Wildfires in Canada have so far scorched forests the size of the state of Virginia. The province of Québec this month recorded its largest-ever fire as it moved across an area 13 times the size of New York City. Mega fires, so large and savage that they are simply unstoppable, have broken out across the country.
Even as thousands of Canadians and firefighters from abroad continued to fight more than 900 fires, Canada’s record-breaking wildfire season has made it clear that traditional firefighting methods are no longer enough, wildfire and forest experts say.
Instead of focusing on putting out flames, wildfire agencies, county governments and the logging industry need to make fundamental changes to prevent fires from starting and spreading in the first place, they say.
They include steps such as closing forests to people when conditions are ripe for fires and increasing patrols to spot smaller fires earlier, when there is still a chance to contain them.
New strategies are critical as wildfires, across Canada’s expanse, are expected to become increasingly difficult to fight as they become more frequent and larger in the hotter and drier conditions brought about by climate change.
“We can add billions and billions and billions of dollars, and even then we wouldn’t be able to put out all the wildfires,” said Yves Bergeron, an expert in forest ecology and management at the University of Quebec. “We need a paradigm shift from seeing wildfire agencies’ role as putting out fires to protecting human society.”
Across Canada, wildfire agencies and provincial governments are fighting wildfires as they always have, experts say: responding to fire outbreaks by trying to suppress or prevent them from spreading, or simply letting remote fires burn far from communities and vital infrastructure.
Some provinces followed suit by banning the use of fire in forests and eventually closing forests altogether.
But at the same time, so many wildfires were breaking out across Canada — even in eastern provinces like Quebec and Nova Scotia, which don’t usually experience the kind of outbreaks common in Western Canada — that wildfire agencies were overwhelmed, even with overseas reinforcements.
Quebec’s service, with the capacity to put out about 30 fires at a time, has dealt with three to four times as many fires, experts said.
With just a few months left in the wildfire season, the result has already burned nearly 28 million acres of forest, a record for a single wildfire season and five times the annual average.
More than 155,000 people have been evacuated from their homes at any one time, some more than once, and three firefighters have died. Smoke from the fires has drifted into the United States and Western Europe, darkening skies and making air quality dangerous.
“We’ve been too reactive,” said Michael Flannigan, a fire control expert at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia.
In provinces where human activities are believed to have started fires, such as Alberta and Nova Scotia, officials introduced fire bans and closed forests, but only after the fires had already ignited and spread, and even though conditions before the outbreaks indicated high risk, Mr Flannigan said.
“Alberta and Nova Scotia both applied forest closures this year, but they applied them too late, after the fires raged across the landscape,” Mr. Flannigan said.
Forest closures are “deeply unpopular, but very effective at stopping man-made fires,” said Mr. Flannigan.
Political leaders are reluctant to close forests, and even then only gradually, experts say, in part because of a loss of revenue and the unpopularity of closing access to public lands.
But by closing forests early when conditions become extremely risky — and eliminating human activities that could cause fires, from recreational camping to off-road vehicle use — the restrictions could be lifted fairly quickly, experts said.
Cordy Tymstra, a wildfire management consultant and former science coordinator at Alberta’s Wildfire Management agency, said Canadian provinces should follow the lead of Australia, another country that often experiences major wildfires and where forests automatically close when certain weather conditions occur.
“We need to move to an apolitical approach or a system that is automated,” Mr Tymstra said. ‘Sorry, the forest is closed. You can’t drive your ATV down that trail.”
It is critical to close forests early in the face of extremely hot, dry and windy conditions, as any resulting fires typically lead to the most destruction. In Canada, three percent of wildfires account for 97 percent of forests burned, said Mr. Flannigan.
In areas where wildfires are often caused by lightning, such as British Columbia, patrols should be increased on high-risk days, said Mr. Tymstra. The strategy should be to discover fires as soon as possible to take advantage of a small time frame of maybe just 20 minutes to try to put them out before they become more dangerous and difficult to control.
“Your best investment is to hit them hard, fast, before they exceed a certain size,” Mr Tymstra said.
“This year has been a very loud call for change,” he added. “We need a transformational change, a major rethink.”
Canada, whose vast boreal forest is considered one of the world’s largest terrestrial carbon vaults, needs to shift to a policy of both reducing and preventing fires, experts say.
In Quebec, the wildfire agency has traditionally focused on putting out fires in commercially viable logging areas, Mr. Bergeron said. It should again focus on making communities and infrastructure more resistant to fires, for example by building buffers of less combustible trees or plants.
Reducing or eliminating power lines running through forests would reduce inflammation, experts said. Managed burns, common in some parts of the western United States, can be used to reduce the flammability of forests.
Encouraging the logging industry to apply mosaic patterns could slow the spread of fires. Encouraging industry to plant faster-growing but commercially less valuable tree species, such as the jackpine, would speed up forest recovery.
But these changes would be costly and some, such as those related to logging, would require delicate negotiations with a politically powerful industry. Reforms should also take place in each of the provinces, which are responsible for fighting fires on their territory.
Wildfire agencies, Mr Tymstra said, have been slow to move out of their traditional “comfort zone” of focusing solely on putting out fires.
“We’re losing the model of fighting all fires all the time,” said Mr. Flannigan. “The area burned in Canada has doubled since the 1970s,” he said, driven “largely, not solely, by human-induced climate change.”
This year’s wildfires – as well as a series of record-breaking temperatures in Canada’s far north – have brought the issue of managing the country’s forests to the forefront as the country and the rest of the world heat up.
Due to climate change, the wildfire season in Canada begins earlier in the spring and ends later in the fall. The largest and most devastating fires have increased in size in recent decades and are expected to continue to grow, said Yan Boulanger, a forest ecology expert at the Canadian Forest Service who has worked to model how Canadian forests will evolve.
“It will become more and more difficult to fight these big fires,” Mr Boulanger said. “The harsher the climate gets, the fires will become more intense in the amount of energy they release. We have seen this year that some fires released so much energy that they could not be fought directly by water bombers, much less by firefighters on the ground.”
“These fires will be much more intense and we will have many more,” Mr Boulanger said, adding that the resulting smoke “will reach the United States, maybe not every year, but very often.”