Imperial College London’s World Weather Attribution has released a report on their findings regarding the effects of human-caused climate change on wildfires, finding that fossil fuel-driven climate change has caused extreme fire conditions in the NWT to be more than twice as likely to occur.
Almost 4 million hectares have been burned in Canada this fire season, largely driven by hot and dry weather in July. The Northwest Territories and western Ontario have been the most harshly affected, with hundreds of out-of-control fires.
“Since 2023, the wildfires we’ve seen across Canada have been fundamentally different in their scale and intensity. Our research is yet another piece of evidence for this shift being due to climate change,” said Dr. Theodore Keeping, Research Associate in Extreme Weather and Climate Change.
WWA conducted their research using climate models and observations, focusing on the 7-day and 30-day periods of most extreme fire conditions in Ontario and the NWT and comparing them to projections of what would be expected in a world without fossil fuel emissions.
One of their key findings was that fire conditions such as those seen this year are no longer rare and should be expected to reoccur every two to six years in the NWT and every six to fifteen years in Ontario. In models of a world without human-caused climate change, such events would be much rarer, occurring less than once every 40 years.
“Time and again we see the same results: climate change is a key driver behind uncontrollably large and unprecedented fires,” said Dr. Friederike Otto, Professor of Climate Science.
One element of this year’s fire season that WWA described as ‘particularly remarkable’ was burned area built up rapidly over a relatively short period of time, with more than 90% of the total occurring within a five-week period from the end of June to the end of July.
in orange lines for the Northwest Territories (top) and Ontario (bottom) regions. From the WWA report summary
WWA says that to continue to mount an effective response this wildfire season and those in the future, interagency coordination, flexible deployment across jurisdictions, and surge capacity are more important than ever.
Adapting to increased wildfire risk will require strengthening early warning systems, multi-risk zoning for land use, incorporating Indigenous knowledge, and improving forest resilience after fires occur by diversifying with less flammable tree species.
Canada’s climate conditions as well as the composition and natural fuel characteristics of Canadian forests make then highly susceptible to wildfires. As more and larger fires occur, fuel reduction methods will become less effective, and fires will become harder to control.
The WWA study also includes a component that examines the vulnerability and exposure context of this fire season, learning more about the various risk drivers associated with this event beyond the fires themselves.
“The impacts of these fires on public health and property have been extensive due in part to the large numbers of simultaneous fires across Canada and the rapid growth under extreme fire weather conditions, which are stretching available personnel and firefighting resources,” said Chris Boyer, Technical Advisor of Climate and Health at Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre.
Smoke from this summer’s wildfires has spread over hundreds of kilometers and affected millions of people in Canada and beyond, potentially causing health problems ranging from difficulty breathing to cardiac arrest, especially in populations with compounding vulnerabilities.
The study also found that Indigenous communities have been disproportionately affected by wildfires, both by evacuations of these communities being more difficult in remote locations, and repeated displacement disrupting cultural practices.
“Some of these communities are also dealing with the shortened response and recovery times between disasters due to the recent successive wildfires affecting longer-term resilience,” said Boyer.
Ultimately, the report concludes that unless the rampant burning of fossil fuels is curbed, wildfires across the planet, and especially in Canada, will only continue to grow more intense as the climate continues to change around us.
“The science backs up what people on the front lines already know: humanity’s addiction to burning massive amounts of coal, oil and gas is heating our planet, turning more of Canada’s vast forests into tinderboxes, and spreading dangerous smoke far beyond the flames,” said UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell.
When asked what message he had for Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, considering the federal government’s interest in making the West Coast Oil Pipeline a project of national interest, Dr. Keeping had this to say.
“I think that the message that I would want to send to Mark Carney very simply is that if you export fossil fuels, the impacts of the burning of those fossil fuels come home.”
More details about WWA’s findings, as well as their full study, can be found on the World Weather Attribution website.
