‘Our new normal’: As climate change exacerbates wildfires, Canada faces a fiery future

As he looked out his window at the thick smog of wildfire smoke blanketing Toronto this week, Ze’ev Gedalof thought to himself, “This is our new normal.”

Global temperatures are climbing as a result of climate change, leading to longer and more intense wildfire seasons across Canada. As the world heats up, experts warn to brace for a fiery future.

“We’re going to see lots more wildfires in the coming years and decades as the climate warms,” said Gedalof, an associate professor researching forestry and climatology at the University of Guelph. “Climate scientists have been saying this for decades, and people are just not paying attention.”

Here’s what you need to know.

Is climate change making wildfires worse?

Although wildfires are a natural process that can be beneficial for the ecosystem, the events have been happening at an “unprecedented level” in recent years, Gedalof said.

“It’s not rocket science,” he continued. “When it gets warmer and drier, we’re going to see longer fire seasons and we’re going to see hotter fires.”

There are three main ingredients for a wildfire, according to John Innes, a professor of forestry at the University of British Columbia — its intensity hinges on the source of ignition (and how frequently they occur), the state of the fuel and the presence of conditions that spread the fire, like strong wind.

“Climate change affects all of those,” he said. Specifically, scientists expect more thunderstorms and windy conditions as the weather changes, which can spark and spread fires. Meanwhile, woods are drier as temperatures warm, providing for excellent fuel, Innes said.

“We are anticipating that it’s going to get hotter and warmer, particularly the springs and the autumns — and so the fire season becomes longer,” Innes continued, adding that there are no longer fire seasons in parts of the southern U.S. because the risk of fire has become present year-round. In “50 to 80 years,” Innes sees the same thing happening to Canada.

If a wildfire gets intense enough, it can even generate its own weather, including thunder and lightning — potentially spawning more fires, according to Jeff Brook, an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

Brook added that climate change has impacted the seasons in which certain species are active — like mountain pine beetles, which usually get killed off by the cold but are now able to survive year-round due to warming winters. As a result, they’ve become an epidemic in the B.C. interior, devastating forests — “and dead forests are even more susceptible to burning,” he said.

Wildfires to increase both in intensity and duration

While we can’t predict exact weather conditions in the future, climatologists say wildfires on average will increase in intensity and duration in coming years.

Kent Moore is a professor of physics at U of T Mississauga researching the dynamics of our climate system and its long-term impacts. “Typically by this time of year, about 200,000 hectares (of forest) would have burned in Canada,” he said. “We’re about ten times that this year.”

That’s not to say every year will be as intense going forward, but it will mean major fires will become more common: “There is a concept called return period, which is how often would one expect to see a fire season of this intensity.

“As the climate changes, we expect to see that return period go down — so rather than having a fire season like this once every 20 or 30 years, we may see a fire season like this every ten years or every five years,” Moore said.

And while occasional fires can be good for the ecosystem, the unprecedented burns in recent years are too much, said Gedalof: “Most of these ecosystems are going to take decades to adapt (to Canada’s new fire conditions) … These changes are happening much, much faster than ecosystems can respond to.”

The regions most at risk of fire change from season to season as conditions vary, said Innes. According to his most recent data, the areas at greatest risk now are British Columbia, western Alberta, western Quebec and eastern Ontario.

A vicious cycle: Wildfires are major polluters

In extreme years, wildfires can become major sources of greenhouse gasses. In 2021, wildfire emissions broke a new record in Canada, with an estimated carbon footprint of 270 million tonnes — more than the oil and gas sector and heavy industry combined.

Wildfires are “a very large contributor to greenhouse gas emissions,” said Brook, adding they’re an example of what climatologists call a “positive feedback” — climate change makes wildfires worse, which in turn makes climate change worse.

“It’s a vicious cycle,” he said. According to his research, when comparing total emissions in B.C. over the past five years, a bad year of forest fires has “four times the amount of greenhouse gas emissions as a quieter year.”

“If our boreal forests burn, they’ll dwarf (emissions) from our own human activities, which is concerning as this starts to happen more and more and more.”

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