2023 Canadian wildfires have consumed near double the area as the previous record - Image: Jesse Winter/Reuters

Some of Canada's wildfires likely made worse by human-driven climate change

Alejandra Borunde, npr, August 22, 2023

A record-breaking 59,000 square miles have burned across Canada this year, forcing nearly 1 out of every 200
Canadians to evacuate their homes and smothering vast parts of North America in chocking smoke. New
research shows some of those fires were likely made worse by climate change. During the early summer, the hot,
dry, windy weather that whipped Quebec's fires into infernos was at least twice as likely, and 20% more intense,
because of human-caused climate change, according to an analysis by the World Weather Attribution group, a
research organization centered at Imperial College, London. Weather that increases fire risk is "getting more
severe as climate change gets worse," says Clair Barnes, a climate scientist at the Grantham Institute at Imperial
College London and the study's lead author. "They will continue to do so until we stop emitting fossil fuels."

The study looked at human-caused climate impacts on fire weather, the conditions that make a spark likely to
catch and turn into a blaze. More intense fire weather leads to much more dangerous burns, says Mike Flannigan,
a fire scientist at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia. Hotter air temperatures suck moisture from
trees and duff along the forest floor, priming them to burn with taller, hotter flames. High winds can also cause
fires to spread so quickly they are difficult, or impossible, for firefighting teams to control.

"The increase in intensity, that's what worries me the most," Flanigan says. At home in Kamloops, British
Columbia, he coughs, as smoky air from local fires wafts through the room. Having that increase in intensity
means we're seeing more fires we cannot manage with direct attack." Just about 3 of Canada’s fires — usually
the most intense ones — cause nearly all the damage, Flannigan points out.

For all the destruction wildfires leave in their wake, it's important to remember that fires are an integral part of
Eastern Canada's ecology, says Martin Girardin, a forest ecologist with the Canadian Forest Service. The region's
forests evolved with fire and in many cases need it to stay healthy. Scientists can look thousands of years into the
past using climate archives, like tree rings and fragments of ancient charcoal preserved in the bottom of lakes, to
see that vast burns have ripped across the region’s forests at least every few hundred years. Periods in the past
have had even more frequent and widespread fires than the modern era. Scientists like Girardin expect human-
driven climate change, in tandem with decades or centuries of forest management decisions that in some cases
increase fire risk, to push modern fires to the edge of those historic bounds. "With climate change, we should
attain or exceed those levels," he says. […] This summer, fires have burned an area roughly the size of Florida.
That's more than twice as much as the next-most destructive season, 1989. Since 1959, the country's annual
burned area has more than doubled.

The fires have burned not just forest but through communities — a more and more common reality as fires cover
more ground and people's footprints expand, says Sandy Erni, a fire and disaster risk expert with Canada's Forest
Service. "Every Canadian has been affected in a way or another by the current fire season," she says. Four
firefighters have died this season. Nearly 200,000 people have had to evacuate due to the fires. Millions across
North America have breathed in dense, damaging smoke. […]

Fire experts have predicted for decades that climate change would push Canada's fires to burn more widely and
frequently. But their predictions are coming sooner than they even thought. "What we're seeing this year is the
signal of what we were anticipating to happen maybe 20 years from now," says Girardin. […]