will be able to solve the supply chain or logistical problems that stump a classical computer.”

Finding these optimization solutions via the quantum route is what two companies are already doing. One is D-Wave Systems, Inc., based in Canada, which has used this method successfully to address traffic flow problems for Volkswagen in both Beijing and Lisbon, with its quantum annealing technology.

Another is an American company, Entanglement, Inc., which used similar technology to devise a plan for managing COVID vaccination operations at the state level, including handling widely dispersed inventories of the vaccine.

We wrote about the implications of this kind of quantum hybrid technology in an earlier Forbes column, for supply chain management and vaccine distribution. Now we see how quantum computing systems can protect lives and property in another way, by employing Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithms (QAOA), hybrid quantum-classical variational algorithms designed to tackle combinatorial optimization problems, to allocate resources for fighting wildfires.

That’s not all. As we’ve seen in the case of Hawaii, wildfire emergencies can also be caused or exacerbated by failures in power line systems and electricity distribution networks. Given the immense number of factors that can affect the probability of a power line ignition occurring, the analysis becomes too tough for traditional methodologies. But as a recent IEE document recently argued, quantum-enhanced algorithms can do a better job predicting the probability of such failures.

Where does all this lead us? Congressman Young Kim (R-CA) has sponsored bipartisan legislation to improve communication and information sharing among first responders during wildfires, using new advanced technologies. In addition to AI and robotics, for example, quantum computing and quantum hybrid computing should be high on Rep. Kim’s list. They could go a long way to help IMT’s and first responders deal with the complex threat and uncertainty these disasters pose.

It's been the fashion—including in this column—to dwell on the risks quantum computers will pose to our existing encryption systems, and the like. But it’s also important to emphasize how they will bring powerful benefits—including tackling real-life problems like wildfires right now.