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Episode: How can Canada fight its wildfires?

Author: BBC World Service
Duration: 00:23:00

Episode Shownotes

This year wildfires in Canada have caused devastation to the country’s treasured town of Jasper. The wildfires have ravaged the landscape, destroyed communities and displaced hundreds of thousands of people.The causes are many, and fires are a natural occurrence. But humans, and the climate, are making them worse. As the

number and intensity of fires increase, the methods used to both prevent and fight them may need to change.How can Canada fight its wildfires?Presenter: Tanya Beckett Producer: Louise Clarke Researcher: Anoushka Mutanda-Dougherty Editor: Tara McDermott Technical producer: Cameron WardContributors: Mike Flannagan, Professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia Liz Goldman, World Resources Institute John Keeley, senior research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey and an adjunct professor at the University of California in Los Angeles Cordy Tymstra, former wildfire science coordinator for the Alberta Wildfire Management Branch(Image: Getty/ Anadolu)

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_00
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

00:00:06 Speaker_04
Hello, this is Jackie Leonard from the Global News Podcast.

00:00:11 Speaker_00
Let me tell you about our annual review of the happiest news stories of 2024.

00:00:28 Speaker_04
From the work of thousands to raise the magnificent Notre Dame Cathedral from the ashes, to the astonishing success of the chopsticks maneuver to catch a rocket booster as it came back to earth, to the young Irish rappers who went massively viral with an absolute banger of a tune. The Happy Pod.

00:00:38 Speaker_05
Just search for the Global News Podcast wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Welcome to The Enquiry with me, Tanya Beckett. One question, four expert witnesses, and an answer. It was eight o'clock in the evening on the 22nd of July that many residents of Jasper first heard that wildfires were threatening their homes.

00:00:58 Speaker_05
By 9.45 p.m. the authorities declared a state of emergency. It was just three hours after wildfires to the north and south of the town ignited. An estimated 25,000 people fled Jasper and the surrounding national park.

00:01:17 Speaker_05
Jasper is located in the Rockies in Alberta and is well known to Canada's tourists who travel to see its stunning mountain landscapes, glaciers, lakes, and diverse wildlife. Two days after the town was evacuated, it was engulfed by fire.

00:01:38 Speaker_05
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith fought back tears when she described the scale of the loss.

00:01:44 Speaker_01
For many generations, the town of Jasper and the parks surrounding it have been a source of pride with some of the most beautiful scenery in the entire, in the world, with its mountains and lakes and meadows.

00:02:06 Speaker_01
And to those in Alberta and around the world who have experienced the magic of Jasper, the magic is not lost and it never will be.

00:02:18 Speaker_05
Firefighters say that the flames will take until the autumn to extinguish. This week on The Inquiry, we're asking, how can Canada fight its wildfires? Part one, Canada is burning.

00:02:38 Speaker_09
Evacuation can be very stressful and long lasting. I've talked to people who were evacuated Some have lost their homes, and even 10 years later, they smell smoke and it triggers them. It is a significant impact on society, these evacuations.

00:02:59 Speaker_05
July was a dry, hot month for the town of Jasper. Set amid breathtaking natural beauty, temperatures were repeatedly topping 30 degrees centigrade. As days of searing heat turned into weeks, fire crews rushed to deal with any wildfires that popped up.

00:03:18 Speaker_05
Our first expert witness is Mike Flanagan, professor of wildland fire at Thomson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia.

00:03:27 Speaker_05
He describes what happened when, on July the 22nd, fires both north and south of Jasper spiralled terrifyingly out of control.

00:03:37 Speaker_09
It started on Monday. It reached town on the Wednesday evening and it moved very quickly, very high intensity. They did try direct attack and that they were using helicopters was ineffective, their words.

00:03:53 Speaker_09
And they did not use planes because the wind conditions were too dangerous. So there was no direct attack using planes, just helicopters. It was too dangerous for crews on the ground to be close to the fire. Flames 100 metres and taller.

