Questions of how to protect communities from wildfire risk loom large as thousands flee homes nationwide

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In a Facebook video posted June 1, Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation Chief Allan Adam drove a truck through the streets of Dog Head reserve, part of the Fort Chipewyan community that was put under an evacuation order on May 30 because of an out-of-control wildfire nearby.

In the video, Mr. Adam points out buildings that are so far untouched by the fire, including homes, a school and a nursing station. He also speaks of efforts being made to keep the community safe should the blaze edge closer, including firefighting personnel setting up sprinkler systems to soak the roofs of homes.

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“This whole area will have sprinklers, and if anything comes, they will feed it with the fire hydrant,” Mr. Adams said in the video.

For Fort Chipewyan and other communities in the wildland-urban interface, or WUI – the area where human development meets the forest – such efforts can make a difference between devastation and survival. Officials in Logan Lake, B.C., for example, credit sprinklers for helping the community fend off a wildfire in 2021.

As wildfires force thousands to flee their homes in Alberta and Nova Scotia – where fires have been burning since late May – questions of how to manage wildfire risk in WUI terrain loom large. Mapping and analyzing WUI territory would be helpful, but efforts to do that at a national level are still relatively new.

And although there may be consensus on how best to protect communities from wildfire risk – a joint federal, provincial and territorial vision statement for a Canadian Wildland Fire Strategy was released in 2006 – that strategy hasn’t been fully rolled out, partly owing to its multi-jurisdictional nature and its high cost.

“As a country, we have a national plan on how to get ready for wildfires and how to manage and minimize the risk going forward,” says Paul Kovacs, executive director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, a non-profit group that focuses on disaster prevention and research. “What we don’t have is a plan that has been implemented and funded.”

There are national programs. In 1982, the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre was set up so that jurisdictions could share personnel, aircraft and equipment among themselves and with international partners.

FireSmart Canada, a program meant to help communities protect themselves from damaging impacts of wildfires, dates back to 1990, when a committee was set up to address common concerns about wildfires in WUI terrain. Scores of FireSmart programs have been rolled out throughout the country in areas such as fuel management (clearing brush around WUI communities) or public education.

But despite those programs, experts say there’s not a comprehensive enough strategy backed by sufficient funds to tackle the issue.

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In 2016, the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers, a group made of up federal, provincial and territorial forestry ministers, released a report that reviewed the previous decade’s efforts to roll out the Canadian Wildland Fire Strategy, saying that while some progress had been made, actions had been “somewhat ad hoc” and that a lack of standardized reporting made it difficult to track progress.

In that void, many jurisdictions have taken their own steps to tackle wildfire risk, Mr. Kovacs says, particularly in B.C. and Alberta, where large wildfires – as in Kelowna in 2003 and in Fort McMurray in 2016 – resulted in billions of dollars’ worth of damage.

Wildland fire ecologist Robert Gray, based in Chilliwack, B.C., says B.C.’s FireSmart grant program can be difficult to navigate and puts smaller communities, especially Indigenous communities, at a disadvantage compared with larger centres that have greater capacity to apply for grants and hire personnel to administer programs.

And the grant program isn’t operating at the scale required to make a dent in wildfire prevention, he says, noting that it took two years to cobble together funds – about $180,000 – to carry out a 79-hectare prescribed burn at the Canadian Rockies International Airport in April.

Progress is happening, albeit not as quickly or efficiently as many would like. In 2021, the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers endorsed a five-year action plan to implement the previously-announced national wildfire strategy, noting that Canada now “regularly experiences large, catastrophic wildland fire events.”

And in 2022, B.C. announced wildfire funding that would, among other things, allow the B.C. Wildfire Service to run year-round. On June 1, as part of an update on wildfire programs, federal officials announced Ottawa had signed agreements to train 300 Indigenous firefighters and 125 Indigenous fire guardians this season.

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In reviewing community wildfire protection plans introduced over the past decade in B.C. and Alberta, Mr. Kovacs has seen two hurdles that keep those plans from being fully implemented.

