The smoke will continue to reach the US as long as the fires continue to burn in Canada, but why don’t they go out?

() — Another wave of wildfire smoke drifted toward the US, darkening blue summer skies and raising concerns about the increasing frequency of fires and what they have to do with climate change.

More than 100 million people are under air quality alerts from Wisconsin to Vermont to North Carolina as smoke from the Canadian wildfires drifts south, though conditions are expected to slowly improve over the holiday weekend. .

Air quality on both sides of the border was affected by more than 500 active wildfires that devastate Canada. Some fires are so out of control that officials have no choice but to let them burn.

Meanwhile, at least 10 countries they sent their own firefighters to help Canada put out fires threatening communities whose residents rushed to evacuate.

scientists continue reiterating the warnings that the effects of climate change have arrived, emphasizing that forest fires and the columns of toxic smoke they generate will become more frequent.

As smoke billows from Canada’s forests, some may wonder why so many of the fires are allowed to rage out of control.

This is why:

Some of the fires are in extremely remote areas

While each Canadian province responds to fire differently, they all have common guidelines that emphasize the importance of prioritizing which fires to fight and which to let burn.

Massive fires burning in remote areas — like some in northwestern Quebec — are often too out of control to do anything about it.

“If you have limited resources and you have a lot of fires, what you do is protect human life and property first,” Robert Gray, a Canadian wildfire ecologist, told . “You protect people, infrastructure, watersheds, so there is a prioritization system.”

He added: “If you have these fires that are burning in remote areas and they don’t immediately threaten anything, then you’re going to have to let them do their thing.”

While the idea of ​​massive fires ripping through millions of acres of forest may seem incomprehensible, it’s not entirely new.

“There have always been fires that Canadian authorities don’t fight. It’s expensive to do, ecologically undesirable and you’d just be messing with nature,” said Daniel Perrakis, a fire scientist with the Canadian Forest Service.

“Smoke is a problem, but even if we wanted to do something about it, it wouldn’t be very clear how to do it. You’re talking about large areas where there is no road access; no communities in some cases.”

Of the 539 fires that are currently burning270 are out of control across Canada, including those in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec.

Along with remoteness and distance from people, terrain is another factor. Some of the fires are allowed to burn simply because they are on terrain too treacherous for firefighters to even attempt to tackle.

“These fires are so big that you can’t really put people near them, the winds pick up, they move very fast, they can start in front of you and trap equipment,” Gray said.

There are not enough resources to fight all the fires

Firefighters from at least 10 countries, including the US, Mexico, Costa Rica, Chile, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, South Korea and France, have been deployed to Canada to help with the wildfires since the first week of June.

“Canada doesn’t have a lot of resources to fight fires,” Gray said. “Individual provinces have their own recruitment teams, but they brought in thousands of people from outside the country to help.”

One contributing factor to the apparent lack of resources in the current fight against wildfires is funding, Gray acknowledged.

“They usually don’t allocate a lot of money up front for firefighting,” he continued. “But once the fires break out, governments can certainly find all the money they need to put them out.”

“International groups keep saying that it is necessary to shift the focus towards mitigation and prevention in advance in order to spend less money on response and recovery,” he added. “It’s ridiculous. We spend billions of dollars once a fire breaks out, but we don’t invest the money up front to mitigate fires from happening in the first place.”

There are not enough prevention tactics to reduce the number of fires

More work is needed to reduce future wildfires, which may one day end in catastrophic tragedy.

One of the most effective fire prevention tactics is through prescribed burns, which are fires started intentionally as part of a forest management plan to reduce the risk of more serious and damaging fires.

“We don’t do nearly enough prescribed burning in BC,” Gray said. “Right now we are burning about 10,000 acres a year. The state of New Jersey burns more than we do here in BC.”

Controlled burns have been an important cultural and environmental tradition in indigenous communities, who for thousands of years set low-intensity fires to clear land of wildfire fuel such as debris, brush, brush, and certain grasses. Such fuel ignites easily, allowing for more intense flames, which are more difficult to fight.

Intentional burning practices can increase the resilience of forests and decrease the likelihood of future wildfires.

Perrakis echoed Gray’s sentiments: “It would be very helpful to have maybe 10 or 20 times more controlled burns than we’re currently doing.”

Since controlled burns carry liability issues and pose the risk of accidental wildfires if not done correctly and at the right time, this will require more government funding and proper training.

“We would be removing the fuel from the fire before there is even a fire,” Perrakis said. “It would not be used across the entire Canadian countryside, but very strategically around communities and other values ​​and be in line with the local ecosystem.”

Along with controlled burns, other tactics, such as large-scale clearing, must be intensified, Gray said.

“We need large-scale logging in these types of forests that don’t produce a lot of big wood, so there are a lot of small trees and we have to come and do something with them,” he added. “We can send them into the bioeconomy, produce markets for bioenergy, engineering, wood products — there’s a lot we can do with low-value wood, and that’s a lot of what’s burning right now.”

The ecosystem depends on fires, and climate change makes them worse

Fires have always served a vital ecological purpose on Earth, essential to many ecosystems. They restore soil nutrients, help plants germinate, and remove decaying matter. Without fire, overgrown foliage such as grass and shrubs can set the landscape up for worse outbreaks, particularly during extreme droughts and heat waves.

Most of Canada is covered by boreal forest, the largest and most intact biome in the world. The ecosystem with trees such as fir and pine makes up about a third of all forests on the planet.

But it is a fire-dependent ecosystem, which means that species in the forest have evolved in the presence of fire, and fire “is an essential process for conserving biodiversity.” according to Nature Conservancy.

“We have records from the 1700s and 1800s of days with yellow skies, black skies and smoky skies,” he adds. “It’s the natural cycle of the boreal forest. There really isn’t much that Canadian fire management agencies can do, even if they wanted to.”

While wildfires in the system have always been around and are typically caused by natural elements like lightning, climate change is making them more frequent, increasingly unmanageable, and much harder to prevent.

A year ago, after enduring a record high temperature of 121 degrees Fahrenheit (49 degrees Celsius), the British Columbia village of Lytton was engulfed by a wildfire, drawing attention to the effects of climate change.

Heat-trapping emissions have led to hotter, drier conditions, and wildfires are now lasting longer and getting hotter in places where they have always occurred; meanwhile, fires are also igniting and spreading in unexpected places.

“We know that weather is the most important ingredient of fire behavior, and that weather and weather are linked,” Perrakis said.

Another problem is the increase in forest fires caused by climate change which, at the same time, make climate change worse.

Boreal forests are carbon-dense, releasing 10 to 20 times more planet-warming carbon pollution for every unit area burned by wildfires than other ecosystems, according to a 2022 study. published in the journal Science Advances. Over the years, researchers say it has become a vicious feedback loop of climate change. Emissions from wildfires contribute to rising global temperatures, which in turn fuels even more wildfires.

“Things are changing because of climate change, and that’s taking everyone a bit by surprise, even though we’ve been talking about it for decades,” Perrakis said. “It takes a big season like this for everyone to really realize what climate change looks like. It’s pretty undeniable.”

As Canadians near the fires evacuate their homes while firefighters try to save their properties and communities, other larger fires are burning freely with no way to control them, and people in the US will continue to breathe noxious smoke.

Everything points to the question: When will it end?

“People should probably get used to it, because it’s not something that just came out of nowhere,” Perrakis said. “Climate change is undeniable, and now is the time to think about the future, 10 to 20 years from now, and what needs to be done.”