The Decibel - How much forest management matters in wildfires

Episode Date: July 16, 2026

Evacuation orders are under way in communities in northwestern Ontario, as more than 140 wildfires rage in the region. Meanwhile, smoke from the fires has drifted south, blanketing cities like Toronto in a yellow haze. Fire officials confirm more than 4.7 million acres have burned throughout Canada this year. As wildfires have become a regular occurrence in Canada, questions about what can be done to mitigate the damage and protect communities has become louder. Dr. Jen Beverly, associate professor of wildland fire at the University of Alberta, joins The Decibel to talk about the role of climate change, whether wildfires are becoming more intense and frequent and what role forest management plays in wildfire country. Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Each year, from around April to September, we hear about communities impacted by wildfires. And this year is no exception. Armstrong, Ontario, Boston Bar, BC, Collins First Nation, Fort Simpson Northwest Territories, Lack-Laquois First Nation, Lytton, BC, Lack de Mill Lack First Nation, Osoyus, B.C., West Colonna, BC, White Sand First Nation, Riggley Northwest Territories.

Those are just some of the communities that are either dealing with or have dealt with an evacuation order this year. Collins' first nation in northwest Ontario was hit particularly hard with extensive damage to homes and community buildings. Chief Helen Pavola reports that some people were fleeing on boats. And it's not just the people who are in those communities who are at risk. A crew inside a CN rail train near Armstrong, Ontario, were also caught in the fire on Monday. This could potentially overtake us here. This is getting a little scary.

The video they posted online showed the train encircled by flames as they waited for instructions. Holy shit. Okay, y'all need to hurry up here. Like, seriously, we're encased in flames now. Hello, Jody, can you hear us? Yeah, I can hear you there.

I'm telling them here. We're notching up. Yeah, this has got to move f***ing quicker. Eventually, another train going the opposite way comes barreling out of the flames and passes them. Holy crap. Go to cross the hole. Yeah. Oh yeah, look over there. CNRail confirmed that their employees were evacuated on Monday night, and later said that they had suspended operations in the region.

Even if you're not having to flee a fire, you're likely being affected by the smoke from the nearly 1,000 fires currently burning a fire. across the country. Yesterday and today, smoke was spread out as far north as the Arctic Circle, all the way to the southernmost point in the country, Point Peely and Peely Island in Ontario. In Toronto, a thick, muddy, khaki-colored smoke blanketed the city on Wednesday, causing it to have the worst air quality of any major global city, according to IQ Air, which tracks air quality across the world. As the number of wildfires grows, so does the debate around what causes them.

And so today, we're talking to Dr. Jen Beverly. I'm an associate professor of wildland fire at the University of Alberta. My research has been very much focused on fuels. And so trying to understand the forest and wildland fuels that ignite and burn at different scale. So right from the scale of an individual forest. stand right up to large landscapes. She'll tell us about the science behind wildfires, what role climate change plays in

their intensity and frequency, and how much improved forest management would help. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail. Hi, Dr. Beverly. Thanks so much for coming back on the show. Well, thank you for inviting me. So you're a wildfire researcher, but before you researched wildfires, you were worked as an Ontario fire ranger. So you've kind of seen wildfires from many angles. I'm just curious, like, what was it like to fight a forest fire? Great question. Yeah. So actually, I fought fires while I was a graduate student studying fires. So it was going on simultaneously. But becoming a

firefighter really gave me that boots on the ground look at the wildfires I was studying. And it kind of opened my eyes to the challenges of managing fires and making decisions about how to respond to and prevent fires. Yeah, how would how would you say that that experience has made your approach your research? You know, I think I think it really opened my eyes to just how tricky the fire problem is and how difficult it is to suppress fires once they become large. So I got a lot of experience doing that, you know, seeing the fire process, um, under the conditions where we're able to suppress it. But I also got experience being sent to fires that had already escaped that initial attack and

grown very large. And those become large campaign fires that can burn for weeks and even months. And they cost a lot of money. So they've got tons of aircraft, helicopters, crews assigned. And that juxtaposition between the small fires that we can put out versus the large fires that end up being responsible for most of the area burned and most of the costs really made me think hard about how can we give fire managers and decision makers information to help manage that process of responding to fire? Let's actually get a bit of context around what wildfires have looked

