Climate change doubled odds of Canada’s 2026 wildfires, study finds

Human-caused climate change doubled the likelihood of the extreme fire weather conditions that fueled Canada's devastating summer wildfires in Ontario and the Northwest Territories, according to a rapid attribution study released Thursday by World Weather Attribution.apnews+1

The findings directly counter U.S. President Donald Trump's repeated claims that Canadian forest mismanagement is to blame for the fires, which sent hazardous smoke across the northern United States and affected more than 120 million people.

What the Study Found

Researchers compared current fire weather conditions to a hypothetical world without the 1.4 degrees Celsius of warming that has occurred since the pre-industrial era. They found that extreme fire weather events now expected every two to six years in the Northwest Territories and every six to 15 years in Ontario would have occurred less than once every 40 years without climate change.cbc+1

The study used the Daily Severity Rating, a measure of how difficult a fire is to suppress once ignited, to quantify the role of climate change. More than 3.8 million hectares have burned across Canada this season, with approximately 94 percent of that area burning during a five-week window from late June through July.worldweatherattribution+1

"Since 2023, the wildfires we've seen across Canada have been fundamentally different in their scale and intensity," said lead author Theodore Keeping of Imperial College London.dailysabah

Scientists Push Back on Trump

Trump said on July 21 that Canada is "not managing their forests properly" and told reporters Sunday he had decided on a punishment for Canada. Scientists involved in and outside the study rejected that framing.apnews

"What we're facing here is more of a climate related problem than a forest management problem," said Jonathan Boucher, a fire scientist at Canada's Forest Service and study co-author. University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver added: "President Trump is pointing at the smoke while ignoring America's fingerprints on the climate conditions behind it."apnews

Mike Flannigan, a wildfire scientist at Thompson Rivers University who was not involved in the study, noted that lightning-sparked fires account for more than 90 percent of the land area burned in Canada, often in remote northern forests where firefighters cannot arrive within the critical 30-minute suppression window.cbc+1

Indigenous Communities Bear the Brunt

The report highlighted that Indigenous communities are disproportionately affected, making up 42 percent of Canada's wildfire evacuations between 1980 and 2021 despite being only about 5 percent of the population. Thirteen First Nations communities in Ontario have been under evacuation orders this summer.eos+1

"If you care about anyone but the super rich, you have to stop burning fossil fuels," said study co-author Friederike Otto of Imperial College London.apnews