In 2023, Canadian wildfires produced more emissions than all but three of them. Only India, China, and the U.S. polluted the air more.
To me, this is mind-blowing.
But perhaps it shouldn’t be.
Living in Canada, I have seen the impact of the growing wildfire season first hand.
I’ve witness the choking haze in the summer. I’ve smelt the wood-burning odour in the air when the wind is blowing just right.
I’ve seen the burning red sun.
My son has had his baseball games cancelled multiple times and has been forced to have recess at school inside for weeks on end, due to poor air quality.
So perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised.
But I am.
Not just surprised. I am shocked.
Shocked that the Canadian wildfires have such a tremendous impact on the global environment, yet they are never part of the conversation on pollution.
Exposure to wildfire smoke causes huge health risks
My family and I travelled to Alberta over the summer. We were only there for a week, so we were determined to do all the things we could.
The only problem was we were right in the middle of wildfire season.
The day we drove to Banff National Park, wildfires were ravaging the town of Jasper, only a few hours drive West.
We could see the haze in the sky. As we drove through the mountains, it was hard to see the tops — the smoke was too thick.
In Calgary the next day, we went to Calaway Park — an outdoor amusement park.
The air quality index was off the charts. We shouldn’t have gone, and we shouldn’t have spent the amount of hours outside that we did.
But we did.
We spent five hours outside, inhaling the smoke, smelling the wood-burning aroma, and choking through the haze.
When we came back inside, our clothes smelled like campfire.
It was a terrible choice. A stupid choice.
I spent the next two months with a terrible, lingering cough that wouldn’t go away. I would cough so badly some days that I would end up throwing up.
Luckily my six-year-old son seemed to have been unharmed. But we learned something that day.
Wildfire smoke is not to be messed with. It is not a joke. It is not an overreaction.
It is a serious, dangerous health risk. One that comes with a myriad of symptoms.
The United States Environmental Protection agency lists the following as health risks associated with exposure to wildfire smoke,
1. Coughing, phlegm, wheezing, and difficulty breathing
2. Bronchitis, reduced lung function, increased risk of asthma, and an increased risk of emergency room visits and hospital admissions
3. Heart failure, heart attack, and stroke
It is important to note that all of these complications were only studied for one wildfire season. Meaning they are all short-term impacts of wildfire smoke.
The longer term impacts have been studied less, but some recent studies suggest long-term exposure could heighten the risk of developing dementia.
Perhaps I was lucky to only develop a lingering cough.
It could have been a lot worse.
And these health risks will only continue to get worse as the wildfire season in Canada grows.
Wildfires in Canada are getting more common and more extreme
As Piyush Jain, a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service, noted, in 2023,
“We literally saw fire coast to coast — from Vancouver Island to Halifax. It really was extraordinary, the scale.”
2024 trended no differently — at the time Piyush was quoted, in August 2024, the wildfire season was already way above average.
In fact, A State of Wildfires report, published in August 2024, calculated that,
If we don’t cut emissions, the type of extreme wildfire season witnessed in Canada in 2023 will be six to 11 times more likely by 2100.
Even worse, the increasingly widespread hot and dry weather in Canada was discovered to be a main driver in the fires spreading so rapidly. The type of weather that is expected to be typical within only three decades.
If Canadian wildfire smoke is already a leading contributor to carbon emissions worldwide, how much worse will it get in the next decades?
Shockingly, emissions from wildfires are not even taken into account by countries who strive to reach their Paris Agreement targets to keep temperatures from rising more than 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels.
This means that a pollution source, worse than the emissions of over 190 countries, is not even being talked about.
How can any rational conversation about global pollution begin, without a conscientious look at the smoke that Canadian wildfires produce?
How can we hope to tackle any sort of global warming without tracking this source?
What sort of world are we setting up for our children to inherit?
Canada’s boreal forest is at a tipping point
Historically, Canada’s boreal forest as served as a carbon sink. Trees draw carbon from the atmosphere into their leaves, trunks and down into their roots and soil. This reduces the amount of pollutants in the air.
Essentially Canada’s boreal forest is nature’s way to reduce pollution.
But this has gone up in smoke — literally.
The boreal forest no longer acts as the sink it once did. Over the past two decades, warming climate and drier conditions have led to larger wildfires, turning the boreal forest into a growing source of carbon.
Scientists, such as Jennifer Baltzer at Wilfred Laurier University, describe the extreme danger inherent in this.
Canada’s boreal forest is now in a feedback loop — a troubling one. One where the carbon released from the forest contributes to the climate change, which then accelerates the conditions that leads to more fires.
Thus the boreal forest is not longer helping, it is actively hurting, the environment.
And it is not just a Canadian problem. It is a global problem.
One that will grow worse and worse in the years and decades to come.
The dangers of wildfire smoke are often swept under the rug in conventional conversations on pollution.
But they need to be front and center.
When emissions from the wildfires just in Canada, produces more pollution than over 95% of the world’s countries, it is something that needs to be highlighted extensively.
We can no longer ignore them.
Wildfires are a dangerous, very real threat, not just to Canadians, but to the whole world.