The first is money – it can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to thin and prune nearby forests, for example – and the second is the debate over whether fire-mitigation measures should be required or recommended, he said.

And the question of how to limit expansion into WUI areas is a prickly one, with growing populations and people’s desire to live close to wooded areas bumping up against wildfire threats. In a 2018 ICLR report, Mr. Kovacs looked at how local governments could use development permits to require certain fire-resistant building materials and “to control and even prohibit” residential development in areas of high wildfire risk. In that report, he said “more than a dozen” communities in B.C. and Alberta had begun to use development permits to control residential development in WUI areas.

He’s currently working on an update, but doesn’t expect to see a big jump in the number of communities taking that approach, saying it remains relatively rare.

Mr. Kovacs would like to see a firm funding commitment for a national wildfire strategy, as well as clarity on how goals are to be met.

“How do you encourage outcomes that are better than we are experiencing right now – if it’s not through regulation, how do you get there? And that is an important political conversation,” he adds.

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That question, and the tensions around it, can be read between the lines of a 2022 update on the Community Wildfire Resilience Plan for Kelowna, where the Okanagan Mountain Park fire in 2003 ripped through more than 25,000 hectares close to the city, forced the evacuation of more than 27,000 people and destroyed 239 homes.

The city’s wildfire plans, introduced in 2011 and updated in 2016, have allowed it to take “many productive strides” toward reducing wildfire threats, the report said. But the community’s exposure to wildfire remains extreme, evacuation orders have become the norm for multiple communities, and structure losses have been witnessed as recently as August of 2021, the report said, adding that, “an ever challenging climate, hazardous topography, and development trends that have seen growth extend further into the wildland urban interface (WUI) have put Kelowna in a difficult position.”

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Other communities are in the same uncomfortable position.

In Mr. Adam’s June 1 video, he said there were about 62 personnel stationed in Fort Chipewyan as of Thursday, with the possibility of military crews arriving by the weekend.

Even when communities come through wildfires unscathed, being ordered to evacuate or being put on evacuation alert can take a toll, resulting in financial and emotional stress that can linger after the immediate danger has passed.

That strain could be heard in Mr. Adams voice as he drove on near-empty streets under a smoky sky.

“We’ll do our best to save our home, and our community,” he said in the video. “The only thing missing are the kids and the families and our people. We miss you guys. We love you all.”

Mapping the Wildland-urban interface

The wildland-urban interface (WUI) encompasses areas where homes and other structures meet, or are interspersed with, wildland vegetation such as forests and grasslands. Estimates suggest more than 12% of Canadians live within it, as well as nearly one-third of First Nations living on reserves. Though the majority of today's wildfires don't burn buildings, they're expected to become more frequent and intense in a warming climate. Kelowna, Fort Chipewyan and the Halifax area are three of many Canadian communities with significant exposure.

Wildland-

urban interface

Building

footprints

KELOWNA

B.C.

Kelowna

Kelowna

West Kelowna

Okanagan Lake

1 km

FORT CHIPEWYAN

Fort

Chipewyan

Alta.

Slave River

Fort

Chipewyan

Lake Athabasca

1 km

HALIFAX AREA

N.S.

Detail

Middle

Sackville

Hammonds

Plains

Bedford

Stillwater

Lake

Dartmouth

Tantallon

Halifax

3 km

MURAT YÜKSELIR / THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: NATURAL RESOURCES CANADA; CANADIAN FOREST SERVICE; UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA; MICROSOFT; OPENSTREETMAP;

Mapping the Wildland-urban interface

The wildland-urban interface (WUI) encompasses areas where homes and other structures meet, or are interspersed with, wildland vegetation such as forests and grasslands. Estimates suggest more than 12% of Canadians live within it, as well as nearly one-third of First Nations living on reserves. Though the majority of today's wildfires don't burn buildings, they're expected to become more frequent and intense in a warming climate. Kelowna, Fort Chipewyan and the Halifax area are three of many Canadian communities with significant exposure.

