A worker walks in a devastated neighbourhood in west Jasper, Alberta on Aug. 19.AMBER BRACKEN/The Canadian Press
Through the 2000s and early 2010s, a summer of wildfires that burned more than one million hectares – the size of about two Prince Edward Islands – became common in Canada. Some years the annual area burned spiked past two million hectares.
In the mid-2010s, wildfires worsened. More than three million hectares burned in four out of five summers. It was the equivalent, annually, of more than half of Nova Scotia.
All those numbers, which once looked so big, were made to look small last year, when unprecedented wildfires rampaged across Canada and smoke choked the skies for weeks on end. In the final tally, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, 17.3 million hectares burned in 2023 – about the same amount of land as a quarter of Saskatchewan.
This year, what once would have been deemed disastrous instead garners only passing attention. In late July, there was an outpouring of national concern when the historic town of Jasper in the eponymous national park west of Edmonton was hit by a fire, destroying about a third of the buildings there. But the news this summer wasn’t beset by a constancy of wildfires, smoke, evacuations and homes lost.
Yet the latest data from the Forest Fire Centre may be a surprise to many people. As of Sept. 9, wildfires have burned about 5.2 million hectares. That’s about the same as all of Nova Scotia – and it is the second most of any year this century, and one of the worst on record. But the wildfires – in the Northwest Territories and across northern British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan – raged even as not much notice was taken.
As wildfires intensify and proliferate, there is a danger that people in Canada and elsewhere become inured to all the annual damage and all that is lost. What was not long ago extraordinary and fearsome could morph into something more ordinary, widespread destructive wildfires as a fact of life, a normal part of summer.
The science on the wildfires of 2023 should be a wake-up call that such lashings from climate change should not be taken as anything like normal. A year ago, the continuing role of climate change in wildfires was already clear. World Weather Attribution concluded that the likelihood of the wildfires in eastern Canada had “more than doubled” because of climate change.
This year, in mid-August, an article in Nature Communications detailed the wildfires of 2023 and how human-caused climate change “enabled sustained extreme fire weather conditions.” The average temperature in Canada from May through October last year was 2.2 C warmer than the three-decade average from 1991 through 2020. The conclusion from scientists is clear, part of the growing consensus that the effects of a hotter climate aren’t part of some abstract future but are very much part of the present: “The 2023 fire season heralds the emergence of severe climate change impacts on fire activity decades earlier than previously anticipated.”
Wildfires are, to an extent, fuelling future wildfires. An article in Nature in late August estimated greenhouse emissions from last year’s fires were comparable to the annual fossil-fuel emissions of large countries. Nature cited the hot and dry weather and, while the high temperatures and drought were extreme compared with historical data, the paper stated: “Projections indicate that these temperatures are likely to be typical during the 2050s, even under a moderate climate mitigation scenario.”
Policies to fight back against fires are challenging. The No. 1 goal has to be to slash greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels. Climate change didn’t cause wildfires but it has made them more likely and more severe. But such action will unfold over several decades and has little impact on the foreseeable future.
Preparing for wildfires as part of adaptation strategies is smart – but Jasper is an example of how some preparation may not necessarily be enough. Parks Canada and the municipality of Jasper had reduced the amount of fuel – trees – near Jasper itself, removing 1,000 hectares over about two decades. In the late 2010s a specific firebreak was also created near Jasper. Such work is costly and slow.
Worsening wildfires are a warning. Just because the alarm keeps on ringing, year after year, is no reason to ignore it. The clanging should never be considered ordinary.