00:04:11 Speaker_05
The unfolding tragedy claimed the life of a 24-year-old firefighter, Morgan Kitchen, who was fatally injured by a falling tree. Mike says it was a specific set of conditions that led to flames of such extreme intensity.

00:04:27 Speaker_09
It had been hot and dry for three weeks, so the fuels were dry and plentiful. Jasper is in confluence of three valleys, So it's in a high-risk location. Fires love to run up and down valleys.

00:04:42 Speaker_09
The problem is that most fires enter a community not through a wall of flame, but through a rain of burning embers. And these embers can be carried by the wind multiple kilometers.

00:04:58 Speaker_05
Canada's forests cover about a third of the nation, and wildfires are a common occurrence. The authorities make preparations to contain them when they happen.

00:05:08 Speaker_09
So if a fire starts, and let's say it starts two kilometres from a community, it takes half a second to say that fire is unwanted and we're going to put it out. We send resources, crews, helicopters, what have you.

00:05:21 Speaker_09
Let's say the fire starts 100 kilometres north, which is just bush, They will say, well, what's the fire weather for the next couple of weeks? They run a fire growth model and say, where will that fire spread?

00:05:32 Speaker_09
And then make a determination of whether to action that fire, i.e. try and put it out, or just monitor it.

00:05:38 Speaker_05
So not all fires are deemed dangerous. Some are even planned. But the small number of fires that get out of control are responsible for the most destruction.

00:05:52 Speaker_05
In May 2016, wildfires broke out in northern Alberta, leading to the most expensive natural disaster in the history of Canada. In the town of Fort Murray, over 2,000 businesses and homes were destroyed.

00:06:06 Speaker_09
In Canada, 3% of our fires burn. 97% of our area burned. And much of this happens on a relatively small number of days. Those hot, dry, windy days, we call them spread days.

00:06:19 Speaker_05
Longer periods of drier weather make the landscape more arid and lead to more frequent electric storms.

00:06:26 Speaker_09
In Alberta and British Columbia this year, our fire season started in February, and we're seeing our fire season start earlier and earlier. The warmer we get, the more lightning we see. The more lightning, the more fire we'll see.

00:06:42 Speaker_09
And in Canada, even though lightning-caused fires are responsible for 50% of the fires, they're responsible for about 90% of the area burned.

00:06:52 Speaker_05
And growing numbers of intense wildfires is a problem which is by no means confined to Canada. Time for our second expert witness. Part Two. Secrets of the Forest.

00:07:15 Speaker_06
I'm Liz Goldman and I'm with the World Resources Institute.

00:07:19 Speaker_05
Liz says that her organization, like many others, is noticing a worrying rise in forest fires, not just in North America, but across the globe.

00:07:29 Speaker_06
They're happening with increasing intensity, their ranges are spreading. They're happening in tropical, humid, moist forests where we wouldn't really expect them to.

00:07:40 Speaker_06
And then they're certainly happening in temperate and boreal forests as well, where they're more of a natural part of the ecosystem.

00:07:48 Speaker_06
But they're happening more frequently in a way that is impacting the overall health of the forest in a negative way and the people who live around those forests.

00:07:57 Speaker_05
Perhaps the most concerning place that wildfires are becoming an increasing problem is in the tropics. Here the humidity is very high and even in the dry season the plants are usually too wet to be ignited by lightning. or accidentally lit by locals.

00:08:15 Speaker_05
Instead, the vast majority of the fires in the rainforests of the Amazon and Indonesia are man-made and intentional. The result of deforestation and clearing of farmland by what is termed and burn.

00:08:29 Speaker_06
So people will clear land using fire. And what happens is that when the fires are set, the intention is for a landowner to clear vegetation, trees off of their property. But it's often difficult to only have it stop at a property line.

00:08:49 Speaker_06
So it will often spread out beyond a given property unintentionally and move through the forest.

00:08:57 Speaker_05
Farmers also often dry out the naturally wet soil so that it can be used for planting. This means that when fires are started in the forest, they can spread more easily than they otherwise would and are more likely to get out of control.

00:09:12 Speaker_05
In 2015, blazes started in this way in Indonesia led to the worst wildfire season in a century.

