A proactive approach to wildfire management in Canada

By Emily Miranda

The 2023 fire season exposed a growing mismatch between Canada’s wildfire preparedness and rapidly evolving risk. Longer, more volatile seasons and more extreme fire behaviour are colliding with governance and capacity constraints, slowing the adoption of proven tools.

Wildfire risk is changing not only how often fires occur, but how they behave. This means response systems built for episodic events are strained by faster spread and cascading impacts, such as smoke and post-fire flooding.

The path forward is to operationalize readiness, so it can scale across jurisdictions and still function under strain. Readiness is a maintained capability, supported by ongoing risk intelligence, scenarios and exercises, and pre-defined decision triggers that enable faster, more coordinated action.

Identifying Potential Implementation Gaps

During the 2024 Jasper wildfires, responders and infrastructure operators struggled to access a shared, real-time picture of fire spread, water availability, and grid vulnerabilities. The information existed, but was in separate systems and could not be combined quickly enough to guide decisions. The result was delayed actions and compounded impacts, illustrating how preparedness can falter, not for lack of effort, but for lack of integration.

Effective wildfire preparation requires procurement and contracting that can move proven tools into operations within a single fire season. When assessment and contracting take months, agencies enter peak season without the best tools, rely on interim options, and postpone testing and integration. This is a decision that often slips into the following season, especially when funding supports short pilots, but not multi-year licensing, security clearance, and integration.

Standards and data-sharing enable coordination when they are designed for reuse across jurisdictions. Tools can be brought together into a common operating picture, when agencies align on a few essentials, like shared definitions and practical, pre-agreed ways to share information.

Where this alignment is established in advance, and made reusable, integration becomes faster and more reliable. This kind of interoperability is increasingly achievable, and it is essential for supporting coordinated decision-making during a multi-jurisdictional fire season.

Readiness varies by context and improves when systems are designed for local realities. Indigenous fire stewardship is widely acknowledged, and it is most effectively embedded in permitting, mitigation, and recovery when roles are clear, stewardship is resourced, and governance mechanisms are durable.

Meanwhile, fly-in and winter-road communities face basic constraints (i.e., intermittent cellular coverage, seasonal supply chains, limited evacuation options) that many preparedness models implicitly assume.

Planning assumptions need to be updated more frequently, as historic baselines are overtaken by changing fire behaviour. Longer seasons, far-reaching smoke, and rising secondary risks (i.e., post-fire flooding) are increasingly common. In practice, readiness depends on forecasting and modelling services that keep plans current.

This includes predictive fire-weather and ignition modelling, seasonal smoke outlooks, and scenario analysis that stress-tests cascading hazards for communities and infrastructure. Used routinely, these services translate emerging conditions into specific updates, which will trigger pre-positioning resources, opening clean air shelters, and adjusting evacuation thresholds, before peak season.

Making Readiness Dependable

The next step is to design readiness around known failure modes, so capabilities still work under strain. Canada has strong assets, from FireSmart measures, to hazard maps and dashboards.

However, fast-moving incidents expose weak points when connectivity drops and staff are stretched, or authority is fragmented. In these circumstances, situational awareness lags and decisions, such as evacuation timing, road closures, and resource deployment are delayed, allowing fires to outpace response. This increases the risk to people and critical infrastructure.

Designing for success means establishing resilient data platforms and pre-agreed roles so information stays shared, decisions stay timely, and actions can be implemented quickly.

Firstly, readiness improves when local, provincial, and federal data can be combined through shared standards, rather than rebuilt through one-off integrations each season. This requires up front actions, such as negotiating data sharing terms on access, cadence, and security, aligning mapping services so layers line up and standardizing key definitions, such as what counts as an ‘active perimeter’. The payoff is a trusted, shared picture of perimeter, smoke, and air quality that supports coordinated decisions and consistent public warnings.

Secondly, public warning systems work when they are interoperable and authority is clear. Communities benefit when multi-channel alerting systems are in place (cell broadcast, radio, sirens, and door-to-door protocols). They also benefit when systems are paired with pre-agreed roles. Who issues which alerts? How should messages escalate when coverage is unreliable? What alerts trigger transport, sheltering and re-entry? With governance in place, technology can support timely decisions across jurisdictions.

Thirdly, emergency operations capacity improves when it is maintained year-round, not recreated each season. For many smaller municipalities, this means surge staff can step into roles using clear playbooks, repeatable training, and credentialing that lets outside support plug in quickly.

