Fires have traditionally burned an average of 2.5 million hectares of land in Canada yearly. But the 2023 fires were unusually large and widespread: by mid-July, 29 megafires, each exceeding 100,000 hectares, left a trail of destruction across the country. Canada released 647 megatons of carbon that year, generating approximately 31% of the global emissions from wildfires.

This year, wildfires swept across northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Smoke permeated the atmosphere in central Canada, the Great Lakes region and the northeastern United States, compromising air quality and reducing visibility in major cities.

Looking not too far into the future, the amount of forest burned by wildfire is projected to double as a result of a changing climate.

“A warming planet is contributing to longer fire seasons,” says Mike Flannigan, professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University. “Alberta’s fire season used to start in April. Now we’re seeing fires in March and February. The warmer the planet gets, the more lightning we expect. And the atmosphere gets more efficient at sucking moisture out of vegetation, the fuel for fire. The drier that fuel on the forest floor is, the higher the intensity of the fire, which is difficult to impossible to extinguish.”

Given the new reality, the burning question is how can Canada be better equipped to battle blazes that have increased in intensity and size, especially in the boreal forests? 

Fight smarter with precision tech

Earlier this year, the federal government announced a new wildfire-fighting initiative called WildFireSat, which will be the first government-owned satellite mission specifically designed to monitor all active wildland fires across Canada on a daily basis.

Spending money on more resources to extinguish larger fires is a waste. You want to get the fire at the start. That’s where the investment needs to be.

 – Mike Flannigan, wildland fire expert, Thompson Rivers University

Set to launch in 2029, seven microsatellites will feed the tracking information back to fire-management authorities. The data is intended to help those on the front lines identify high-risk wildfires and deploy resources and crews more strategically.

In recent years, start-ups have been testing a variety of tools to aid in battling forest fires. One company, Pano, makes AI-enabled cameras to spot wildfires; another called Rain has been piloting autonomous helicopters to douse them. Others have developed satellites and drones to monitor forests and weather.

Flannigan explains: “Say we’ve got 100 new fires. Which ones do we fight? What if we’ve only got enough resources to fight 20? Which are the important ones to fight, and which are the ones we can deal with later or just let Mother Nature run her course? Using machine learning helps make an informed decision when faced with that kind of situation.”

In a related effort, researchers at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus and B.C. Wildfire Service, the province’s wildfire-suppression service, have formed a partnership to develop a provincial wildfire camera network. Using 5G technology, the cameras detect smoke from wildfires and share real-time data to support evacuation planning, resource deployment and wildfire behaviour predictions.

The Washington Post reports that, since 2023, more than 100 new wildfire-related technologies have launched in the United States and around the world. Many employ artificial intelligence in wildfire detection, such as FireSat, an initiative undertaken by the non-profit Earth Fire Alliance, with funding from Google and the Moore Foundation. Drawing on “high-res multispectral satellite imagery,” FireSat is designed to feed updates in 20-minute intervals to first responders, citing the location of active fires. The data will be accessible through phones, tablets and laptops. A prototype was deployed in March this year.

For now, though, firefighters mainly rely on people to alert them of a wildland blaze. To facilitate reporting, some provinces have created apps specifically to call in a fire. B.C. Wildfire Service’s mobile app features a “Report a Fire” function that automatically generates the coordinates of a fire’s location and sends them directly to the closest fire-management agency.

The high cost of forest fires

Economic losses due to forest fires are significant and likely to rise if current fire trends continue. Assistance funds now average about $340 million per year; in 2016/2017 and again in 2020/2021, the Disaster Financial Assistance Arrangements program paid $1.7 billion in assistance. (According to a government media release, WildFireSat is expected to save the Canadian economy between $1 billion and $5 billion over its first five years of operations.)

The 2016 wildfire in Fort McMurray, Alberta, is considered the costliest natural disaster in Canadian history at an estimated $9 billion in direct and indirect physical, financial, health and environmental impacts.

Equally alarming are the health impacts of smoke inhalation. Research suggests that as many as 1.5 million people die globally every year as a result of wildland fire smoke. Even short-term exposure is detrimental as it can lead to bronchitis, worsen asthma and create other health problems, as reported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

And there is the environmental cost, which itself contributes to worsening the main cause behind bigger, more frequent wildfires: a warming planet. Boreal forests have historically helped to slow climate change by storing carbon as trees grow rather than adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Forests absorb approximately a quarter of global carbon emissions.

With forest fires burning more than twice as much tree cover as they did 20 years ago, this vital carbon sink is shrinking.

The window of opportunity

Canada has been warming at about twice the global rate. Average temperatures in 2023 between May and October were 2.2°C above the norm over the previous 30 years and were largely responsible for the unusual weather patterns that fuelled the fires. Which is all to say that wildfire season will continue to last longer and burn more fiercely than before.

Flannigan believes fire-management plans should prioritize quick and early containment of wildfires to realize the highest return on investment. “Every fire starts small, whether it’s a campfire or lightning strike. That’s our window of opportunity,” he says. “Spending money on more resources to extinguish larger fires is a waste. You want to get the fire at the start. That’s where the investment needs to be.”