00:09:21 Speaker_06
you know, land being cleared for mostly palm oil plantations. When that happens, the peat areas need to be drained. They're dried out, they become flammable, and they catch fire quite easily.

00:09:32 Speaker_06
So when land is cleared by fire, it can spread onto these peat areas that are flammable, and it's just very difficult to put out the fires when that happens.

00:09:42 Speaker_05
As a result, Indonesia experienced one of the biggest environmental disasters of the modern era.

00:09:48 Speaker_02
Smoke from Indonesia's burning peatland blankets the forests of Sumatra and Borneo islands and coats the lungs of the people who live there.

00:09:57 Speaker_05
The smoke led to the loss of life of 100,000 Indonesians and downwind neighbours Singapore and Malaysia also lost thousands of their own citizens as a result of the pollution.

00:10:11 Speaker_06
It's very bad for human health, for people living close to the area, but smoke from these fires can travel hundreds of miles, of course, and impact communities far flung from where the actual emissions are happening.

00:10:26 Speaker_06
And because when wildfires burn, they actually burn the biomass that's stored in the vegetation that's being burned. So in tropical forests, many of these areas are older growth trees that have massive amounts of carbon stored within them.

00:10:42 Speaker_06
And that gets released into the atmosphere when they're burned. And that exacerbates climate change, which has a whole host of other impacts for people all across the world.

00:10:54 Speaker_05
Climate change is not only exacerbated by wildfires, but it is also often cited as a reason for them getting worse, because it leads to more prolonged periods of dry weather.

00:11:05 Speaker_05
But there are also long-established weather systems that can contribute to the problem. In the case of Indonesia, a weather system called El Nino was cited as another main reason for the wildfire spreading.

00:11:18 Speaker_05
El Nino is a warming of waters in the Pacific. In 2015, this stopped the rains from reaching Indonesia, making the ground drier and more exposed to risk of fire.

00:11:30 Speaker_05
Similarly, in 2021, Russia suffered record-breaking heat and drought, mainly attributed to a northward shift of the polar jet stream.

00:11:40 Speaker_05
For the first time in recorded history, wildfire smoke from boreal or deciduous and coniferous forests in Siberia reached as far as the North Pole.

00:11:50 Speaker_06
So in 2021, Russia had a record-breaking fire year and a lot of the fire activity was happening.

00:11:58 Speaker_06
in Siberia, some of which was happening again in peat soils or melted permafrost areas where there's massive amounts of carbon stored in the soil that's released into the atmosphere there.

00:12:14 Speaker_05
And the problem is also profoundly affecting southern Europe. In August of this year, as Greece was experiencing its hottest summer since reliable records began in 1960,

00:12:25 Speaker_05
Thousands of people in towns and villages outside the Greek capital, Athens, were ordered to move to safer areas as wildfires raged.

00:12:35 Speaker_05
The trends towards larger areas being burned is deeply alarming, but it's also the case that wildfires are a natural and necessary part of the ecosystem. So when does normal tip over into dangerous and unhealthy?

00:12:57 Speaker_03
Hello, this is Jackie Leonard from the Global News Podcast. Let me tell you about our annual review of the happiest news stories of 2024.

00:13:11 Speaker_03
From the work of thousands to raise the magnificent Notre Dame Cathedral from the ashes, to the astonishing success of the chopsticks manoeuvre to catch a rocket booster as it came back to earth, to the young Irish rappers who went massively viral with an absolute banger of a tune. The Happy Pod. Just search for the Global News Podcast wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

00:13:25 Speaker_03
Part three, fire and nature.

00:13:46 Speaker_05
The history of wildfires goes back to the history of plants moving from the water onto land, which happened 400 million years ago.

00:13:49 Speaker_08
We have good charcoal evidence from the fossil record showing that we've had wildfires on our landscape throughout the world for hundreds of millions of years. So this is nothing new.

00:13:59 Speaker_08
Our third expert witness is John Keeley, a senior research scientist with the US Geological Survey and an adjunct professor at the University of California in Los Angeles.

