Wildfires in Canada have so far consumed forests the size of Virginia. The province of Quebec recorded its largest-ever fire this month as it spread over an area 13 times the size of New York City. Huge fires, so vast and so intense that they could not be extinguished, that they broke out across the country.
Even if thousands of Canadians and foreign firemen keep on fighting more than 900 fire, Canada record forest fire season Wildfire and forest experts say traditional fire-fighting methods are no longer enough.
Instead of focusing on extinguishing fires, they said, forest fire departments, provincial governments and the logging industry must make fundamental changes to prevent fires from breaking out and spreading in the first place.
These include steps such as closing forests to people when conditions are ripe for fires and increasing patrols to detect smaller fires earlier, when there is still a chance to contain them.
The new strategies are important because wildfires across Canada are expected to become increasingly difficult to deal with as they grow more frequent and larger in hotter and drier conditions due to climate change.
“We could add billions and billions of dollars, and even then we wouldn’t be able to put out all the wildfires,” he said. Yves Bergerón, an expert in forest ecology and management at the University of Quebec. “We need a paradigm shift from seeing the role of forest fire agencies as putting out fires to protecting human society.”
Across Canada, wildfire prevention agencies and provincial governments, experts say, have been fighting wildfires the way they always do: responding to flare-ups by trying to extinguish or prevent them from spreading, or letting fires remotely away from communities and critical infrastructure simply burn.
Some provinces followed by banning the use of fire in the forest and eventually closing the forest completely.
But there are so many wildfires burning across Canada at once — even in eastern provinces like Quebec and Nova Scotia that don’t usually have the outbreaks common in western Canada — that wildfire agencies are overwhelmed, even with reinforcements from abroad.
Quebec’s agency, which is capable of fighting about 30 fires at once, has faced three to four times as many, experts say.
With just a few months left to bushfire season, nearly 28 million acres of forest have been burned as a result, a record for a wildfire season and five times as much. The annual average.
More 155,000 people were evacuated from their homes at several times, some more than once, and three firefighters were killed. Smoke from the fires has spread to the United States and through Western Europe, darkening the sky and turning air quality dangerous.
“We were overreacting,” said Michael Flannigana specialist in fire management at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia.
In provinces where human activity is suspected to be the cause of fires, such as Alberta and Nova Scotia, officials have implemented fire bans and closed forests, but only after the fires have burned and spread, and even though pre-breakout conditions present a high risk, Flannigan said.
“Alberta and Nova Scotia both used forest closures this year, but they used them too late, after fires broke out everywhere,” Mr. Flannigan said. “In the case of Alberta, you can see this upper ridge, this extreme weather event — hot, dry and windy — will arrive a week before.”
Flannigan said forest closures were “very uncommon but very effective in stopping man-made fires.
Political leaders are reluctant to close the forest, and even then only gradually, experts say, in part because of lost revenue and a ban on access to unpopular public lands.
But closing the forest early when conditions become extremely risky — and eliminating human activity that can cause fires, from recreational camping to the use of all-terrain vehicles — means restrictions can be lifted fairly quickly, experts say.
Cordy Tymstraa consultant in wildfire management and former science coordinator with Alberta’s Forest fire management agency, said Canadian provinces should follow the example of Australia, another country that often faces severe wildfires and where forests automatically close in the event of certain weather conditions.
“We need to come to a non-political approach or system that is automated,” Mr. Tymstra said. “Sorry, the forest is closed. You can’t drive your ATV down that road.”
It is important to close the forest early in the face of extremely hot, dry and windy conditions as any fire usually leads to the most destruction. In Canada, three percent of wildfires account for 97 percent of forests burned, Mr. Flannigan said.
Mr. Tymstra said that in areas prone to bushfires caused by lightning, such as British Columbia, patrols should be increased on high-risk days. The strategy should be to detect fires as early as possible to take advantage of the small window of perhaps 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, hit them fast before they exceed a certain size,” says Mr. Tymstra.
He added: “This year has been a huge call for change. “We need transformative change, a major rethink.”
Experts say Canada, whose vast boreal forest is considered one of the world’s largest terrestrial carbon stores, must shift to a policy of both reducing and preventing fires.
In Quebec, the forest fire department has traditionally focused on extinguishing fires in commercially viable logging areas, Bergeron said. It should refocus on making communities and infrastructure more fire resistant, such as creating buffer zones made of less flammable trees or plants.
Experts say reducing or eliminating power lines running through the forest will reduce the likelihood of ignition. Managed burning, common in some parts of the western United States, can be used to reduce the flammability of forests.
Encouraging the logging industry to cut in a mosaic pattern could slow the spread of fires. Urging the industry to plant faster-growing but less commercially valuable tree species, such as jackfruit pine, will accelerate forest regeneration.
But these changes will be costly, and some, such as those related to logging, will require delicate negotiations with a politically powerful industry. Reforms would also have to take place in each province responsible for fire fighting in their territory.
Mr Tymstra said bushfire agencies had been slow to get out of their traditional “comfort zones” by focusing solely on extinguishing fires.
“The model is always fighting fires, we lose,” Mr. Flannigan said. “The area burned in Canada has doubled since the 70s, largely due to human-caused climate change,” he said.
This year’s wildfires — as well as a series of record-breaking temperatures in Canada’s far north — have pushed the country’s forest management issues to the fore as the country and the rest of the world get hotter.
With climate change, wildfire season in Canada begins earlier in the spring and ends later in the fall. The largest and most destructive fires have increased in size in recent decades and are expected to continue to increase, he said. Yan Boulangera forest ecology specialist at the Canadian Forest Service who has studied modeling how Canadian forests will grow.
“It will become more and more difficult to put out these massive fires,” Boulanger said. “The more extreme the climate, the more intense the fires will become in terms of the amount of energy they release. We’ve seen this year some fires release so much energy that water bombers can’t put them out directly, much less put out by firefighters on the ground.”
“These fires are going to be much more intense and we’re going to have more fires,” Mr Boulanger said.
