A helicopter flies by the Wesley Ridge wildfire near Coombs, B.C., in August, 2025. The cost of battling wildfires this year is expected to total near $500-million.CHAD HIPOLITO/The Canadian Press
Nearly 900,000 hectares of forests burned during the peak of British Columbia’s wildfire season this year, making it one of the province’s worst fire years on record.
And with more than 100 blazes still burning across the province, the cost of battling wildfires in 2025 is expected to be close to $500-million.
A new paper published Thursday in the U.S. journal Science argues that B.C. should be spending much more than that to break the current cycle of destructive wildfires.
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The preliminary estimates for 2025’s wildfires are well above B.C.’s ten-year average for severity and cost, and the trends are expected to worsen in the coming years.
“B.C. and the Western U.S. states are not alone in this dilemma; the same wicked problem plagues many jurisdictions around the world,” the paper notes.
“Numerous studies have demonstrated the long-term financial benefits of reversing the disaster spending ratio to favour mitigation and prevention spending over response and recovery,” it says.
“Yet to date, nearly all governments have left the crossroads heading in the same wrong direction by continuing to make massive expenditures in response and recovery and only minimal investments in mitigation and prevention.”
The paper focuses on British Columbia as a stand-in for many jurisdictions that are facing similar conditions. But in B.C., the challenge is not just to persuade a debt-laden provincial government to add substantial new spending commitments. The forest industry – currently struggling with punitive U.S. tariffs – also needs to shift to play a greater role in wildfire mitigation.
Treatments, such as thinning and prescribed burning, need to be conducted on a broad scale and will take decades to produce results.
Two support workers in August, 2025, outside the evacuation centre at the Qualicum Beach Civic Centre, carrying food for evacuees from the Wesley Ridge fire.Jen Osborne/The Globe and Mail
The province’s recent fiscal update forecast this year’s deficit at a record $11.6-billion, and the New Democratic Party government is under pressure to rein in spending.
Calvin Sandborn, a retired law professor from the University of Victoria and one of the authors of the paper, said in an interview that the province can’t afford not to invest much more in wildfire mitigation.
“The province really has no choice,” he said. “In the long run, it will be far more expensive to suffer through increasingly catastrophic fire seasons far into the future.”
The forest industry already recognizes the need to change practices. A key topic at this year’s convention of the Council of Forest Industries was how to manage forests by reducing fuel loads and creating fire breaks to help prevent the spread of wildfire.
The peer-reviewed paper was also co-written by fire ecologist Robert Gray and Robin Gregory, a research scientist and adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia. It argues that some of the costs can be recouped through the development of new markets for materials harvested through forest thinning.
“Changing industrial activity from exacerbating the problem of damaging fires to helping create solutions requires a substantial shift in management philosophy,” the paper states.
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The province can offer incentives such as tax breaks. But “it requires moving from timber harvest and economic profit as the end goal to harvest as a means of achieving multiple goals – including not only economic objectives but also social, cultural, and environmental goals that are met by reducing the incidence of high-severity wildfires on the landscape.”
The public should also be given the true cost of wildfires to understand the need for mitigation investments, the authors wrote. The provincial government does not track indirect costs for individual fires or fire seasons. However, “economists suggest that total fire costs typically range from 1.5 to 20 times the direct cost.”
One of those indirect costs is the impact on human health. In early September, health advisories were posted in communities spanning B.C., Alberta and the Northwest Territories and a portion of northwestern Saskatchewan.
About 3.5 million people in Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley were advised to seek out spaces with air filtration or air conditioning to avoid breathing fine particulate matter.
The paper cites research concluding that from 2007 to 2020, wildfire smoke annually contributed to more than 11,400 non-accidental deaths in the contiguous United States.