00:14:13 Speaker_05
We have in California, in our shrublands, which occur at the lower elevations near the coast, we have hundreds of species that simply will not reproduce unless there's a fire.

00:14:24 Speaker_08
They'll produce seeds and those seeds go in the soil and then the seeds have a requirement for smoke to stimulate their germination.

00:14:40 Speaker_08
And they may sit in the soil for a hundred years and there's very low diversity because they're dormant, but once a fire comes through they germinate and diversity goes way up on our burned landscapes. And We see similar phenomenon in other Mediterranean climate ecosystems like South Africa and Western Australia.

00:14:52 Speaker_08
Many of these have these fire-dependent species that simply will not complete their life cycle without a fire. Wildfires are then, to some extent, necessary.

00:15:08 Speaker_08
But, as we heard from Liz Goldman in Part 2, the evidence strongly suggests that wildfires are becoming more extreme. So what's changed?

00:15:15 Speaker_05
Well, a lot of things have changed. In particular, the number of people on Earth has increased. What has also changed is the way people view fire.

00:15:31 Speaker_08
For example, many indigenous people used fire regularly in managing their landscapes. But when those landscapes were taken over by other people, take, for example, North America, many of our

00:15:49 Speaker_08
Land management agencies have felt it necessary to put out all fires, and this has had negative impacts on some ecosystems. And so those are probably the big issues. The growth of the human population puts more people in contact, and then people have altered our fire regimes, which has had various impacts on our ecosystems.

00:16:08 Speaker_08
A growing population means more demand on land. Timber companies, for example, want to protect their trees by stopping fires occurring. But John says this has been part of the problem.

00:16:24 Speaker_05
And so, historically, many of our forests had frequent fires, maybe every 10 to 20 years, and they were of low intensity because they burned on the forest floor and didn't get into the canopy of the trees.

00:16:37 Speaker_08
Today, though, we have such heavy fuel accumulation What John is saying here is that vegetation that has not been allowed to burn naturally builds up, meaning that wildfires that follow are more intense.

00:16:51 Speaker_05
Now we're seeing a change in the regime from low intensity to very high intensity fires that take out the entire forest.

00:17:04 Speaker_08
And this is all the result of the management practices that occurred in the past with the goal of trying to put out all fires. As a result, we've put out fires for a long time, but now we are faced with conditions that result in even more extreme fires. The growing global population also has another effect.

00:17:23 Speaker_08
For example, urban sprawl brings with it more infrastructure to transport electricity.

00:17:32 Speaker_05
And in the last 20 years, we've had like a five-fold increase in area burn due to power lines. And this is particularly a problem in areas where we have extremely high winds.

00:17:42 Speaker_08
And those winds have knocked down power lines repeatedly And so today we're seeing our major determinant of big fires in California are power line failures that occur during these extreme wind events and that's certainly tied into population growth.

00:18:01 Speaker_08
Population growth means that there are also more people to start accidental fires. But we also know it's led to an increase in carbon footprint. I think there's no question that climate change is impacting wildfires. It makes them worse.

00:18:25 Speaker_08
I think it would be a stretch to say that the increase in the size and frequency of our large fires is entirely due to climate change. With a larger wildfire problem comes the need for more sophisticated tactics to get fires under control. Time for our final expert witness.

00:18:42 Speaker_05
That's bigger than the size of England. That's like burning Netherland ten times over.

00:19:01 Speaker_07
Cordy Timstra is a former wildfire science coordinator for the Alberta Wildfire Management Branch. He reminds us that 2023 was also a devastating year for wildfires in Canada.

00:19:08 Speaker_05
In total, 15 million hectares were destroyed. The boreal forest, it's going to burn and it's going to burn more in the future. So everyone says this is the new normal. No, it is not the new normal. It's going to get worse and worse.

00:19:25 Speaker_07
And this is definitely changing our thinking on how we need to protect our assets on the landscape, but also how welfare management agencies, what changes they need to make to deal with this future with more fire on the landscape.