like in Canada over the past few years. What does the data say about the intensity and number of wildfires that we've been seeing? In terms of numbers of fires, nationally, it varies from year to year, and that's normal. The numbers of fires themselves, in Canada, they can range anywhere from maybe three or four thousand wildfires per year up to 10,000 or a little bit over that. But even in a really bad year, like 2023, you know, we were right in the middle at about 7,000 fires that year. So the numbers of fires don't end up being that informative about what's going on because most of those fires, again, are small, they're suppressed before they do any significant damage. Now, when you look at the areas that

those fires burn, what we see are really some dramatic years recently. So, you know, that might range from under a million hectares across the whole country to more severe years when it's 5 million or 7 million hectares. And in really extreme cases like 2023, over 12, 13, 14 million hectares burned. Now, when I look at the data of fire intensity and how fires are burning, I'm not seeing dramatic changes in the way certain fires in the boreal forest of Canada are burning. These are high-intensity fire regimes. And it's perfectly natural to have really intense fires that burn the forests and kill off the trees. I'm not necessarily seeing changes in the way those fires are burning. They're burning intensely, but that's also the way fires in the 1980s

were burning in the 1950s and earlier in the record. So certainly it's extreme and during some of these extreme years with the impacts of drought, the fires are burning maybe deeper. So, and that has different impacts on the ecosystems. Can you explain that when you say deeper? Because you're explaining that, you know, it's not as more intense, but it's actually, they're going deeper. What does that mean? Right. So, you know, the fire, when it initially spreads through an area, it's spreading almost like a line that's expanding outwards. And that's sort of where it achieves its size and its extent. Now, after the flaming friar front passes, the fire will continue to smolder in those areas and burn deeper into the organic layer on the forest floor.

And if you have a lot of accumulated organic matter on the forest floor that's been built up over many years of those forests developing, then that fuel consumption will continue in a smoldering state after the initial fire passes through. And so if you have drought conditions, more of that forest floor material is then available to burn and smolder. And that's that smoldering deep, down to mineral soils in some cases that can release a lot of the stored organic matter on the

forest floor. You mentioned the forest floor there about how that might impact the severity of a fire. And I'm assuming that you're talking about this is kind of the fuel, right? And this is your expertise, is in fuel management and the role fuels play in wildfires. What exactly fuels a fire? So when I talk about fuel in the context of wildland fire, I'm talking about the, live and dead biomass that's out there. So the live fuel is the trees, the branch wood, the needles, the very fine branch wood that contributes to fire intensity. Also coarse, woody debris, so bigger chunks of wood that have maybe a tree that has

fallen over and is decomposing on the forest floor. As well, moss, shrubs, Forbes, ground vegetation on the forest floor. And it's that accumulation on the surface that can support the spread of a fire. And if you have enough intensity, so if you have enough fuel and enough wind, you can get enough intensity on that surface, that that fire can transition to the suspended fuels. And that could be ladder fuels, branches, lower branches of trees, smaller trees in the understory or shrubs. they serve as a bit of a stepping stone for fire to move from the surface up into the elevated aerial fuels in the forest. And so they move from the surface up into the canopy and start spreading as a high intensity fire that's consuming vertically the fuel right from the ground up into the tree tops. Has there been a change in the fuel available for these wildfires to start?

Absolutely. In some places there have been. Forests are dynamic. They are never stuck in one state. They're constantly changing and evolving. And across large areas, I mean, Canada, we have the vast boreal forest that spreads right from coast to coast. And that's where a lot of the fire in the area burned is happening in the boreal forest. And it has different types of forest in different ages. And you've got these patches formed together in a bit of a quilt work, a mosaic.

across vast areas. So you've got different disturbances, human-caused disturbances, as well as natural disturbances that change that patchwork. When a fire comes through and burns over an area, it basically turns all of those patches into a reset. Now it's going to regenerate as a young forest that comes in. It's part of a natural process to keep those forests healthy. On that, I mean, I'm curious to know when we talk about the changes and the fuel, can we connect that to climate change? Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that we're seeing with climate change is that the fire seasons are getting longer. And we're getting more opportunities within those seasons for fires, large, fires, large, intense fires to happen. So fire conducive weather doesn't happen every day.

