Dry conditions and warmer-than-usual temperatures helped fuel a long and unrelenting wildfire season that, to date, has burned more than 17,500,000 hectares, a 647 per cent increase over the 10-year average.
Dry conditions and warmer-than-usual temperatures helped fuel a long and unrelenting wildfire season that, to date, has burned more than 17,500,000 hectares, a 647 per cent increase over the 10-year average.
It’s unlikely 2024 will be worse than this year simply because this year was so exceptionally bad across the whole country. It’s not common for us to see problems coast to coast, if only because there are multiple factors that need to be bad for serious fire behaviour and it’s hard to get those to line up everywhere at once. When we talk about bad fire years, it’s usually due to a few provinces being bad, not every province.
That said, it will probably be bad, and 2023 probably won’t be the worst year in the next decade. Climate change is getting worse, forest management is slow to fix, and we already have so many communities in the trees that interface fires are practically a given.