Temperature records broken in Spain and Portugal
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an hour ago
- Yahoo
470 'out of control' wildfires burning across Canada: Striking images from across the country
The 2025 wildfire season in Canada is now the second-worst on record with wildfires raging across various provinces Atl-Wildfires 20250805 With over 470 wildfires classified as burning "out of control" in Canada, the 2025 wildfire season is already the second-worst on record. And to make matters worse, climate experts say this could be Canada's "new normal." 'This is our new reality… the warmer it gets, the more fires we see,' Mike Flannigan, the B.C. research chair for predictive services, emergency management and fire science at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops told CBC News. The latest data posted by the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC) indicates that over 7.3 million hectares of land in the country has burned due to wildfires this year. This number is 78 per cent more than the five-year average of 4.1 million hectares. More than 470 fires across the country are currently classified as 'out of control', according to the CIFFC. These numbers surpass the next worst season in 1989, but are behind the record-setting 2023 season, according to a federal database of wildfire seasons dating back to 1972. The last three wildfire seasons are now among the 10 worst on record since Canada started actively tracking them. The prairie provinces, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, account for more than 60 per cent of the area burned so far. The Manitoba government extended its regional state of emergency as 14,000 people remain displaced due to intense wildfires as of Aug. 7. Thirteen communities in north-west Saskatchewan are under an evacuation order, several of which are reportedly First Nations. Wildfire smoke has been intensifying over parts of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and the northern portion of the Avalon Peninsula. Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Josh Hogan declared a regional state of emergency over the weekend and issued evacuation alerts for various parts of the province. 20,000 people remain poised to flee as a new fire roars south of St. John's, Newfoundland's largest city. Two fires burning in New Brunswick have also been classified as "out of control" by authorities, with one of the blazes more than doubling in size overnight. The Miramichi wildfire is currently burning into 6th day, and has nearly tripled in size over the last 24 hours. British Columbia and Ontario are all also battling raging wildfires across their provinces. An out-of-control wildfire has forced evacuations within the Vancouver Island community of Port Alberni. At least 300 people have been evacuated so far. The Mount Underwood wildfire is located to the south of Port Alberni, a city of around 19,000 people. There are currently 97 active wildfires in B.C. Fire crews in the City of Kawartha Lakes in Ontario are battling at least four active wildfires as of Tuesday, Ministry of Natural Resources officials said. Meanwhile, Prince Edward Island is experiencing record-breaking temperatures as a hot, dry spell continues to affect the province. Several business in Halifax's Bayers Lake Business Park are being asked to evacuate as fire crews battle a rapidly growing wildfire in the area. Climate change, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, has made Canada's fire season longer and more intense, climate experts maintain. "We really need to do a lot more to manage our forest, to reduce the impact of climate change and better prepare the communities that are at risk," Anabela Bonada, managing director of climate science at the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation at the University of Waterloo said in an interview with The Canadian Press.
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
This is our second-worst wildfire season on record — and could be the new normal
This year's wildfire season is already the second-worst on record in Canada, and experts are warning that this might be the new normal. More than 7.3 million hectares have burned this year so far, more than double the 10-year average for this time of year, according to the latest figures from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC) and Natural Resources Canada. "It's the size of New Brunswick, to put it into context," Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University, told CBC News. The last three fire seasons are among the 10 worst on record, according to a federal database dating back to 1972, with 2023's devastating blazes taking the top spot. "I've never seen three bad fire seasons in a row," Flannigan, who has been studying fires since the '70s, said. "I've seen two in a row: '94, '95. I've never seen three. This is scary." Manitoba and Saskatchewan account for more than half the area burned so far, but British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario are all also well above their 25-year averages. Fire bans have been announced in multiple provinces, including a total ban on going in the woods in Nova Scotia. Meanwhile, the military and coast guard were called in to help fight fires in Newfoundland and Labrador this week. Around 1,400 international firefighters have also helped fight Canadian fires so far this year, according to the CIFFC. Scientists say that climate change, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, has created longer fire seasons and drier landscapes, sparking more intense and widespread forest fires. "I used to always say… some years are cooler and wetter and we will get quiet years," Flannigan said. "But maybe every year's going to be a bad fire year now." Dry conditions across the country have allowed fires to quickly balloon this fire season. "The forests of Canada are too dry, too hot," Environment Canada climatologist David Phillips told CBC News. "This year… there's no kind of reprieve from what we've seen." This year has seen notable blazes in regions where we haven't historically, such as Newfoundland and Labrador, where one fire has grown to over 5,200 hectares. Yan Boulanger, a research scientist in forest ecology at Natural Resources Canada, says Newfoundland "is not used to [seeing] huge fires." "But we will have to get more and more used to it, because those ecosystems are also projected to see an increase in fire activity in the upcoming decades." The other outlier is Quebec, which was one of the hardest-hit provinces in 2023, when an estimated 4.5 million hectares burned. This year, the province has had a much milder fire season, thanks to frequent precipitation in the spring and early summer, Boulanger says. But a sudden bout of dry conditions in August, usually a quiet fire month for the province, has experts recommending vigilance. Consequences of repeated fires Bad back-to-back fire seasons can have huge consequences. Fire is a natural part of the lifecycle for many tree species, but a forest can become damaged to the point where trees cannot regrow in the area for years, or even decades. It's called "regeneration failure." "The problem is when we have too much fire and we are getting out of what we are calling the natural variability of the system," Boulanger said. "When such things happen… the forest can lose its resilience." Scientists are already seeing it in regions of Quebec that were heavily damaged in 2023, and in parts of the Northwest Territories and Alberta, Boulanger says. Right now, around 300,000 to 400,000 hectares are affected by regeneration failure in Quebec. Fewer trees means less carbon being stored, exacerbating the problem of increased emissions that occur during widespread forest fires. The 2023 fires produced nearly a quarter of the year's global wildfire carbon emissions. Meanwhile, wildfire smoke has been linked to a myriad of health complications, including a higher risk of dementia. WATCH | Calls picking up for a national wildfire agency: With intense wildfires becoming an annual problem in Canada on a new scale, we need more strategies, experts say. The Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs (CAFC) has called on Ottawa to establish a national forest fire co-ordination agency to ensure that personnel and equipment can be distributed across the country when different regions are seeing heavy fires, and that fire chiefs are at the table when national policies are made. The government has been studying the possibility of creating a national disaster response agency since 2023, and met with CAFC to discuss it in December. But it's time to move beyond the planning stage, according to Ken McMullen, the organization's president and fire chief in Red Deer, Alta. "All parties are saying that they think it's a good idea. The reality is nobody's helped pick up the ball and get it across the finish line," he said. Flannigan, at Thompson Rivers University, supports the idea, but believes we need to go further and create a robust national emergency management agency that would be able to provide training for fighting wildfires, forecast where fires are likely to occur and whether they're a danger, and then move resources there proactively. "Yes, it's going to cost money, but if it prevents one Jasper, one Fort McMurray, it pays for itself," he said, referring to the Alberta communities ravaged in recent years by fires. "The status quo doesn't seem to be working. We're spending billions and billions of dollars on fire management expenditures, but our area burned has quadrupled since the 1970s."
