The remains of a home smoulder in Jasper, Alta., in July, 2024.AMBER BRACKEN/The Canadian Press
When serious wildfires break out in Canada, a debate invariably ignites between two camps. There are those who argue that the fires are becoming worse and those who say these conflagrations, while terrible, are only blips in an improving trend.
This raking over of the ashes is of more than academic importance.
If the situation is in fact becoming worse, then it behooves Canadians to act. The country must prepare better, invest in more firefighting resources and change, as necessary, how and where we live. But if there is no worsening trend, and the fears are the byproduct of alarmism and ignorance, then there is no urgent need to change course.
A new academic paper shows that there is some truth to both arguments: there are fewer fires but they are getting bigger. However, the paper, published this month in the Canadian Journal of Forest Research, shows that fires are becoming worse in the ways that matter. It also cites research indicating that fires are increasingly likely to burn over the winter, in types of forests not normally conducive to fire and in wetlands that have traditionally acted as protective barriers.
And it warns that Canada’s fire trends are likely to continue for decades due to climate change.
Wildfire ash is accelerating glacier melt in the Canadian Rockies
The paper updates existing fire research covering the period from 1959 through 2015 to add nine more years, up to and including 2024. It does show that the total number of fires each year has trended down for decades. So the naysayers are right about that.
But just having fewer fires doesn’t mean things are getting better. When it comes to wildfire, size matters.
The number of large fires – defined as those bigger than 200 hectares – has been increasing by an average of three per year for decades, the paper shows. Most alarming, the very large fires – those that exceed 20,000 hectares – are getting bigger, and accounting for an increasing proportion of the area burned.
What this adds up to is a great deal more damage. And that is the metric that really counts.
For 57 years, from 1959 through 2015, the average area burned in Canada annually amounted to 1.96 million hectares, equal to nearly 20,000 square kilometres. The long-term trend was supercharged in the last decade, which included three of the worst fire years recorded in Canada. From 2016 through 2024, the average area burned annually was 2.84 million hectares, a 45-per-cent jump from the years through 2015.
Northern Manitoba wildfire evacuees’ return delayed because of mould, rotting food in homes
That increase translated into enormous additional devastation. If the scale of annual conflagration since 2016 had matched the average over the previous 57 years, about 79,000 square kilometres of Canada would not have burned. That’s an area greater than New Brunswick.
So it’s time to retire the debate over whether fires are getting worse. They are. It’s time to shift attention towards reacting accordingly. Fire cannot be eliminated. In fact, it is necessary for the propagation of some types of trees. But there are many things Canadians can do to mitigate their risk.
On an individual level, people can minimize the threat to their own home through the FireSmart approach, which includes measures such as cutting back greenery and blocking embers from getting into roof vents. When large-scale fires do bring palls of smoke, people can reduce the health danger by using air barriers and filters to create a clean room in their home and by scaling back outdoor exercise.
Governments can approve more controlled burns to remove fuel from forests or create fire-breaks around communities or infrastructure. They can also beef up fire-fighting capabilities so that crews can tackle blazes in more places at once, during a season that is now longer than the historical norm. And government can offer better support to people forced to evacuate their communities, as recently called for by Manitoba’s Advocate for Children and Youth.
Wildfires are a terrifying phenomenon with the potential to destroy homes and lives. They may eventually force Canadians to abandon some of the more fire-prone parts of the country. And their power is being amplified by climate change, which is leading to warmer and drier weather.
It can be tempting to hope that the problem will simply go away. But this belief cannot be allowed to hold back action. Assuming that a declining overall number of fires means there is no crisis is to miss the forest for the trees.