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Did climate change cause Canada's wildfires? [1]

['Isabella Kaminski']

Date: 2023-06-12

Wildfires, however, result from a complex interaction of factors, involving short-term weather and longer term climate patterns, the type of forests involved and what people are doing to them. And they all need something to spark them off.

Kira Hoffman, a researcher specialising in fire ecology at the University of British Columbia and the Bulkley Valley Research Centre, stresses that fire is a natural and common part of the ecosystem in western Canada, which is drier and more prone to lightning strikes.

On the other hand, British Columbia's fire season was so bad in 2017 that it broke its own records for the area of land burned. A study later found that climate change had a "profound influence", greatly increasing the chance of underlying extreme warm and dry conditions and increasing the area burned by a factor of seven to 11.

This year's fire season is unique in not being isolated to a particular province, says Carly Phillips, a research scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists in the US. What links the provinces is hotter than usual temperatures for this time of year and a prolonged period of drought, both of which raise wildfire risk and are getting worse in some places due to climate change.

"Canada has incredibly diverse ecosystems," says Hoffman. "And what we're seeing is drought in the prairies, in the mountainous ecosystems, in the Maritimes [provinces]. So places that maybe wouldn't have as much fire activity on a normal year, like Nova Scotia and Halifax, are now seeing many more ignitions."

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Lynn Johnston, a forest fire research specialist with Natural Resources Canada, adds that the fire season started a lot earlier than usual this year in some places.

Researchers at World Weather Attribution, who explore the connections between extreme weather and climate change, will be analysing the current Canadian wildfires but say they need to update their methodology for fires first.

Although the genesis and spread of a wildfire is "complicated", however, Johnston says she is less hesitant than she used to be about making the link to climate change. Hoffman is also concerned when media reports on wildfires do not make the link to climate-induced disasters. "The science is very much telling a different story."

Nevertheless, they all acknowledge there are other important factors at play.

Human development into forested areas increases the risk of people or their infrastructure sparking fires, says Phillips.

Researchers have also long drawn attention to the way that Canadian forestry policies moved away from traditional and Indigenous practices of planned burning which safeguard valuable timber resources and people. Regular, controlled burning clears the forest understory and reduces the risk of larger fires spinning out of control, but this had been stopped in much of the country.

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[1] Url: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230612-did-climate-change-cause-canadas-wildfires

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