This year’s wildfire season is already the second-worst on record in Canada, and experts are warning that this might be the new normal.
More than 7.3 million hectares have burned this year so far, more than double the 10-year average for this time of year, according to the latest figures from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC) and Natural Resources Canada.
“It’s the size of New Brunswick, to put it into context,” Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University, told CBC News.
The last three fire seasons are among the 10 worst on record, according to a federal database dating back to 1972, with 2023’s devastating blazes taking the top spot.
“I’ve never seen three bad fire seasons in a row,” Flannigan, who has been studying fires since the ’70s, said.
“I’ve seen two in a row: ’94, ’95. I’ve never seen three. This is scary.”
Manitoba and Saskatchewan account for more than half the area burned so far, but British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario are all also well above their 25-year averages. Fire bans have been announced in multiple provinces, including a total ban on going in the woods in Nova Scotia.
Meanwhile, the military and coast guard were called in to help fight fires in Newfoundland and Labrador this week. Around 1,400 international firefighters have also helped fight Canadian fires so far this year, according to the CIFFC.
Scientists say that climate change, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, has created longer fire seasons and drier landscapes, sparking more intense and widespread forest fires.
“I used to always say… some years are cooler and wetter and we will get quiet years,” Flannigan said.
“But maybe every year’s going to be a bad fire year now.”
Dry conditions across the country have allowed fires to quickly balloon this fire season.
“The forests of Canada are too dry, too hot,” Environment Canada climatologist David Phillips told CBC News. “This year… there’s no kind of reprieve from what we’ve seen.”
This year has seen notable blazes in regions where we haven’t historically, such as Newfoundland and Labrador, where one fire has grown to over 5,200 hectares.
Yan Boulanger, a research scientist in forest ecology at Natural Resources Canada, says Newfoundland “is not used to [seeing] huge fires.”
“But we will have to get more and more used to it, because those ecosystems are also projected to see an increase in fire activity in the upcoming decades.”
The other outlier is Quebec, which was one of the hardest-hit provinces in 2023, when an estimated 4.5 million hectares burned.
This year, the province has had a much milder fire season, thanks to frequent precipitation in the spring and early summer, Boulanger says. But a sudden bout of dry conditions in August, usually a quiet fire month for the province, has experts recommending vigilance.
Consequences of repeated fires
Bad back-to-back fire seasons can have huge consequences.
Fire is a natural part of the lifecycle for many tree species, but a forest can become damaged to the point where trees cannot regrow in the area for years, or even decades. It’s called “regeneration failure.”
“The problem is when we have too much fire and we are getting out of what we are calling the natural variability of the system,” Boulanger said. “When such things happen… the forest can lose its resilience.”
Scientists are already seeing it in regions of Quebec that were heavily damaged in 2023, and in parts of the Northwest Territories and Alberta, Boulanger says. Right now, around 300,000 to 400,000 hectares are affected by regeneration failure in Quebec.
Less trees means less carbon being stored, exacerbating the problem of increased emissions that occur during widespread forest fires. The 2023 fires produced nearly a quarter of the year’s global wildfire carbon emissions. Meanwhile, wildfire smoke has been linked to a myriad of health complications, including a higher risk of dementia.
Heat warnings remain in place for much of Canada as hot and humid temperatures continue to fuel wildfires. Ken McMullen, fire chief for Red Deer, Alta., is calling for the development of a national wildfire administration to allocate resources and co-ordinate rescue efforts between provinces.
With intense wildfires becoming an annual problem in Canada on a new scale, we need more strategies, experts say.
The Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs (CAFC) has called on Ottawa to establish a national forest fire co-ordination agency to ensure that personnel and equipment can be distributed across the country when different regions are seeing heavy fires, and that fire chiefs are at the table when national policies are made.
The government has been studying the possibility of creating a national disaster response agency since 2023, and met with CAFC to discuss it in December. But it’s time to move beyond the planning stage, according to Ken McMullen, the organization’s president and fire chief in Red Deer, Alta.
“All parties are saying that they think it’s a good idea. The reality is nobody’s helped pick up the ball and get it across the finish line,” he said.
Flannigan, at Thompson Rivers University, supports the idea, but believes we need to go further and create a robust national emergency management agency that would be able to provide training for fighting wildfires, forecast where fires are likely to occur and whether they’re a danger, and then move resources there proactively.
“Yes, it’s going to cost money, but if it prevents one Jasper, one Fort McMurray, it pays for itself,” he said, referring to the Alberta communities ravaged in recent years by fires.
“The status quo doesn’t seem to be working. We’re spending billions and billions of dollars on fire management expenditures, but our area burned has quadrupled since the 1970s.”
