Last August, my family and I embarked on a road trip through Southwest China to the Tibetan areas of Sichuan province, a Chinese jurisdiction famous for its spicy cuisine and commonly referred to in the West as Szechwan.

At the time of our adventure, China was in the midst of a record-breaking heatwave dubbed by the scientific publication New Scientist as “the most severe [heatwave] ever recorded in the world.” Rivers dried up, wildfires raged, crops wilted, people died from heatstroke and rolling blackouts hit major metropolises, resulting from the severe drought’s impact on hydroelectricity generation. Hundreds of weather stations across the country either tied or set heat records.

I chronicled my family’s vacation on the frontlines of climate change for a guest essay in The New York Times, noting the troubling things we witnessed in Sichuan. To finish the story, I wrote, “What happened in China this summer has made it abundantly clear: Even with concerted and aggressive global action to curb carbon emissions, it’s going to be a rough ride.”

Less than one year after penning those words, I again find myself with a front-row seat to another unfolding environmental catastrophe: the wildfires scorching northern and western Canada.

In the Yukon, 146 wildfires are burning across the territory, with more than 220,000 hectares burned as of Aug. 29.

On the territorial government’s wildfire website, an interactive map showing the locations and severity of wildfires in the Yukon is so full that the territory’s landmass and borders are almost entirely obscured. A considerable percentage of these fires are burning out of control.

And while many of the blazes tearing through the territory are remote and pose no immediate threat to communities, there have been some scary situations this summer.

Yukon on fire

Near the end of July, Victoria Gold’s Eagle Gold Mine in the Central Yukon west of Keno City was evacuated due to a fire. On Aug. 6, the territorial government ordered residents of Mayo to evacuate their community due to safety hazards posed by the Talbot Creek Fire. Two days later, a state of emergency was declared for Mayo and its surrounding areas. The same week, 61 evacuees from the fly-in community of Old Crow arrived in Whitehorse as fires, smoke and strong winds threatened their settlement.

Prior to the abovementioned evacuations, in the second week of July, an out-of-control fire in Ibex Valley, roughly a 30-minute drive from downtown Whitehorse, triggered an evacuation alert for more than 150 nearby homes along the Alaska Highway. The blaze spewed smoke into Whitehorse, rendering the skies hazy and orange. It triggered the deployment of dozens of firefighters, seven pieces of heavy equipment and four helicopters, among other resources.

On July 9, the day after the fire was first reported, a colleague and I drove by the blaze on our way to go fishing near Haines Junction. It was a worrisome sight: Not far off the highway, plumes of whitish-grey smoke rose from behind nearby trees while a helicopter involved in the fire response buzzed overhead.

At a checkpoint along the highway, a responder told us to keep driving and not stop until we’d cleared the area. The blaze felt close, too close for comfort. This is a feeling that’s almost certainly shared by the Yukon’s neighbours in British Columbia and the Northwest Territories.

Earlier this month, horrifying images of a wall of fire and smoke charging towards Kelowna triggered shock across Canada and worldwide. News reports indicate that as many as 200 structures in Kelowna were reduced to rubble from the wildfires. In the N.W.T., out-of-control blazes forced the evacuation of approximately 68 per cent of the territory’s residents, including nearly the entire population of the capital, Yellowknife. Distant relatives of mine were among those evacuated from Hay River.

Major international news organizations have transmitted images of the fiery terror in western and northern Canada around the globe. In recent days, friends in China, Europe and the Middle East have contacted me to check in and say they’d seen images and videos of the N.W.T. and Okanagan infernos.

Flames of climate change?

The micro and macro causes of this summer’s unprecedented wildfire season will likely be debated for some time. Still, there is a robust contingent of researchers pointing the finger — at least in part — at climate change.

Recently published findings by the London-based research group World Weather Attribution claim that the conditions that led to the wildland infernos in Quebec earlier this summer were made twice as likely by climate change. The report additionally notes, “the intensity [of peak fire weather] has increased by about 20 per cent due to human-induced climate change.”

In an article published on North Carolina State University’s website earlier this summer, Robert Scheller, a forestry and environmental resources professor at the university and associate dean of the North Carolina State College of Natural Resources, stated that “warmer-than-average temperatures and drought conditions” have fueled Canada’s 2023 wildfire season. Rising temperatures and droughts are two of the chief impacts of climate change.

The infernos across Canada this summer come as our species observed a grim milestone: July 2023 was the hottest month on Earth since records began. Scientific American reported it was likely the hottest month in 120,000 years. Additionally, our planet’s average sea surface temperature reached a record high in April this year and spiked to near-record highs in July.

If temperatures continue to rise globally, Canadians can expect more hazy days and fire-caused turmoil in the summers. As Scheller said, “More carbon in the atmosphere will make wildfires worse everywhere in the world […] I expect that we’ll see more fires on every landscape where fires can burn.”

Adapting to a changing world

We hear a lot about the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and most Canadians — 74 per cent, according to Ipsos — agree the country needs to be a leader in responding to climate change. But the reality is that even if the Yukon reduced its emissions to zero, the impact on a global scale would be negligible. Case in point: Shanghai emits more carbon in two days than our territory does in a year.

That’s not to say Yukoners should not strive to achieve net zero. The above point is intended to illustrate that without concerted efforts from the world’s biggest polluters, the Yukon and surrounding jurisdictions can likely expect more record-breaking wildfire seasons.

A recent article from News columnist Keith Halliday hones in on what Yukoners and local leaders can do to ensure that people and property remain safe from fire in the coming summers: prepare. He notes what a complicated logistical operation it was to evacuate Yellowknife and encourages community leaders in Whitehorse to reassess whether or not their teams are “ready to leap into action” in a decisive and coordinated manner if we face a similar tragedy down the road.

Halliday also asks what we are doing now to minimize the future wildfire risk to Yukon settlements, singling out increased funding for FireSmarting initiatives and controlled burns to bolster firebreaks as possible steps that could be taken. He ends his analysis column by noting that while we can’t necessarily stop a future fire from threatening Whitehorse or other Yukon communities, we can plan now to limit the damage.

My second summer on the frontlines of climate change has been different than what I witnessed last year in China, but it was humbling all the same. It also worries me about what might happen next summer, the summer after, and so on. Because while there’s no denying this summer has been a rough ride for everyone impacted, we’re not out of the burning woods yet. It would be wise to remember this.

Contact Matthew Bossons at matthew.bossons@yukon-news.com

Wildfires