Ottawa, Canada - Faced with another summer when wildfires have scorched millions of acres of land and blankets of smoke have disrupted daily life, Canada is trying to limit the devastation.
Despite procuring new water bombers and deploying forest management strategies to protect populated areas, experts are cautioning that intense wildfires will remain a fixture of Canadian life year-on-year.
"We're going to have to live with this," said Normand Lacour, who spent decades at Quebec's wildfire prevention and detection organization.
Canada is home to about a quarter of Earth's boreal forest area and average annual temperatures in the country are increasing roughly twice as fast as the global average.
That makes conditions in Canada particularly "conducive to intense and very extensive forest fires," University of Ottawa geography professor Patricia DeRepentigny told the AFP.
Canada's last three wildfire seasons have been among the 10 worst on record, including the devastating summer of 2023 when 44.5 million acres were torched.
This summer is not currently on track to approach that historic toll, with four million hectares burned so far.
In the western province of British Columbia, 15,000 people have been ordered to evacuate their homes, while residents of major eastern population centers like Toronto endured some of the world's worst air quality.
The federal government has invested $227 million over five years "to establish a new national aerial firefighting surge capacity."
The money is being used to lease 10 aircraft capable of confronting wildfires, to be dispatched to provinces facing intensifying blazes.
Ottawa is also backing a roughly $110 million program that aims to clear flammable material such as vegetation from populated areas. Provinces have also beefed up their firefighter capacity.
"Canada is not in an excellent position," warned Ryan Ness of the Canadian Climate Institute – there are "too many communities that are in areas that are exposed to wildfires."