Wildland-urban interface

Building footprints

KELOWNA

B.C.

Kelowna

Kelowna

West Kelowna

Okanagan Lake

1 km

FORT CHIPEWYAN

Fort

Chipewyan

Alta.

Slave River

Fort

Chipewyan

Lake Athabasca

1 km

HALIFAX AREA

N.S.

Detail

Middle

Sackville

Hammonds

Plains

Bedford

Stillwater

Lake

Dartmouth

Tantallon

Halifax

3 km

MURAT YÜKSELIR / THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: NATURAL RESOURCES CANADA; CANADIAN FOREST SERVICE; UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA; MICROSOFT; OPENSTREETMAP;

Mapping the Wildland-urban interface

The wildland-urban interface (WUI) encompasses areas where homes and other structures meet, or are interspersed with, wildland vegetation such as forests and grasslands. Estimates suggest more than 12% of Canadians live within it, as well as nearly one-third of First Nations living on reserves. Though the majority of today's wildfires don't burn buildings, they're expected to become more frequent and intense in a warming climate. Kelowna, Fort Chipewyan and the Halifax area are three of many Canadian communities with significant exposure.

Wildland-urban interface

Building footprints

KELOWNA

B.C.

Kelowna

Kelowna

West Kelowna

Okanagan Lake

1 km

FORT CHIPEWYAN

Fort

Chipewyan

Alta.

Slave River

Fort

Chipewyan

Lake Athabasca

 

1 km

HALIFAX AREA

N.S.

Detail

Middle

Sackville

Hammonds

Plains

Bedford

Stillwater

Lake

Dartmouth

Tantallon

Halifax

3 km

MURAT YÜKSELIR / THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: NATURAL RESOURCES CANADA; CANADIAN FOREST SERVICE; UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA; MICROSOFT; OPENSTREETMAP;

Canada has a data gap in its tracking of wildfire risk for vulnerable communities

Unlike geographical features like floodplains, the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) arises largely from people’s choices. As Canadians build more houses amid wildland vegetation, wildfires in those areas become more consequential: they destroy more things we care about. The likelihood of ignition also increases, because people cause about half of Canada’s wildfires.

It would be advantageous, then, to know where Canada’s WUI (pronounced “woo-ee”) is expanding, and how rapidly. But we don’t. We also don’t have tools for assessing wildfire risk like we have for flooding and earthquakes. We even lack crucial data inputs, such as high-resolution maps of vegetation and other fire fuels, or detailed records about fires over a sufficiently long time period to capture the variability of fire regimes.

These data gaps impede our ability to take full advantage of the fact that there are plenty of effective strategies for reducing risk. Homeowners in the WUI can change roofing, siding and ventilation. Municipalities can regulate land use planning in the WUI to prevent expansion into high-risk areas.

“Just as there’s so many overwhelming problems, there’s just as many options for helping and mitigating risk, or adapting to fire on the landscape,” said Lynn Johnston, a fire scientist with the Canadian Forest Service.

Ms. Johnston is among the researchers who are tackling the blind spots. Until 2016, nobody could say where the WUI began and ended. She mapped it while completing her Master’s degree at the University of Alberta. That exercise revealed 32.3 million hectares of WUI, representing 3.8 per cent of Canada’s total land mass. Since then, British Columbia created and updated maps depicting at-risk areas within its WUI.

American researchers fret about their own data gaps, although they’re generally ahead of us. In 2018, one group mapped decadal changes in the U.S. WUI between 1990 and 2010 within census blocks and discovered that over that time, it had grown by 189,000 square kilometres, an area larger than Washington State.

“As long as WUI growth is unchecked, wildfire problems will likely worsen,” they warned.

The U.S. is also further along in developing formal methods of assessing wildfire risks. But Ms. Johnston said the Canada Forest Service, provincial fire managers and certain universities, are pressing forward. And many crucial inputs for assessing fire risk, such as the locations of buildings and climate models, already exist and are evolving rapidly.

“We really need to start mapping these things,” she said.

– Matthew McClearn