Canada's wildfire paradox: fewer fires, greater destruction highlighted in new analysis

Canada's wildfire seasons are growing longer, larger and more destructive, according to a six-decade analysis of fire records by the federal government's Canadian Forest Service.

The study shows the trend isn't being driven by more frequent fires but by a smaller number of increasingly large wildfires that are burning more land than in the past, reinforcing a trend federal scientists first identified years ago.

In 2019, fire scientists with Natural Resources Canada published a study that suggested wildfire activity across the country had increased steadily since the mid-20th century, driven by rising temperatures and longer fire seasons.

The pattern was uneven at the time: Some regions showed clear increases in area burned, while others appeared stable or even declining. Human-caused fires were thought to be in retreat, reflecting decades of prevention efforts, and the largest fires, though growing, had not yet come to dominate the national picture.

The updated study, recently published in the Canadian Journal of Forest Research, extends that analysis through 2024 using improved satellite mapping and nine additional fire seasons that comprise several of the most severe on record, including 2021, 2023 and 2024.

The research found that the area burned from wildfires continues to rise across nearly all Canadian eco-zones, even in the Pacific Northwest and Atlantic Canada regions. Both were once considered lower risk because of wetter conditions but are now showing flat or increasing fire trends.

The study also illustrates how the largest fires now account for a growing share of the damage and that while lightning continues to drive most wildfires, human-caused fires have begun increasing again since the early 2000s — a shift the authors link not to policy failure but to hotter, drier conditions that make more ignitions harder to control.

Fighting the unstoppable

"I think that increase in the human-caused fires, particularly the larger fires, is because the fuels are drier," said Chelene Hanes, a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service at Natural Resources Canada's Great Lakes Forestry Centre in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont.

Hanes is the lead author of both the 2019 and 2025 national studies examining long-term changes in Canada's wildfire regime.

She said the largest fires now reach a scale and intensity where conventional firefighting tactics become limited, forcing crews to focus on containment and protection rather than stopping the fire outright.

Hanes said the impact of the largest wildfire events are becoming increasingly visible on a national scale.

"They're becoming responsible for a larger proportion of the burned areas because everything's so dry," she said.

The dynamics Hanes describes are no longer abstract datasets but have played out repeatedly in recent wildfire seasons across the country.

In July 2021, wildfires driven by extreme heat and record temperatures swept through British Columbia, notably destroying the village of Lytton, which had just recorded Canada's highest temperature on record, at 49.6 C.

The 2023 wildfire season was widely reported as the most severe on record in Canadian history, scorching more than 15 million hectares and prompting large-scale evacuations and significant smoke pollution across Canada and into the United States.

In 2024, a wildfire in Jasper National Park in Alberta forced the evacuation of roughly 25,000 people, destroyed hundreds of structures and become one of the country's most costly disasters of the year.

WATCH | The impact of wildfires on wildlife in the boreal forest:

How wildfires affect boreal forest wildlife

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While some wildlife thrive when the boreal forest burns, experts say climate change and human activity have led to larger, more intense wildfires, exacerbating the negative effects on some species.

Pricing the fire risk

The shift in the wildfire landscape is also being felt in Canada's insurance industry, which is warning that rising wildfire risk is reshaping losses, premiums and long-term housing decisions across the country.

"We price risk as an industry, and we have seen an increase in natural disaster risk across Canada — but in particular in high-risk wildfire areas," Liam McGuinty, vice-president of federal affairs at the Insurance Bureau of Canada, said.

McGuinty said between 2005 and 2014, insurance losses from wildfires in Canada were about $70 million a year, but in the most recent decade, that average has climbed closer to $750 million — a 1,000 per cent increase in a little over a decade.

The industry is responding by adjusting how it prices coverage in the most exposed communities, which can mean higher premiums or changes to policies as companies manage their overall risk, he said.

"Our job is to price risk," McGuinty said, noting that in areas of Canada with greater wildfire exposure, insurers have had to make "changes to insurance policies."

He emphasized that wildfire coverage remains part of a standard home insurance policy in Canada and that coverage is "widely available," adding, "This isn't a California-type situation at all," referring to how major insurers stopped writing or renewing policies in high-risk wildfire areas of the state after repeated catastrophic losses.