Mutual aid can move faster because they define types of resources liability and reimbursement, and practical logistics like staffing, lodging, communications. Simulation-based training can reinforce readiness by letting teams rehearse decisions against realistic wildfire scenarios before peak season.

Finally, preparedness is strongest when it is embedded in routine land-use and asset decisions and not just treated as a public-awareness campaign. FireSmart measures, such as defensible space, ember-resistant design, and vegetation management are most effective when normalized through:

• Bylaws and permitting that make defensible space and ember-resistant choices routine;
• Building and retrofit guidance tied to local exposure, not generic hazard categories;
• Capital plans that fund buffers, access routes, water availability, and sheltering spaces;
• Community training cycles that show households what to prepare, when to evacuate, and how to respond to smoke in alignment with local evacuation and smoke plans.

These actions create built-in, long-term wildfire readiness, rather than creative reactive processes, that only have short-term impacts.

Scaling for Readiness

Canada is rich in promising wildfire management innovations. The recurring bottleneck is the pathway from pilot to practice. Tools are demonstrated, but they do not become routine across ministries, municipalities, and Indigenous partners. Successful, sustained adoption requires three conditions:

1. Governance readiness: procurement pathways, data-sharing agreements, and decision authority;

2. Operational capacity: trained staff, resilient communication, and exercised protocols;

3. Technical maturity: data and models integrated into real workflows.

When one element lags, even strong tools fail to influence decisions. For example, a province may publish wildfire and smoke mapping layers, but if municipalities, public health, and transportation authorities cannot access them in real-time, the data won’t shape evacuation timing, road closures, or clear-air shelter activation. The issue is rarely the tool itself. Rather, it is whether governance, operations, and data integration are aligned to permit information to drive coordinated action.

Building Long-Term Resilience

Damage caused by ember storms depends on decisions made well before a fire starts. In the wildland–urban interface, land use patterns, access, and vegetation management determine whether embers ignite isolated structures, or cascade into neighbourhood-scale loss.

Many municipalities lack clear triggers, such as exposure-based building requirements and retrofit thresholds tied to local risk, that translate wildfire exposure into everyday planning decisions. Improved ember and fire-spread modelling can make these triggers explicit, enabling systematic risk reduction, rather than post-event rebuilding.

Resilience starts with anticipating smoke and heat exposure. Predictive modelling provides a repeatable, updatable picture of exposure risk, allowing jurisdictions to plan and resource clean air sheltering, filtration, and continuity of water and power, ahead of the season.

Capacity follows incentives as short budget cycles and project-by-project grants undermine workforce retention and sustained exercises. Multi-year funding, pooled programs, and standing service arrangements underpin the core services required for readiness. This includes forecasting, smoke modelling, training, and scenario cycles, which enables routine interpretation of indicators and coordinated action across jurisdictions.

The Inherent Vaule of Strategic Foresight

Strategic foresight matters when it changes real-world actions, such as when to evacuate, staff response, and when to shut down vulnerable infrastructure. In wildfire management, this translates into a repeatable cycle of monitoring signals, updating scenarios, and pre-authorizing decisions, so thresholds and roles are set before communities are under pressure.

Foresight functions as infrastructure, when it is embedded in governance and exercised routinely, not activated only during crises. This includes:

Shared signals and indicators delivered through a common platform, combining fire weather, smoke, and infrastructure stress models, with agreed stewardship and update cadence.

Scenario and exercise cycles, supported by modelling and simulations, that let agencies rehearse severe fire seasons and update playbooks and decision triggers before peak season.

Trigger points and pre-authorized decisions embedded in a shared modelling environment or digital twin, can enable evacuation, re-entry, asset shutdown, and mutual aid actions to be tested and rehearsed in advance.

In practice, this can take the form of a shared wildfire and smoke modelling platform that allows agencies to test scenarios, agree on evacuation and re-entry thresholds, and pre-authorize actions before a season begins. In such scenarios, decisions are triggered by conditions, not improvised under pressure.

Canada’s wildfire challenge is structural as much as it is environmental. Resilience will depend on removing frictions that hinder collective action, slow procurement, brittle data sharing, inconsistent standards, unexercised playbooks, and unclear decision authority.

A foresight driven posture can be delivered through repeatable services, including predictive models, scenario and simulation platforms, and governance frameworks that set triggers and decisions in advance. These capabilities turn response capacity into maintained readiness, and readiness into long-term resilience by reducing risk before peak season.

Emily Miranda is the national program manager of Future Ready® at WSP in Canada. For more information, visit: www.wsp.com

This article was featured in the August 2026 print edition of Environmental Science & Engineering Magazine.