Why is Canada facing one of its worst wildfire seasons?

Vibha Sharma

Chandigarh, June 9

Wildfires continued to burn across eastern Canada, sending a polluting haze into the United States. However, “worst appeared to be over for now in the big cities along the Mid-Atlantic, where for two days smoke had blotted out the sun and an acrid smell hung in the air,” as per the New York Times. According to the ground reports, on Tuesday New York City “topped the list of the world’s worst air pollution” due to the dilapidating smoke from “more than a 100 wildfires” in Quebec.

Experts say wildfires in Canada are yet another stark reminder of the threat climate change poses to the health and wellbeing of communities globally, and “dismal response from those responsible to the crisis”.

“Despite knowing the dangerous impacts of their operations, the fossil fuel industry has executed coordinated disinformation campaigns that work to ensure their profits soar while communities suffer. We can’t afford further delay in actionpolluters must be held accountable for decades of damage and deception”, says Carly Phillips, co-author of a study in the Environmental Research Letters, finding links between wildfires in North America and fossil fuel emissions.

“We’ve known for decades that emissions from fossil fuel production have an outsized responsibility for the worsening impacts of climate change,” says Phillips.

Wildfires and Canada

According to the latest edition of the IPCC report, climate change has led to warmer and drier conditions favourable for wildfires in North America and climate change is an “added stress,” increasing the severity and impacts of past wildfire outbreaks. Canada is currently facing “one of its worst wildfire seasons” and the main reason for this is the “abnormally high temperatures and dry conditions”.

The heat in May, followed by a particularly dry spring, increased the wildfire risks, say experts pointing to the “historical temperatures in May and June driven by climate change”. According to Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index, the heat in parts of Canada was made up to five times more likely due to human-induced climate change.

Climate change is worsening the occurrence of wildfires in Canada and neighbouring regions and according to a 2022 UN report, “by the end of the century, the probability of wildfire events occurring in a given year worldwide could increase by up to 50% in some places, even if carbon emissions are reduced”. At least two-thirds of rapid increases in fire weather are explained by anthropogenic warming, as per another study.

A recent report on wildfire weather in the USA says that the “wildfire seasons are lengthening and intensifying across the country.”

“Attribution studies, in which weather observations and climate models are used to quantify the contribution of climate change to specific weather events, have shown that climate change is worsening the occurrence of wildfires in Canada and neighbouring regions,” experts say.

Reports quote Nathan Gillett, Research Scientist at Environment and Climate Change Canada, making a direct link with human-induced climate change.

According to Gillet, “human-induced climate change is warming Canada at about twice the global average rate, and at the same time, there is a clear-long term increase in the area burnt by wildfire each year in Canada.”

Climate change has substantially increased the risk of extreme forest fire seasons in western Canada. “And we know that the past month has been unusually warm over most of Canada. So it’s clear that climate change has increased the risk of extreme fire seasons in Canada like the one we are seeing now, and we expect the risk of such extreme fire seasons to increase further in the future,” says Gillet.

Link between wildfires and fossil fuel emissions

According to the study published in the Environmental Research Letters, there is a connection between carbon emissions linked to the world’s major fossil fuel producers and the increase in extreme wildfires across western Canada and the US.

“The peer-reviewed study found that 37 per cent of the total burned forest area in Western Canada and the United States between 1986-2021 can be traced back to 88 major fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers,” experts say.

Climate change was also behind the extreme temperatures that Canada and other parts of the Pacific Northwest experienced in June 2021.Some direct impacts of these heatwaves are wildfires, agricultural and economic losses, and heat-related deaths.The widespread impacts of the wildfires blazing across Canada highlight how climate change threatens the health and wellbeing of communities globally, says Phillips.