Why Canada's Forest Fires Are So Difficult to Fight

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
Brian Lehrer on WNYC. You know, there's been so much health and climate news this week that we're devoting three days to it. We usually set aside a segment on Tuesday to do something health and climate related, health or climate related sometimes, to make sure that those stories don't get lost in the crush of other day-to-day news headlines. But there's so much this week that we're doing a Tuesday, health and climate segment, a Wednesday one today, and a Thursday one tomorrow.
Today, a two-part deeper dive into the connection between forest management and global warming and part two, how to read the air quality index and protect yourselves the next time the smoke comes back. Part one, as smoke from Canada's wildfires filled the northeast and midwest air last week, President Donald Trump blamed Canada.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:05)
You know, we got to stop the fires up there. We can help them. We'll help them.
But maybe they should pay us some damages or something. We should do some tariffs.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:15)
We should do some tariffs or they should pay the United States for the damage that's being done because these wildfires originate in Canada.
This wildfire management charge, you may remember, is similar to what he leveled at California's state government during past fire seasons, mismanaged forests, rake the leaves, things like that. What conservatives tend to leave out is the role of a warming climate. But both things can be true at once, right? Forest management matters and climate change is making fires bigger, longer, and fiercer. So what actually makes forest management so hard to change? What, if anything, could Canada have done differently or do differently in the future? And how does managing a forest have to change when the climate is changing, too? Joining us now to walk through some of the science is Augustin Bigot, Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at NYU Tandon, where he runs the Ignite Fire Research Lab and studies how wildfires start, spread and can be predicted. Professor Guibaud, welcome back to WNYC. Thank you so much for joining us.

**Augustin Guibaud** (2:32)
Good morning, Brian. Thank you so much for having me.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:35)
So in general terms first, and we'll get into specifics later, the president says Canada's fires come down to bad forest management. Canada's prime minister points to climate change. As a researcher in the field, is this an either-or situation or is the real starting point here, how those two forces feed each other?

**Augustin Guibaud** (2:56)
Well, I think there's a bit of both, of course. Now, one thing we want to bear in mind first is that Canada is a very sparsely populated country. And so we have roughly 40 million people over 10 million square kilometers, and so for the audience in New York, the density of Canada is such that you roughly would have, you know, 200 people over a surface the size of Manhattan. And now imagine that it's summer and it's getting pretty hot, and you're roughly 200 people over such a large area and a fire starts somewhere. You know, you can try to manage the land as well as you can. There are going to be areas that are not going to be accessible. And so first, I really want to emphasize that point. Canada is a large area of natural land with very limited inhabitants.
And so if we consider fire in that context, fire is part of the natural ecosystems. And so we expect some forests to burn as part of the natural life cycle. So we have a rejuvenation of the land, some of the trees that may be sick or dying are burning in the flames, new sprouts can come off the ground. And so we have a healthy ecosystem that is sustained with the presence of fire.
And so that's really a first point here.
Now, when we have inhabitants and when we develop policies to manage lands, we try to develop policies first to protect assets. We want to protect our homes, we want to protect our highways, we want to protect our power plants. And so very close to where people live and where industrial activities are present, we're going to clear the land and we're going to do this, for instance, mechanically. We're going to use bulldozers to create some clearings. We're going to try to increase the access to fire fighters with more roads. We're going to put water, potentially reservoirs or accesses. And that's going to protect us as a last line of defense. And what I think is important to remember here is that we're going to protect some areas from wildfires, but we're not going to completely extinguish wildfires. And so there is policy, there are policies in place to do this, but they're not going to cover the very large and immense land of Canada, which again is the size of the US., but it's roughly one-ninth of the population.