Wildfires in Canada have so far burned forests roughly the size of the state of Virginia. The province of Quebec recorded the largest fire this month as it advanced over an area 13 times the size of New York City. Mega fires, too large and violent to be contained, have broken out across the country.
Even as thousands of Canadians and firefighters from abroad continue to battle more than 900 blazes, Canada’s record-breaking fire season makes it clear that traditional firefighting methods are no longer enough, fire and forestry experts say.
Instead of focusing on firefighting, wildfire agencies, provincial governments and the logging industry should make fundamental changes to prevent fires from igniting and spreading in the first place, they said.
This includes measures such as closing forests to people when conditions are ripe for fire and increasing patrols to spot small fires earlier, when there is a chance to prevent them.
The new strategies are important because wildfires, across Canada, are expected to become more difficult to fight as they grow more frequent and larger in warmer and drier conditions resulting from climate change.
“We can add billions and billions of dollars, and even then we won’t put out all the fires,” said Yves Bergeron, an expert in ecology and forest management at the University of Quebec. “We need a paradigm shift from seeing the role of wildfire agencies as firefighting to protecting human society.”
Across Canada, wildfire agencies and provincial governments are fighting wildfires the way they always have, experts say: reacting to fire outbreaks by trying to suppress them or prevent them from spreading, or allowing isolated fires far from communities and critical infrastructure to burn.
Some provinces followed by banning the use of fire in the forests and finally by closing the forests completely.
But so many wildfires have broken out across Canada at the same time — even in eastern provinces like Quebec and Nova Scotia that typically don’t experience the kind of attacks common in western Canada — that wildfire agencies are overwhelmed, even with overseas reinforcements.
The Quebec agency, which has the capacity to fight about 30 fires simultaneously, is faced with three to four times as many, experts said.
With a few months left in the wildfire season, the result is nearly 28 million hectares of forest burned, a record for a wildfire season and five times the annual average.
More than 155,000 people were evacuated from their homes at one point, some more than once, and three firefighters died. Smoke from the fires drifted into the United States and across to Western Europe, darkening the sky and making air quality hazardous.
“We were overreactive,” said Michael Flannigan, a fire management expert at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia.
In provinces where human activity is suspected of causing the fires, such as Alberta and Nova Scotia, officials have implemented fire bans and closed forests, but only after the fires have ignited and spread, and even if conditions before the outbreaks indicated a high risk, Mr. Flannigan said.
“Alberta and Nova Scotia both used forest closures this year, but they used them too late, after the fires burned across the landscape,” Mr. Flannigan said. “In Alberta’s case, you can see this upper ridge, this extreme weather event — hot, dry and windy — coming a week in advance.”
Forest closures are “unpopular but very effective at stopping human-caused fires,” Mr. Flannigan said.
Political leaders have been reluctant to close forests, and even slowly, experts say, in part because of the loss of revenue and the unpopularity of closing access to public lands.
But closing forests early when conditions become more dangerous — and eliminating human activity that can fuel fires, from recreational camping to the use of all-terrain vehicles — means the restrictions can be lifted quickly, experts say.
Cordy Tymstra, a wildfire management consultant and a former science coordinator at the Alberta Wildfire Management agency, said that Canadian provinces should follow the example of Australia, another country that often faces large forest fires and where forests are automatically closed when there are weather conditions.
“We have to go to an apolitical method or a system that’s automated,” Mr. Tymstra said. “Sorry, the forest is closed. You can’t drive your ATV on that trail.”
It is important to close forests early in the face of extremely hot, dry and windy conditions because any resulting fires usually lead to the most destruction. In Canada, three percent of forest fires account for 97 percent of forest fires, Mr. Flannigan said.
In areas where wildfires are caused by lightning like British Columbia, Mr. Tymstra said, patrols should be increased on dangerous days. The strategy should be to see the fires as soon as possible to take advantage of a small window of maybe as little as 20 minutes to try to extinguish them before they become more dangerous and more difficult to control.
“Your best investment is to hit them hard, hit them fast, before they get past a certain size,” Mr. Tymstra said.
“This year is a very strong call for change,” he added. “We need a change of change, a big rethink.”
Canada, whose vast boreal forest is considered one of the largest terrestrial carbon vaults in the world, should move to a policy of fire mitigation and prevention, experts said.
In Quebec, the wildfire agency has historically focused on putting out fires in areas where commercial logging is possible, Mr. Bergeron said. There should be a renewed focus on making communities and infrastructure more fire-resistant by, for example, creating buffers made up of less flammable trees or plants.
Reducing or eliminating power lines that run through forests can reduce ignitions, experts say. Managed burns, common in some parts of the western United States, can be used to reduce forest fires.
Encouraging the logging industry to cut mosaic patterns will slow the spread of fires. Encouraging industry to plant faster-growing but commercially less valuable tree species, such as jack pine, can accelerate forest regeneration.
But these changes can be expensive and some, such as those related to logging, will require delicate negotiations with a politically powerful industry. Reforms must also take place in each of the provinces, which are in charge of fire suppression in their territories.
Wildfire agencies, Mr. Tymstra said, are slowly getting out of their traditional “comfort zone” of focusing only on putting out fires.
“The model of fighting all fires all the time, we’re going to lose,” Mr. Flannigan said. “The area burned in Canada has doubled since the 70s,” he said, driven “largely, not only, by human-caused climate change.”
This year’s wildfires — as well as a series of record-breaking temperatures in Canada’s far north — have pushed to the fore the issue of managing the country’s forests as the country and the rest of the world warm.
With climate change, Canada’s wildfire season is starting earlier in the spring and ending later in the fall. The largest and most destructive fires have grown in size in recent decades and are expected to continue to grow, said Yan Boulanger, a forest ecology expert with the Canadian Forest Service who works on modeling how Canada’s forests will evolve.
“It’s going to be more and more difficult to fight these big fires,” Mr. Boulanger said. “The more extreme the climate, the more intense the fires will be in the amount of energy they release. We’ve seen this year some fires release so much energy that they can’t be directly combated by airplanes with water bombs, especially by firefighters on the ground.”
“These fires are going to get worse and we’re going to have more of them,” Mr. Boulanger said, adding that the resulting smoke “will reach the United States, maybe not every year, but very often.”