Canada wildfire season already second worst on record as experts warn of ‘new reality'
More than 470 fires across the country are currently classified as 'out of control', according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC).
7,318,421 hectares of land in Canada have burned due to wildfires this year – close to 78% more than the five-year average of 4,114,516 hectares, according to the CIFFC's latest data.
The 2025 fire season is only behind the explosive 2023 wildfire season, which resulted in an astounding 17,203,625 hectares burned.
'This is our new reality… the warmer it gets, the more fires we see,' said Mike Flannigan, the BC research chair for predictive services, emergency management and fire science at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops.
A June analysis on the 2025 fire season in Canada published by United Nations University in Shibuya, Japan, concluded that the fires are a 'stark manifestation' of climate change and that warm, dry weather in the spring resulted in temperatures 2.5C above average.
The warmer temperatures extend the fire season and increase the frequency of lightning that sparks fires, said Flannigan. A hotter climate also causes the atmosphere to suck moisture out of fuel, dead vegetation and the forest floor – creating ideal conditions for fires to start, he explained.
'It means more of the material is dried out, is available to burn when the fire does come, it leads to bigger flames, higher intensity, which gets to be difficult to impossible to extinguish,' he said.
So far, the worst of the fires have been concentrated in the prairie provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, which together account for about 60% of the hectares burned so far this year in Canada.
Tens of thousands of people in communities across the country have been evacuated due to the wildfires. In Saskatchewan, the Canadian Red Cross reported it had assisted more than 17,000 people in the province from over 6,700 households to evacuate.
Thirteen communities in north-west Saskatchewan are under an evacuation order, several of which are First Nations, according to the province. One of the most affected areas of this year's wildfire season in the province is Denare Beach, a north-eastern village that was mostly destroyed in June due to a blaze.
The season has also now hit the east coast of Canada, as wildfires are currently raging across Newfoundland and Labrador and several towns are under evacuation orders.
John Abatzoglou, a professor of complex systems management at the University of California, Merced, co-authored the June report from United Nations University.
Abatzoglou said this year's fire season is the third year in a row Canada has seen fire activity that is well above average. The fires are also causing widespread smoke to cascade from the country into the United States as well, prompting severe air quality warnings in several states this month, is also an indication of how the fires are hurting populations beyond evacuations.
It's an international element of the fires that officials are having to contend with on a wider scale, Abatzoglou said.
'This is a really key point that's different from other natural hazards and its ability to impact everything from quality of life to … human health and even mortality,' he said.
Governments and public health officials will have to address how to change public behaviour and public policy to contend with 'smoke days', where you have to stay inside, he said.
'I know communities that may not have great infiltration systems … so more efforts there to provide resources to communities so that they can be safe indoors during acute smoke periods.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
BreakingNews.ie
2 minutes ago
- BreakingNews.ie
Pakistan floods leave 220 dead as rescuers pull 63 more bodies from landslides
Rescuers in north-west Pakistan have pulled 63 more bodies from homes flattened by flash floods and landslides, raising the death toll from rain-related incidents to at least 220, officials said. Pakistan has had above-normal rain which experts link to climate change, leading to floods and mudslides that have killed about 541 people since June 26, according to the National Disaster Management Authority. Advertisement Hundreds of rescue workers are still searching for survivors in Buner, one of several districts hit in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where torrential rain and cloudbursts triggered massive flooding on Friday, said Mohammad Suhail, a spokesman for the emergency services. Dozens of homes were swept away. Local residents look at flash flooding in Mingora (Naveed Ali/AP) First responders have been trying to recover bodies in the worst-hit villages of Pir Baba and Malik Pura, where most people died on Friday, according to Kashif Qayyum, a deputy commissioner in Buner. A local police officer, Imtiaz Khan, who narrowly escaped the deluges, said floodwaters carrying hundreds of boulders flattened dozens of homes within minutes in Buner. 'A stream near the Pir Baba village in Buner swelled without warning. At first, we thought it was a normal flash flood, but when tons of rocks came crashing down with the water, 60 to 70 houses were swept away in moments,' he told the Associated Press, adding that many bodies were left mutilated. Advertisement 'Our police station was washed away too, and if we hadn't climbed to higher ground, we would not have survived,' he said. Rescuers said that as water started to recede, they saw large swathes of the village destroyed, wrecked homes and giant rocks filling the streets. Damaged cars trapped in mud (Naveed Ali/AP) 'It was not just the floodwater, it was a flood of boulders as well, which we saw the first time in our lives,' said Sultan Syed, 45, who suffered a broken arm. Mohammad Khan, 53, said the floods 'came so fast that many could not leave their homes', he said. Advertisement Most of the victims died before reaching hospital, said Mohammad Tariq, a doctor at a government hospital in Buner. 