But you can kind of rely on it happening a certain number of days every year. And those number of days are increasing. And then you also have an extended fire season. So fires are starting earlier in the spring. And we're seeing them later in the fall. And that is changing the forests. And it's also changing the forests in terms of the other stressors that the forest is experiencing.

And it's also having an impact on just the general health and resilience of these ecosystems recovering from wildfire. Okay. So if I'm understanding correctly, it's like there's a number of things that's impacting these wildfires when it comes to how they're burning. One of them being that there's more fuel, but also the conditions, right, that's hot, it's dry, it's windy. Is that correct? Absolutely. Yeah. We're seeing more of those days, more of those hot, dry, windy days that are the kinds of days that support extreme fire behavior and large fire spread. Right. When it comes to the factors that lead to wildfires, you know, we can't really manage the weather, but there are ways that fuel is being managed in forest. What do some of those strategies look like? So there's always been a lot of interest in trying to be proactive about minimizing fire impacts. So one of the ways you can do that is manage the fuels. Like we can't do much about the weather. The hope is that you can modify those forests to make them less flammable. So they're naturally flammable because they have evolved with fire and their fire adopted species. How do you then make them less flammable? Well, try to keep the

fire on the surface. And you do that by reducing those latter fuels that I was talking about. So if you can remove those lower branches, you don't have a wick for the fire to move from the surface up into the canopy. The hope is that you can keep the fire on the surface. And if it can't get up into those aerial fuels, then it cannot create that ember shower that we know rains down into neighborhoods and ignites structures. The other thing that they do to make these forest architectures less flammable is they remove some of the trees. And that makes it more difficult for a fire to spread from tree to tree.

and that can be done manually by mulching or raking up fuels or doing a prescribed burn in the understory to consume some of those fine fuels on the forest floor. But the goal at that stand level next to a community with a fire smart treatment is really to change the architecture of the stand. So its natural flammable state is not as conducive to the kinds of intense fires that pose a threat to. communities. Mm-hmm. Okay.

Is the idea not to have as intense fires, but not to actually suppress the fires completely. Is that kind of the idea? I think there's some recognition that you cannot stop a fire with a fuel treatment, because if there's any fuel there, the fire can continue to burn. So it's really about modulating the fire behavior. So dampening the fire behavior, so it's not as intense. So it doesn't get up into those aerial suspended. fuels and if it can't get up into the canopy, it's going to be a lower intensity fire.

That means it's going to be easier to suppress with ground crews. So when fire is a surface fire, it is responsive to suppression by ground crews with hose and water. And it also will be more responsive to air tankers dropping water on it. It's safe for crews to be on the ground fighting a surface fire. and they could do that effectively with the tools that they have. Once a fire gets up into the canopy, now it has a massive amount of fuel. And that means it's going to reach an intensity that is no longer conducive to fire suppression.

It wouldn't be safe to have crews on the ground fighting it. So the goal is very much to keep the intensity lower. It's not possible to completely stop a fire with a fuel treatment unless you were to remove all of the fuel. And that's generally not not acceptable to people who live in those areas. They don't want to see these areas paved. They want to see the forest be retained in some capacity because it provides other things. There's visual quality, its habitat, and so on. We'll be right back. We know that fires are part of our natural ecosystem, right? They help a forest regenerate. And there are some that argue that the size of the wildfires today can be blamed

on poor forest management. So, for example, that our earlier approaches in trying to suppress fires, which was something that was common in the 1970s, that has led to where we're at today. So I'm just curious, like, what does the science say about this argument? That it's poor management of the forest. That's a problem and not climate change. Yeah, it's a concerning narrative. And it's not really consistent with my understanding of what's happened. And I think it's become popular because it's a very simplistic way of thinking about the problem. There's vast areas where there hasn't been active fire suppression. Fires are monitored or they're even left to burn if they're not threatening communities. And there's been lots and lots of fire up there. In the managed forest,

if we wanted to refer to that as areas, more to the south. in the boreal anyway, where you have long-term tenure and short-term tenure agreements for timber harvesting forest products, as well as most of the population, there has been active fire suppression. And in some places, there absolutely has been a reduction in burned areas because of fire suppression activities. The extent to which that has dramatically shifted ecosystems to become more flammons, I haven't seen any confirmed evidence of that for the boreal forest in Canada. There's been lots of fire in those areas, even with suppression. So we have a very modified landscape today, both by fire and by people.

