Canada is suffocating. Since the beginning of the year, the North American country has been ravaged by flames. The equivalent of the area of ??the Pays de la Loire went up in smoke in a few months. No indicator encourages a way out of the crisis in the coming days.
After a wave of fires in the province of Alberta in May, the entire country is now affected by a wave of fires unprecedented in its history. The Weather Channel produced a map to count the hundreds of fires and realize that they are affecting Canada from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic.
The number of fires is extremely complicated to estimate, but they are between 200 and 300 across Canada. A hundred would be out of control according to the firefighters. Territories rarely affected by fires are currently very threatened, such as Quebec.
More than three million hectares would already be destroyed by the fires: this corresponds to the size of the Pays de la Loire region. Here is the importance of the area to control for firefighters in Canada. You could drive over 300 kilometers continuously and still be threatened by flames. Here is the latest map listing the “hot spots” in Canada:
The images of New York seem to be taken from a science fiction movie: it is impossible to see the tops of Manhattan’s skyscrapers because of the arrival of smoke from nearby fires in Canada. The wind carried these traces of forest fires over hundreds of kilometres. The smell of burning is everywhere in New York.
The American megalopolis is currently one of the most polluted cities in the world according to the IQAir site. Sunlight struggles to pierce this cloud of fine particles. Canadian authorities recommend avoiding going outside and not opening your windows.
More than 10,000 Canadians had to leave their homes in a hurry according to Franceinfo. The annual average of the area burned each year is already happily exceeded with almost seven months left in the year 2023! As of May 31, this represented “nearly eight times the average of the last thirty years over the same period” according to Le Monde.
A firefighter, fighting in Nova Scotia (a province in eastern Canada), described to Le Monde the power of the fires: “Flames reaching 60 to 90 meters, and a fire that rises and rolls like a freight train. he eastern part of the country had never recorded such a fire in its history.The local authorities are asking for federal and international assistance to resolve the situation.
The country is gradually receiving aid from the international community. By a tweet, Emmanuel Macron promised the reinforcement of a hundred firefighters to “fight the flames alongside their Quebec comrades.”
The Canadian armed forces were dispatched urgently by Ottawa, capital of the country. The United States, Costa Rica, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand have also sent hundreds of firefighters to join the fight there. Air quality is seriously affected by the fires. Le Devoir explains that: “The concentration in the most affected regions is more than eight times the World Health Organization’s recommendation for daily exposure, which is 15 nanograms per cubic meter.”
Most of the northern United States is under a thick smoke haze. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said more than 100 million Americans are on an amber air quality alert. This “is primarily impacted by Canadian fires, although other local pollution emissions and weather may also play a role,” according to the EPA.
“It’s a very serious fire moving with the ever-changing winds,” Halifax Mayor Mike Savage told CBC News. Local town halls have opened reception centers for these thousands of displaced people.
Authorities are still struggling to estimate the extent of the wildfires due to vagaries of the wind. But, Dave Meldrum, Deputy Chief of the Regional Municipality’s Fire and Emergency Department, expects a long fight during the TF1 news: “Our firefighters will be here for days. Even when we put out the fire, there will be a lot of work to do to flush out and fight the underground fires.”
Canada was hit early by the fires this year: the number of hectares that had gone up in smoke was already approaching one million even before the start of summer. The province of Alberta thus experienced the worst fire in its history at the beginning of May with the disappearance of 12 times the area of ??its capital. Wildfires are on the rise, but according to Canadian journalist Étienne Leblanc: “Experts are also seeing that fire seasons start earlier and end later.”
The Canadian government even estimates that “the area devastated by forest fires is expected to double by 2050 due to climate change.” In response, the country launched the “GardeFeu” mission: a satellite system to monitor its forests. But the Canadian Space Agency does not plan to put it into service until 2029. A significant period of time at a time when fires are threatening more and more.
Climate change is thus very vicious: the Canadian boreal forest has historically been able to capture large amounts of carbon. The devastating fires of recent months therefore release a lot of CO? into the atmosphere. This aggravates climate change which increases the likelihood of fires. Without real global upheaval, Canada must therefore expect to live in a cycle of ever larger forest fires.
Solutions exist to adapt, but this requires having the support of the population for policies, deepening scientific expertise in order to better control and prevent fires and having financial funds to match the challenges. These prevention policies are rarely popular before the problem arrives. If no homes are burned down or no one dies, the quality of development will be less relayed than when thousands of people are forced from their homes as is the case in Halifax today.
Canada has thus allocated 346.1 million dollars to the fight against forest fires while the fossil fuel sector has benefited from approximately 10.7 billion dollars per year between 2015 and 2021 according to Le Devoir. Ironically, this type of investment contributes enormously to climate change and therefore to the multiplication of forest fires in the North American country.
Among the possible solutions, a debate exists in Canada on the possibility of betting on less flammable trees. Some provinces are also open to the return of an Aboriginal technique that has been practiced for millennia: controlled burning. This is to: “avoid the formation of a bed of plants that could serve as fuel for a possible fire” by burning the most combustible vegetation and dead wood before the summer season according to the Departmental Fire Service and Var Rescue.