'Many among the dead were children and men, while women were away in the hills collecting firewood and grazing cattle,' he said. Mourners attended mass funerals on Saturday as authorities supplied tents and food to people in Buner. According to the provincial disaster management authority, at least 351 people have died in rain-related incidents this week across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the northern region of Gilgit-Baltistan. Rescuers in Chositi village, Kishtwar district, Indian-controlled Kashmir (Channi Anand/AP) Meanwhile, in Indian-controlled Kashmir, rescuers scoured the remote village of Chositi in the district of Kishtwar on Saturday, looking for dozens of missing people after it was hit by flash floods two days ago, killing 60 and injuring 150. Advertisement Thursday's floods struck during an annual Hindu pilgrimage in the area. Authorities have rescued more than 300 people while 4,00 pilgrims have been taken to safety. Such cloudbursts are increasingly common in India's Himalayan regions and Pakistan's northern areas, and experts have said climate change is a contributing factor. Pakistani officials said rescuers have evacuated more than 3,500 tourists trapped in flood-hit areas across the country since Thursday. Many tourists have ignored government warnings that urged people to avoid flood-hit regions in the northern and north-western regions, fearing more landslides and flash floods. Advertisement
BBC News
an hour ago
- BBC News
Surrey heath wildfire caused by 'out-of-control campfire'
Parents have been urged to speak to their children about the dangers of wildfires after an "out-of-control campfire" ripped through fire engines, a water carrier and specialist off-road vehicles were called to the blaze on Friday afternoon after it began to spread across Blackheath Common, near Fire & Rescue Service (SFRS) advised residents to keep windows and doors closed following the fire, which affected four hectares (9.8 acres) of land, while police closed Sample Oak Lane by the Chilworth level Friday evening, a fire service spokesperson said it had been contained, but crews would remain on scene overnight to monitor hotspots. In a post on Facebook, SFRS said: "If you are a parent/guardian of a young person please have a chat with them about the dangers of wildfires in this heat."
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘Unlike any other kind of fear': wildfires leave their mark across Spain
On Saturday, the people of Paüls will celebrate the feast of their patron saint, Sant Roc, with a mass, followed by a communal meal eaten at stone tables, jota folk dances and a profound and lingering sense of relief. Last month's wildfire – which turned the night skies a hellish orange, blackened the surrounding hills and devoured 3,300 hectares (8,154 acres) of land – was a near-disaster that stirred memories of the 2009 blaze in nearby Horta de Sant Joan that killed five firefighters. 'People were afraid that everything would burn and that they'd lose everything,' says Enric Adell, the mayor of the small Catalan mountain town. 'They were scared of getting trapped and not being able to get out of the village.' The fear of a fire like that, he adds, is unlike any other kind of fear. 'We've been through a pandemic and a nationwide power cut and torrential rains, but a fire on this scale was something else – as was the aftermath,' says Adell. In the hills above the village square, the charred trees are a reminder of what could have happened without the bravery of hundreds of firefighters, one of whom, Antonio Serrano, lost his life. Changing winds and sheer luck also played a part. 'When a fire hits,' says the mayor, 'it really leaves its mark.' This summer's fires have already left their mark across the length and breadth of Spain, from Galicia and Castilla y León in the north-west to Catalonia in the north-east, from the smart suburbs outside Madrid to Extremadura in the south-west, and all the way down to the beaches of Tarifa in Andalucía. As well as panic and the increasingly familiar tang of smoke, this year's fires have brought with them a sense of deja vu. The hot, deadly summer of 2022 yielded images that laid bare Spain's huge vulnerability as the effects of the climate emergency became increasingly plain. Footage that went around the world that July showed Ángel Martín, a 53-year-old man from Tábara in Castilla y León, using one of his excavators to try to stop the fires in the Sierra de la Culebra reaching the town. In the video, the machine is engulfed by the flames before Martín runs out of the inferno, the clothes burning off his frame. Martín, a much-loved figure in Tábara, suffered burns to 80% of his body and died in hospital three months later. Three years on, Spain is once again on the defensive. 'The fires are one of the parts of the impact of that climate change, which is why we have to do all we can when it comes to prevention,' the country's environment minister, Sara Aagesen, told Cadena Ser radio this week. 'Our country is especially vulnerable to climate change. We have resources now but, given that the scientific evidence and the general expectation point to it having an ever greater impact, we need to work to reinforce and professionalise those resources.' As politicians engage in blame games, experts warn, once again, that all the bickering over the number of water-dumping planes misses the point. The current spate of fires, they add, was entirely predictable and underlines the need for a fundamental rethink of land use and management in a continent that is on the frontline of the climate emergency. 