Another summer of intense wildfires is coming to a close. And experts say Canada cannot afford to keep sticking to its old playbook.
“I think the way we used to fight wildfires in Canada probably isn’t the way we should do it anymore,” said Kent Moore, a physicist and climate scientist at the University of Toronto, noting Canada’s firefighting systems and budgets are still geared toward reacting to fires.
Australia and Portugal are two countries that, like Canada, have had recent histories of widespread wildfires. But both countries have since pivoted to a more preventative approach that offers lessons for Canada.
“We need to invest more in mitigation and prevention because response in itself will not deal with the problem that’s accelerating in front of our eyes,” said Alen Slijepcevic, deputy chief officer for fire risk and community preparedness at Victoria’s Country Fire Authority, the Australian state’s fire service.
Land mosaics
In 2017, Portugal experienced two major wildfires that exposed the limits of a strategy centred on fighting fires once they begin.
In June of that year, fires tore through central Portugal during a period of extreme heat, killing 66 people. Four months later, more than 500 fires were recorded on a single day, killing another 51 people.
The scale and speed of the fires overwhelmed Portugal’s firefighting capacity, while communication and evacuation failures contributed to the high death toll.
After 2017, the country moved from spending about 80 per cent of its wildfire budget on suppression and 20 per cent on prevention to a roughly 50-50 split.
The country also sought to address the geographic characteristics that make it vulnerable.
This includes the problem of “rural abandonment,” where private landowners fail to manage their lands, resulting in dense, continuous vegetation that fuels extreme fires.
“Fires nowadays can reach [the] situation of being a megafire,” said Filipe Duarte Santos, a geophysicist and environmental researcher at the University of Lisbon.
“If this is in a region where you have a large continuous forest, that becomes even more destructive, more dangerous.”
Portugal now encourages the creation of landscape “mosaics,” where forests, shrubland and agricultural fields are interspersed.
Landowners can receive a base payment of €80 to €140 per hectare annually for managing land in ways that reduce its vulnerability to wildfire. They can receive additional payments for further improving fire resilience and ecosystem services.
“Landowners can apply to be financed to provide … carbon capture, for instance, and also in terms of different landscaping, with agriculture and forests,” said Santos.
Fire behaviour triangle
In late 2019 and early 2020, Australia faced its own catastrophic “Black Summer” of wildfires.
Severe drought, record heat and exceptionally dry vegetation created conditions in which fires spread rapidly and burned for weeks or even months.
“In Victoria alone, those fires burnt about 1.5 million hectares … and we had a loss of five lives — five firefighters — and a single community fatality at the time,” said Slijepcevic, of Victoria’s Country Fire Authority.
Like Portugal, Australia responded by focusing on reducing wildfire risk before the fire season begins.
Slijepcevic describes wildfires as the product of a “triangle” of weather, topography and fuel that converge to create extreme fire conditions.
“We cannot change topography … and we definitely can’t change the weather,” he said. “The only option is really the manipulation of fuel.”
Firefighters may use aerial ignition — dropping small incendiary devices to burn vegetation under controlled conditions — to prevent wildfires from spreading.
Trevor Howard, national manager of prescribed burning strategy at Australia’s Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities Council, says the goal is not to eliminate fires, but to reduce their intensity.
“When wildfires … run into areas of low fuel through prescribed burning, that’s been very effective in limiting their spread … providing an opportunity for firefighters to then make progress in suppressing and containing that fire,” he said.
However effective, Howard says agencies must now navigate a thicket of regulations, social licence concerns and growing populations near flammable forests. Further complicating their task, climate change has narrowed the window of time in which to conduct controlled burns.
Community management
Australia has also put greater emphasis on making communities more resistant to fires and getting people to act earlier when fires do threaten, says Slijepcevic.
Like Portugal, Australia uses financial incentives to encourage homeowners to make their properties more wildfire resistant. Under a federally supported Bushfire Resilience Rating Scheme, participating insurers can steeply discount the bushfire-risk component of insurance premiums for homes with certified resilience upgrades.
Australia also factors wildfire risk into where and how homes are built. It increasingly restricts development in high-risk areas and uses Bushfire Attack Level ratings to set building requirements, says Slijepcevic.
For example, homes with a higher rating may be required to use thicker glass and metal screens over windows to protect against heat and wind-borne embers.
In addition, Australia has strengthened its fire warning system. It now uses a nationwide, three-tier system to tell people when conditions have become dangerous enough to leave.
But even with those systems in place, overcoming “optimism bias” and getting people to leave remains difficult, says Slijepcevic.
“People wait until the last moment [to evacuate] when they feel the threat,” he said. “They have to see the smoke or see the flames … before they will activate.”
‘Rethink everything’
Canada cannot copy Australia or Portugal wholesale. Canada has 369-million hectares of forest, much of it remote, boreal terrain. These vast forests make prescribed burning impossible to implement everywhere.
But both countries still hold lessons for Canada.
Moore, of the University of Toronto, says Canada could dial up its prevention efforts, particularly around communities and critical infrastructure.
Building codes could require the use of more fire‑resistant materials. And governments could incentivize homeowners and municipalities to clear flammable vegetation, build fire breaks, and limit how and where development happens.
“We also have to have a serious discussion about, ‘Should we live in the forest?’” said Moore. “We have to rethink how we do everything.”
Moore also points to a less obvious lesson from Portugal: how Canada replants forests.
“We tend to replant them as a monoculture,” Moore said. “Having uniform forests is a challenge because [in the event of a fire] the whole thing burns.”
Currently, wildfire preparedness, building requirements and evacuation alerts are largely handled by provinces and municipalities, which results in significant variation across the country. Following in Australia’s footsteps, Canada could implement a national, wildfire-specific building rating system and warning framework.
And Canada could also increase its firefighting budget.
Australia spent about $6.8 billion on fire services in 2024-25, according to government data. This figure includes urban and rural fire services as well as prevention, preparedness, response and recovery.
Canada does not have a comparable national figure. But the federal government spends just $1 billion annually on wildland fire management. Ontario — the largest province by population and second largest by geography — budgeted $150 million for emergency firefighting in 2026–27, after spending $271 million in 2025–26.
Experts also note that prevention cannot replace suppression. Fires still need to be detected and attacked quickly because a small share become extreme events. In B.C., for example, about three per cent of fires account for 97 per cent of the area burned.
Slijepcevic says the answer is to invest in both.
“We need to make a massive shift,” he said. “We need to invest more in mitigation and prevention because response alone will not deal with the problem that’s accelerating in front of our eyes.”
