The Donnie Creek wildfire burns in an area between Fort Nelson and Fort St. John, B.C. in an undated handout photo.HO/The Canadian Press
Robert Gray is an AFE-certified wildland fire ecologist with over 40 years’ experience in fire science, management and operations in Canada and the United States.
Wildfires in Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan are not unusual in May. What is unusual this year is the magnitude of fires in those provinces. And as evacuations and losses become the norm, we must remember that this doesn’t have to be the case, because we can actually do something about it. But the way forward is not through the steadfast pursuit of a flawed approach to fire management.
The United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) identified the major flaw in fire management in 2020: We spend an inordinate amount of money on response (firefighting) and recovery (rebuilding after a fire) and not enough on mitigation and prevention.
According to the UNISDR, “nearly 87% of disasters-related spending goes to response, reconstruction and rehabilitation, and only 13% goes towards managing the risks which are driving these disasters in the first place.” At this year’s World Economic Forum, proponents insisted that a shift from postdisaster recovery to prevention, resilience and risk reduction needs significant investment to save lives and protect against damages. It has been well established by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that every dollar spent on predisaster risk reduction results in US$6 to US$13 in savings.
Reducing disaster mortality, the number of affected people, direct disaster economic loss and damage to critical infrastructure are four of seven goals of the Sendai Framework, which B.C. has adopted. Yet in B.C. we continue to spend very little on mitigation while spending significantly on response and recovery. The province’s response bill for the fire years 2017, 2018 and 2021 was more than $2-billion, while fire-related recovery costs were estimated to be in the tens of billions.
When we do invest in mitigation, there are issues with how money is prioritized. Those most affected by wildfires – rural, northern and isolated Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities – are usually last in line for fire mitigation funding. This is a serious social-justice issue.
The wildfire story begins with images of towering flames and evacuees, satellite photos of drifting smoke, followed by the sight of charred trees and homes reduced to rubble. But that’s typically where the story ends. Who was evacuated, the financial burden for those people, whether their businesses or livelihoods survived the fire, whether they could have mitigated the negative effects of the fire and how they are coping with the emotional trauma – all the things identified in the Sendai Framework – must be considered. There is no shared burden of wildfire effects – it falls primarily on those who can least afford to contend with it.
In B.C., there is also inequity in how the threat of wildfire is mitigated. The favoured delivery model for wildfire mitigation in the province (and across Canada) is FireSmart. Public education, changing local bylaws, conducting home and property risk assessments and small-scale vegetation management are all key aspects of the program. Grants to local governments for risk reduction are now steeped in FireSmart. The inequity comes from who gets the most funding and how that is prioritized. The model used to identify risk and priority uses data on property values and structure density as two key variables; the highest-density communities with the highest property values are eligible for a disproportionate amount of funding. Rural, northern and isolated communities with lower property values and lower structure density are, by design, a lower priority for funding.
FireSmart’s success depends on large numbers of homeowners investing in fire hardening – clearing vegetation from around a house, and cladding it in fire-resistant materials such as stucco and steel. Homeowners have to be willing to invest and, more importantly, be able to invest. But it costs money to fire-harden your home and property and maintain it. Many rural homeowners are older and on fixed incomes – investing tens of thousands of dollars is just not feasible. Ironically, according to Headwaters Economic, a non-profit research institute, wildfires that affect rural areas are far more expensive to suppress than wildfires that hit larger centres.
In B.C., there is also inequality in terms of who is most affected by wildfires. Rural, northern and isolated Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities are on the front lines and are most affected both during the event and often for years afterward. The negative effects can last for years and are often associated with physical and emotional health. Families are traumatized by the loss of their homes, livelihoods or because they’ve been evacuated (in some cases, more than once), all of which contribute to depression, anxiety, domestic violence and substance use. Financial help for rural, northern and isolated Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities lags that provided to larger, southern, urban communities. The physical toll is almost entirely associated with smoke. Chronic wildfire-smoke exposure leads to lower birth weights, dementia and cardiopulmonary disease, as well as more premature deaths among the very young and very old.
We have to change our approach to fire management – from an emphasis on response and recovery to one of mitigation and prevention. B.C. needs to follow the Sendai Framework principles and tackle fire risk reduction at the scale of large landscapes: Start with communities, but then move out to watersheds and the larger landscape. It is only through the aggressive treatment of fuels that we can reduce the likelihood of evacuations, the loss of livelihoods in the natural-resources sector and the physical and emotional toll of wildfires – all the while reducing carbon emissions. At the scale of peoples’ homes and properties, we need to focus less on trying to change human behaviour and getting people to “share responsibility” and more on tangibly solving the crisis. This means providing financial assistance to homeowners, as has been the case in every western state in the U.S. for years, concentrating on those who are struggling to pay for home and property fire hardening and continuing maintenance. If we fail to do this, the consequences – socially, financially and ecologically – will continue to be significant and multigenerational.