Yahoo
11 hours ago
- Yahoo
Two killed in European wildfires as heatwave intensifies
Two men died and thousands were forced from their homes on Tuesday as wildfires fuelled by a heatwave scorched southern Europe. Heat alerts were issued in Italy, France, Spain, Portugal and the Balkans, with temperatures expected to soar above 40C. The heatwave is another sign of climate change, which is fuelling longer, more intense and increasingly frequent bouts of extreme heat. "Thanks to climate change, we now live in a significantly warmer world," Akshay Deoras, a research scientist at the meteorology department in Britain's University of Reading told AFP, adding that "many still underestimate the danger". An employee of a Spanish equestrian centre who suffered serious burns died in hospital as winds of up to 70 kilometres (43 miles) per hour whipped flames through Tres Cantos, a wealthy suburb north of Madrid, officials said. In Montenegro, a soldier died and another was seriously injured when their water tanker overturned while fighting wildfires in the hills north of the capital, Podgorica. A child died of heatstroke in Italy on Monday. The equestrian centre employee was the first fatality from dozens of wildfires that have hit Spain since a heatwave began last week. Spanish media said he had become trapped by the flames as he tried to save horses. Hundreds of residents of Tres Cantos fled their homes due to the risk from the fast-moving blaze, which was contained on Tuesday morning. The fire damaged several homes and "above all" agricultural facilities, Carlos Novillo, Madrid's regional environment chief, told reporters. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said on X that rescue services "are working tirelessly to extinguish the fires" and warned: "We are at extreme risk of forest fires. Please be very cautious." - Saved at 'last second' - Elsewhere, about 2,000 people were evacuated from hotels and homes near the popular beaches of Tarifa in the southern region of Andalusia. The wildfire broke out near where a similar blaze forced evacuations earlier this month. "We managed to save the residential area at the very last second," said Antonio Sanz, the Andalusia region's interior minister. In the northwestern region of Castile and Leon, dozens of blazes were reported, including one threatening Las Medulas, a UNESCO World Heritage site known for its ancient Roman gold mines. The head of the regional government of Castile and Leon, Alfonso Fernandez Manueco, vowed "to act quickly and generously" once the fire is over to restore the site "to its full glory as soon as possible". In neighbouring Portugal, firefighters battled three large wildfires, with the most serious near Trancoso in the centre of the country. More than 700 firefighters were deployed there. Church bells rang out on Tuesday morning in Mendo Gordo, a hamlet near Trancoso, to sound the alarm as a thick column of smoke rose in the distance, images broadcast on Portuguese television showed. Smoke and greenhouse gas emissions related to forest fires since the beginning of summer in the Northern Hemisphere are among the highest ever recorded, according to the EU climate monitor Copernicus. - 'Too hot' - Temperature records were broken at four weather stations in southern France on Monday and three-quarters of the country was under heat alerts on Tuesday, with temperatures forecast to top 40C in the Rhone Valley. The Rhone department banned outdoor public events. Temperatures started rising on Friday in France's second heatwave in just a few weeks and could remain high into next week, according to the national weather office Meteo-France. That would make it a 12- to 14-day stretch of extreme heat. "It's already too hot," said Alain Bichot, 34, as he sat at a cafe terrace early on Tuesday morning in Dijon in eastern France. "I would rather just go to the office. At least there is air conditioning there." Eleven Italian cities, including Rome, Milan and Florence, were placed on red alert on Tuesday due to the heat. In Montenegro, fire crews aided by military personnel were fighting a blaze around Podgorica for a second day when the water truck flipped, killing the soldier, the defence ministry said in a statement. Authorities warned residents to stay indoors due to smoke from a forest fire raging in the hills above Podgorica. Hundreds of soldiers and firefighters were also battling wildfires in Albania. More than half (52 percent) of Europe and the Mediterranean basin was hit by drought in July for the fourth consecutive month, according to an AFP analysis of European Drought Observatory (EDO) data. Drought levels in the region are the highest on record for the month of July since data collection began in 2012, exceeding the 2012-2024 average by 21 percent. bur-ds/bc
