Global Courant
Another wave of smoke from wildfires has drifted into the US, blurring blue summer skies and raising worrying concerns about the increasing frequency of fires and how they relate to climate change.
More than 100 million people are being warned about air quality from Wisconsin to Vermont and as far as North Carolina as smoke from Canadian wildfires continues to drift south, though conditions are expected to slowly improve over the holiday weekend.
Air quality on both sides of the border has been affected by more than 500 active wildfires raging across Canada. Some fires have gotten so out of control that officials have no choice but to let them burn.
Meanwhile, at least 10 countries have deployed their own firefighters to help Canada put out the threatening communities whose residents rushed to evacuate.
Scientists keep repeating warnings that the effects of climate change have arrived, emphasizing wildfires and the plumes of toxic smoke generated by them will become more common.
As plumes of smoke rise from Canada’s forests, some may wonder why many of the fires are allowed to burn out of control.
This is why:
SOME FIRES ARE IN EXTREMELY REMOTE AREAS
While each Canadian province responds differently to the fires in their region, they all have common guidelines that emphasize the importance of prioritizing the fires to fight and those to leave alone.
Massive fires burning in remote areas — such as some currently burning in northwestern Quebec — are often too out of control to do anything about.
“When you have limited resources and you have a lot of fires, you protect life and property first,” Robert Gray, a Canadian wildfire ecologist, told CNN. “You’re protecting people, infrastructure, watersheds, so there’s a priority system.”
He added: “If you have those fires that burn all the way into your late 40s, and they don’t immediately threaten anything, you’re going to have to let them have their way.”
While the thought of massive fires burning through millions of acres of forestland may sound unfathomable, it’s not entirely new.
“There have always been fires that Canadian firefighters don’t fight. It’s expensive to do that, ecologically undesirable and just a bit of a mess with nature,” said Daniel Perrakis, a fire scientist with the Canadian Forest Service.
“The smoke is a problem, but even if we wanted to do something about it, it wouldn’t really be clear how to do it. You are talking about huge areas where there is no road access, in some cases no communities.”
Of the 522 fires currently burning, 262 are listed as uncontrollable across Canada, including British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec.
Besides remoteness and distance from people, terrain is another factor. Some fires are allowed to burn simply because they are too treacherous for firefighters to even attempt to deal with.
“These fires are so big you really can’t get people near them. The wind picks up, they move very fast, they can start ahead of you and they can trap crews,” Gray said.
THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH RESOURCES TO FIGHT ALL FIRES
Firefighters from at least 10 countries, including the US, Mexico, Costa Rica, Chile, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, South Korea and France, have been deployed since the first week of June to assist with the Canadian forest fires.
“Canada doesn’t have a lot of firefighting resources,” Gray said. “Individual provinces have their own contract crews, but they’ve brought in thousands of people from outside the country to help.”
One contributing factor to the lack of resources, evident in the current battle against the out-of-control fires, is funding, Gray acknowledged.
“They don’t usually spend a lot of money upfront on firefighting,” he continued. “But once the fires break out, surely governments can find all the money needed to suppress them.”
“International groups continue to say that you need to shift focus to risk mitigation and prevention up front so you spend less money on response and recovery,” he added. “It’s ridiculous. We spend billions of dollars as soon as the fire breaks out, but we don’t invest the money up front to contain the fires.”
NOT ENOUGH PREVENTION TACTICS TO REDUCE THE NUMBER OF FIRES
More needs to be done to reduce the likelihood of future wildfires, which could one day end in catastrophic tragedy.
One of the most effective fire prevention tactics is through prescription burns, which are fires deliberately lit as part of a forest management plan to reduce the risk of more serious and damaging fires.
“We’re not doing nearly enough prescribed fires in BC,” Gray said. “At the moment we burn about 10,000 hectares a year. The state of New Jersey burns more than we do here at BC.
Prescribed burns have been an important cultural and environmental tradition in Indigenous communities, who have lit low-intensity fires for thousands of years to rid the land of wildfire fuel such as debris, brush, undergrowth and certain grasses. Such fuel ignites easily, allowing for more intense flames, which are more difficult to fight.
The intentional burning practices can increase the resilience of the forests and reduce the likelihood of future wildfires.
Perrakis echoed Gray’s sentiments: “It would be very useful to have maybe 10 times or 20 times more prescribed burn than what we currently do.”
Since prescribed burns carry liability issues and the risk of ending in unintentional out-of-control fires if not done correctly and at the right time, this will require more government funding and proper training.
“We would take the fuel out of the fire before there’s even a fire,” Perrakis said. “It wouldn’t be used all over rural Canada, but very strategically around communities and other values and will be consistent with the local ecosystem.”
In addition to prescription burns, other tactics, such as large-scale dilution, need to be ramped up, Gray said.
“We need large-scale thinning in these forest types that don’t produce a lot of thick wood, so there are a lot of small trees and we need to start doing something with them,” he added. “We can take them to the bioeconomy, produce bioenergy markets, engineering, wood products; there are many things we can do with low value wood, and that is a lot of what is burning right now.”
THE ECOSYSTEM DEPENDS ON FIRES, AND CLIMATE CHANGE IS MAKE THEM WORSE
Fires have always served a vital ecological purpose on Earth, essential to many ecosystems. They restore nutrients to the soil, help plants germinate and remove decaying material. Without fires, overgrown foliage such as grasses and shrubs can prepare the landscape for worse flare-ups, especially during extreme droughts and heat waves.
Most of Canada is covered by boreal forest, the world’s largest and most intact biome. The ecosystem of trees such as spruce, pine and spruce makes up about one third of all forests on earth.
But it’s a fire-dependent ecosystem, meaning the species in the forest have evolved in the presence of fire, and fire “is an essential process for preserving biodiversity,” according to the Nature Conservancy.
“We have records going back to the 1700s and 1800s of yellow sky and black sky and smoky sky days.” he added. “It is the natural cycle of the boreal forest. There really isn’t much Canadian firefighters can do, even if they wanted to.”
While natural fires have always been present in the system and are usually caused by natural elements such as lightning, climate change is making them more frequent, increasingly uncontrollable and much more difficult to prevent.
A year ago, after enduring a record temperature of 121 degrees, the village of Lytton in British Columbia was razed to the ground by a wildfire, sharply drawing attention to the effects of climate change.
Emissions that trap heat have led to hotter and drier conditions, and wildfires are now burning longer and getting hotter in places where they have always been; meanwhile, fires also ignite and spread in unexpected places.
“We know that weather is the most important ingredient of fire behavior and that climate and weather are linked,” Perrakis said.
Another problem is that the increase in wildfires is caused by climate change and at the same time exacerbates climate change.
According to a 2022 study published in the journal Science Advances, boreal forests are carbon dense, releasing 10 to 20 times more carbon pollution that warms the planet for every unit of area burned by wildfires than other ecosystems. Over the years, researchers say it has become a vicious climate change feedback loop. Wildfire emissions are contributing to rising global temperatures, which in turn are fueling even more wildfires.
“Things are changing because of climate change, and that’s something that surprises everyone, even though we’ve been talking about it for decades,” Perrakis said. “It takes a big season like this before everyone really wakes up to what climate change looks like. It is undeniable.”
As Canadians near the fires evacuate as firefighters try to save their homes and communities, other larger fires burn freely with no way to contain them, and people in the US will continue to breathe unhealthy smoke.
It all begs the question: when will it end?
“People probably have to get used to it because it’s not something that came out of nowhere,” Perrakis said. “Climate change is undeniable, and now is the time to think about the future, 10 or 20 years from now, and what needs to be done.”
