Funding for wildfire prevention: what forest owners can apply for

Prevention is the most effective wildfire protection — and the cheapest. A firebreak, a water point or an early-warning network costs a fraction of what a fire out of control destroys. What many forest owners don't know: this kind of prevention is funded by the state. We've gathered the programmes across all 16 German states.

Eligible applicants are forest owners, forestry associations, forestry operations and municipalities — not the technology vendor. The money comes from the joint federal-state task GAK, topped up by the EU's ELER fund and each state's own budget. Because forestry funding is a state matter, programmes and rates differ markedly between states.

Typically funded are physical measures: water extraction points, firebreaks and protective strips, forest roads for fire-brigade access, and conversion to climate-stable mixed forests. Some states have just renewed and enlarged their wildfire budgets — Lower Saxony, for instance, explicitly funds water points since 2026, and Bavaria funds firebreaks for the first time.

What is not funded is the pure purchase of technology: the GAK framework explicitly excludes "the purchase of machinery and equipment". An early-detection sensor network therefore generally falls outside regular funding.

With one important exception: Saxony. Its forest funding directive explicitly names "systems for automatic wildfire early detection" as eligible — here the applicants are municipalities and special-purpose associations. A city with its own municipal forest can apply and procure an early-detection network.

For all other cases, the route runs through project and innovation funding: the DBU project fund, EIP-Agri innovation groups (where forest owners, researchers and technology partners apply jointly), or research programmes such as the German Forest Climate Fund. There, early-detection technology is fundable when it's part of a larger project — not as a standalone purchase.

You'll find the full overview with the official contact points for every German state on our funding page at /waldbrand-foerderung. And if you're a forestry operation or municipality looking to bring prevention and open early detection together: get in touch — that's exactly what FireWatch is built open for.

All information without guarantee and not funding advice. Programmes and conditions change; the official body of your state is always authoritative.