But we still have large areas where these ecosystems have not been disrupted by fire suppression at all. In fact, really vast areas in the country where a lot of this area burning. is happening is happening in areas where there hasn't been active management or suppression from a forest perspective. I think the main message is that the effects of fire suppression and forest management are nuanced. They differ in different parts of the country and in different ecological areas. And I have not seen any substantive evidence to support that it is forest mismanagement that's responsible for what we're seeing. Because The increases in fire activity are happening in those areas where we haven't suppressed fires.

And just to put like, just to connect it then and to put a fine point on it, then what would you connect these, these intensities of fires too then? If it's not this one idea, then what is it exactly? Well, you know, again, what I'm not seeing fires that look different than our historical fires. We're seeing more of those large fires, though. So that seems to very much reflect the increased opportunity for large fires. fires that climate change is introducing. There's more opportunities for them to happen because the seasons are longer due to climate change. And there's more days in the season where you're getting those hot, dry, windy conditions for fire to happen. So it really does look more like the outcome of changes in climate and changes in drug conditions rather than a direct effect of force management. activities. Now, that's not to say, again, it's not to say that force management isn't having an impact in some locations. It's just very nuanced. And it's not easy to generalize what's going

on, certainly nationally. So we know that wildfires are very destructive and threatened many communities. And there are examples from recent past like Jasper, Alberta or Litton, B.C., where the whole town burned down in 2021. And then you go back 10 years to Fort McMurray. I think many people will remember the images from that huge wildfire. How do we go about balancing when to let wildfires burn and when to suppress it? It's a tough decision for the person who has to make that call. So fires are easy to suppress when they're small and you have a very short window to make a decision to do that. Do we put this fire out? Does it pose a threat to public safety and values or can we let this fire burn to achieve its beneficial ecological role on the land?

You have a very short time period to decide what you're going to do because soon enough that fire is going to grow large and you don't have a choice. And it puts that decision maker, I think most people in that position would probably say, let's just put the fire out and be safe because I can't predict the weather into the future with very much confidence. And so I don't know what the weather's going to be like in three or four days. And if we let that fire burn and grow large, is it going to continue to spread? Is the wind going to change direction?

Is it going to be pushed towards a community and threaten public safety, for example, or other values? And a lot of agencies have put in place policies that support those decisions when possible to allow fire to fulfill those ecological objectives. But the decisions are tough ones. We can't rely on past patterns of weather activity to make decisions about what's going to happen in this year or next year. And unfortunately, that often leads to a default decision

to just, well, just put the fire out. Based on your research and what we've been talking about with the unpredictability of the weather and the changing climate. Are there lessons here? How should we be approaching wildfires in the future? Well, I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of good new initiatives in terms of looking at the various complex facets of fire beyond suppression. So, you know, there are efforts to explore.

Can we manage the fuels proactively? Can we do that in a way that can help? address the risk for the highest priority areas where you've got accumulated fuels that potentially could support a wildfire spreading into areas that we care about like communities. And so part of the work that my group does is to try to provide information on where to prioritize those kinds of interventions, those proactive mitigations. And there's lots of efforts to motivate, even at the property level homeowners to become informed about fire smarting their properties, reducing the potential for embers to ignite their homes if they live in fire prone landscapes.

So right from the property scale of individual homeowners out to municipalities and communities and even more broadly across the provincial managed areas, what I'm seeing is a lot of thoughtful consideration about what can be done proactively. And then also, accepting that, you know, we still have to put fires out when they threaten values. And in Canada, we have fire management agencies that do that really well. Dr. Beverly, leave it there. Thank you very much. That was Dr. Jen Beverly, a wildland fire and fuel management researcher and associate professor at the University of Alberta. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Our former intern and associate producer, Cynthia Jimenez, produced this episode.

Our producers are Madeline White, Rachel Levy McGoughlin, and Mahal Stein. Our editor is David Crosby. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening.