More than 100 wildfires burn across B.C. as climate change doubles extreme fire-weather odds

British Columbia is battling 122 active wildfires as of Saturday, August 15, with half classified as out of control and four designated as wildfires of note. The coastal fire region and southern portions of the Cariboo fire region may see thunderstorms bringing potential precipitation and gusty winds this weekend, though wildfire smoke is expected to gradually shift back into central areas of the province.

The scale of the crisis has prompted federal action: the federal government announced Friday it is setting aside $34.2 million to help 141 municipal adaptation projects build climate resilience across Canada. In B.C., the funds are distributed across multiple projects, with Port Coquitlam receiving $789,600 to advance flood-resilient infrastructure, the Habitat Acquisition Trust in Victoria receiving $735,630, and Nanaimo getting $508,220 to improve potable water supply. Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin said the projects will help communities protect people from flooding, extreme heat, and other climate-related risks.

A new report published Thursday by World Weather Attribution found that climate change has made the extreme fire weather behind recent Canadian wildfires dramatically more likely. With global temperatures roughly 1.4 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, researchers determined that severe fire-weather conditions now occurring in Ontario are twice as probable as they would be in a world untouched by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. The finding is even starker in the Northwest Territories: a week of fire weather as extreme as this year's — which would occur once a decade without warming — is now estimated to return every two years.

Friederike Otto, a climate science professor at Imperial College London and study co-author, warned that even marginal worsening stretches firefighting capacity to breaking point. "Even if just a little bit worse, it would mean that everything is even stretched further," Otto said.

Canada is enduring one of its worst burn seasons on record. More than 4,000 fires have been recorded nationwide so far this year, scorching roughly the size of Switzerland — a nearly 45 per cent increase over the 30-year average spanning 1994 to 2023. The crisis mirrors a global pattern, with major blazes forcing hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate across France, Spain, Portugal, and Greece, and devastating swaths of Patagonia in Chile and Argentina.