00:19:44 Speaker_07
The first problem is that when fires are very intense, such as the one that raged through Jasper, the usual methods of trying to put out the flames at its edge and from the air are simply not safe for fire crews to attempt.

00:19:56 Speaker_05
The winds that were created by the fire itself, they can create winds 100 to 150 kilometers an hour. So the fire creates its own weather and it's violent, very violent. So it's difficult to get close to these fires just from safety.

00:20:09 Speaker_07
And you can't fly aircraft at those wind speeds. So you really have to sit back. And that's why some of the best planning that can be done is to have a very good evacuation plan.

00:20:25 Speaker_07
Given these challenges Cordy says there are some key steps that communities need to take in order to protect themselves. The first of which is to deprive wildfires of the fuel they need to spread.

00:20:38 Speaker_05
We need to put more black on the landscape and by that I mean putting prescribed burning

00:20:50 Speaker_07
cultural burning on the land in a controlled way, not when it's the hottest day on record, but during weather conditions that we have more control in terms of managing that fire.

00:20:57 Speaker_07
The second is to increase resources, not just manpower, but also machines. So at night time, we're sleeping. Fire's not sleeping. You need personnel 24 hours a day now.

00:21:09 Speaker_05
I think drones are going to happen in terms of delivering water and retardants.

00:21:15 Speaker_07
I think you will see that because you can send a fleet of drones and you can do very strategic surgical delivery of retardants and water. So I think that's going to come down the road.

00:21:27 Speaker_07
I think you're going to see the use of drones be integrated into a response. Satellite imaging is already widely used to identify and locate fires.

00:21:39 Speaker_07
But Cordy says when crisis hits, it's also important to stay realistic as to what can be managed. We're going to put the resources where it's tolerable.

00:21:45 Speaker_05
So this section of the fire, we can allow to burn. This other section of the fire, intolerable. That's a real different way of thinking. And with every year that passes, there are new lessons to be learned.

00:21:57 Speaker_07
2024 is no exception. What Jasper has shown and should show to Canadians, we have some of the best wildfire management programs in the world.

00:22:17 Speaker_07
But they cannot guarantee a 100% that they can stop these fires from coming into communities. So there is no one solution. It's a shared responsibility. We know that we can build the resiliency into these critical infrastructure and communities. It's going to take time, resources, and money to get to where we want to go.

00:22:37 Speaker_07
And it's like we're running, but climate change and fire is running faster than we are to make the changes that need to be made. Now we return to our question. How can Canada fight its wildfires?

00:23:03 Speaker_05
Days after the fire that raged through Jasper, the town's inhabitants returned to witness the destruction wreaked to their homes and the surrounding national park. 32,000 hectares were destroyed, an area larger than the size of Italy. Tragically, such incidences are becoming more prevalent, but there are many measures we can take to limit the suffering.

00:23:22 Speaker_05
Communities themselves can take steps to stop the fire coming close to their homes, and firefighters need more plentiful resources in terms of both manpower and equipment. We leave the final word to our fourth expert witness.

00:23:35 Speaker_05
We have a saying, hit them hard, hit them fast, because if you can stop that fire obviously from continuing to grow, you can prevent these big mega fires.

00:23:50 Speaker_07
Once that fire is up, it doesn't matter how many aircraft you have, it doesn't matter how many firefighters you have on the ground, that fire is going to move and it's going to move the way it wants to.

00:24:04 Speaker_07
This inquiry was presented by me, Tanya Beckett, produced by Louise Clark, and researched by Anushka Muthanda Doughty.

00:24:17 Speaker_05
The editor was Tara McDermott, and it was mixed by Cameron Ward. Hello, this is Jackie Leonard from the Global News Podcast. Let me tell you about our annual review of the happiest news stories of 2024.

00:24:34 Speaker_03
From the work of thousands to raise the magnificent Notre Dame Cathedral from the ashes, to the astonishing success of the chopsticks maneuver to catch a rocket booster as it came back to earth, to the young Irish rappers who went massively viral with an absolute banger of a tune.

00:24:38 Speaker_03
The Happy Pod. Just search for the Global News Podcast wherever you get your BBC podcasts.