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Flannigan also highlights the importance of establishing a centralized agency solely dedicated to addressing natural disasters. “[Canada needs] an agency like the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency to deal at the national scale with floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and fire,” he says, noting that each province and territory devises its own fire-management plan and may not be in a position to share resources when a neighbouring region requires extra support.

Most Canadians agree that such an agency should be created. Recent polling conducted by Abacus Data shows there is overwhelming support for a national forest-firefighting unit. As Flannigan succinctly observes, “We live in a flammable environment.”

Victoria Foote is a writer and editor who specializes in clean energy and climate.

The post The fight against wildfires is getting increasingly high-tech appeared first on Corporate Knights.

From increased respiratory illnesses to morbidity, from adverse effects during pregnancy to the mental toll exacted in the aftermath of wildfire destruction, the blazes that have become an increasingly visceral sign of a warming planet are exacting a painful blow. “There is no safe level of exposure to wildfire smoke: the more exposure we get, the worse a range of health outcomes,” Marshall Burke, an associate professor in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, said earlier this year, in the midst of one of the worst wildfire seasons Los Angeles has seen.

Wildland wildfires are gobbling up about 26% less landmass than they did two decades ago, according to research led by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health and published by Science magazine. But the number of people exposed to fires has shot up some 40%, in part because people are living closer to areas now prone to igniting.

Wildfire smoke contributes to the deaths of about 40,000 people a year in the United States alone, a study published this year in Nature found, and that number is forecasted to rise to 70,000 people by 2050. A similar study published by the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research in 2024 found that wildfire smoke contributes to about 16,000 deaths in the United States, and that number could climb to close to 30,000 deaths by the middle of the century.

“There is consistent and significant evidence of an association between wildfire smoke exposure and an increased risk of emergency room visits, hospital admissions, physician visits, or medication dispensations for respiratory conditions.

– Health Canada

“This really points to the urgency of the problem,” Minghao Qiu, the lead author of the report, told NPR. “Based on our results, this should be one of the policy priorities, or the climate policy priority, of the U.S., to figure out how to reduce this number.”

Another study predicted that wildfire smoke will kill 1.4 million people every year by the end of the century. And while headlines are often focused on North American or European blazes, it’s in Africa where the greatest risk is playing out. The UN University study found that 85% of global exposure to fire was in Africa.

Half a pack a day

Wildfires are a major source of pollution. In fact, they are 10 times as toxic as air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels, a recent Stanford University study found. Smoke from wildfires can affect air quality in the immediate vicinity and stretch out over great distances. As flames gobbled up forests in Northern Ontario and Alberta this past June, Toronto briefly recorded the worst air quality reading in the world, while parts of the United States were covered by a smoky haze. In Detroit, for example, air quality readings during the wildfire summer were akin to smoking a quarter or half a pack of cigarettes a day, according to one pulmonologist.

“There is consistent and significant evidence of an association between wildfire smoke exposure and an increased risk of emergency room visits, hospital admissions, physician visits, or medication dispensations for respiratory conditions,” according to a study of available research conducted by Health Canada in 2024. There is “significant” evidence, for example, linking asthma to wildfire smoke exposure. Women, children and seniors faced increased risk of respiratory morbidity, the study noted.

Read more of our wildfire coverage

Canadian groups call for dramatic increase to wildfire defence funding

Massive wildfires are forcing governments worldwide to budget more for disaster

Canada is under attack by wildfires. It’s time to respond like it’s national defence.

The fight against wildfires is getting increasingly high-tech

A more nascent area of research is the impact that wildfires have on reproductive development. Researchers note that while there is limited comparative information, the most consistent evidence is for low birth weight and preterm birth as a result of wildfire smoke. The timing of exposure to wildfires also matters – with evidence pointing to the second and third trimesters as being the most delicate, and the severity of wildfires and proximity also influencing adverse birth effects. It’s not just about exposure to wildfire smoke; the mere occurrence of wildfires may also have an impact. “This is an important consideration, as increased maternal stress leading to the adverse birth outcomes could result from both wildfire smoke exposure and occurrence,” a 2024 Health Canada report warned.

Likewise, both exposure and occurrence may be taking a toll on mental health. A number of studies have found increased rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression in both children and adults, which is in line with the climate grief that many people express in an age of seemingly constant environmental crises. The impacts of a wildfire may stretch on for months, or even years. However, it’s not clear that wildfire smoke specifically is linked to adverse mental health effects, “given the difficulties in differentiating the impacts attributable to smoke from those due to trauma associated with the wildfire occurrence (for example, potential loss of property or livelihood, physical threat, evacuation).”

For Qiu, the Stanford researcher, the importance of adaptation is ever more glaring in our learning-to-live-with-wildfire future: “We need to explore what types of adaptation strategies are most useful.” He points to improving access to air purification at home and creating networks of clean-air centres to help people avoid exposure during smoke days.

Natalie Alcoba is a Buenos Aires–based journalist and senior editor at Corporate Knights.

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