'This year's fires are basically on the same level as those we saw in 2022 and 2023,' says Marc Castellnou, the head of forestry for the Catalan regional fire department and a fire analyst at the University of Lleida. 'Since 2017, we've seen this change towards more extreme fires … It's nothing new – and it's happening because climate change is bringing higher temperatures for much longer periods.' The dynamics are not hard to discern. If you have annual heatwaves that arrive one after the other – and last longer and longer – in a country where decades of rural depopulation have left huge areas of land untended, overgrown or given over to homogenous cultivation, then you will have massive fires that are getting harder to fight. As one Spanish scientist noted earlier this week: 'We have all the ingredients for the molotov cocktail we're seeing right now.' Cristina Montiel, a professor at Madrid's Complutense University and an expert in forest fires and land use, says that while Spain's firefighters and other emergency services are doing an 'extraordinarily magnificent' job that is keeping far greater disasters at bay, the problem lies with society as a whole. Despite the annual fires and the abundance of evidence, she says, 'it turns out that we are not – and we do not want to be – aware of the danger in which we're living'. If we were even a little aware, she adds, 'we would take the measures and decisions to protect ourselves'. Fifty years ago, says Montiel, most forest fires were intentional. But today's forest fires are increasingly caused by accidents or negligence and are spreading so voraciously because of two factors: landscape change and climate change. It is an explosive combination. This year's heavy spring rains led to an increase in plant growth that has now been dried out by successive heatwaves, leaving all that combustible vegetation, much of it in neglected areas, ready to serve as fuel for the fires. The situation is further complicated by the phenomenon of 'flash droughts', which can quickly dry out even well-irrigated agricultural land, and which are likely to become more common as global heating continues. Paüls is a case in point. Its population has dwindled over the decades and fewer and fewer people in the area work the land because of the shrinking economic rewards. 'If there were 100 people working the land before, now there are 30,' says Adell. 'If the same policies continue and things remain as hard as they are, then in a few years, there'll be almost no one.' Sign up to This is Europe The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment after newsletter promotion All those years of abandonment had left ravines, gullies and pine forests overgrown and made them into temperature-activated timebombs. Last month's fire, says the mayor, was simply uncontrollable: 'We saw that there was no way of stopping it.' If there is much truth in the idea that preparation is all – and in the old maxim that 'fires are put out in winter' – the challenge now lies in undoing decades of neglect and bad planning that have seen the landscape forgotten and the appearance of housing developments in hazardous places. But Montiel cautions that the much-needed rethink will be neither quick nor easy. 'If things took a turn for the worse 50 years ago, we can now start changing them for the better,' she says. 'But you can't think that starting to change things now will pay off within two summers because that isn't true. These things are processes.' There are, however, already some signs that the message is getting through. After the Horta de Sant Joan fire 16 years ago, a group of shepherds approached the Catalan fire department to ask what they could do to prevent more blazes. The result was the Ramats de Foc (Fire Flocks) scheme, in which shepherds coordinate with firefighters to graze flocks of sheep and goats in areas with a high density of undergrowth and therefore high risk of fire. In areas cleared by the ruminants, firefighters have better access and, as there is less undergrowth, it is also easier to bring fires under control should they break out. 'We don't need more helicopters or firefighters,' says Marc Arcarons, who coordinates the initiative, which was launched in Girona in 2017 under the aegis of the not-for-profit Pau Costa Foundation. 'We could buy 200 more helicopters and it won't solve the problem. It's all about prevention and management.' The scheme also helps shepherds increase their existing incomes as those who participate can sell their meat or cheese at a premium as certified Ramats de Foc, so consumers know the produce is contributing to the preservation of the environment and the survival of traditional agriculture. About 120 shepherds have joined the project, which covers about 8,000 hectares (20,000 acres) in Catalonia. Similar schemes are planned or under way in the Canary Islands and Andalucía. Arcarons says that depopulation – and decreasing dependence on woodlands for building material and grazing since the 1960s – has caused what was once a patchwork of vineyards, olive groves and wheat fields to revert to dense forest. Fast-growing and highly flammable pines dominated, undergrowth flourished and this, combined with climate change and more frequent and longer periods of drought, has led to fires that are extremely difficult to control. 'It's like a chimney,' says Arcarons. 'If you keep throwing wood on the fire eventually the chimney will catch fire and the house will burn down.' Castellnou agrees that without adapting our landscapes to the realities of climate breakdown, we are sealing our fate. 'There's no point talking about more aeroplanes,' he says. 'If we limit our capacity for extinguishing fires by thinking we just need enough equipment to put them out then we're creating an unsustainable, artificial situation for summer after summer of extreme weather.'
