January isn’t typically the time people talk about wildfires. But the devastating fires in Los Angeles have put this issue back into the headlines.
Just six months ago, a similar disaster unfolded on a smaller scale north of the border in the Rocky Mountains, capturing global attention. This past summer’s wildfire in Jasper, Alberta, delivered a stark warning: Canada must urgently step up planning and prevention efforts to address the growing threat of wildfires.
Following 2023’s record-breaking fire season, 2024 was on track to become the second-worst year on record since 1995. The Jasper wildfire alone caused $880 million in insured losses, destroying or severely damaging over one-third of the town and forcing 25,000 people to evacuate.
The Jasper wildfire disaster and others like it are not outliers—they are bellwethers. Wildfire risks are escalating, fueled by climate change, outdated policies, and insufficient adaptation efforts. Without stronger action, the impacts and costs will only grow. Fortunately, governments and communities have some powerful tools at hand to manage the risk.
There are critical lessons we can learn from these disasters that can help communities either avoid them in the future, or reduce their severity.
What happened in Jasper?
As in L.A., the wildfire in Jasper didn’t come out of the blue. Experts have long warned of high and growing wildfire risk in the Jasper area, exacerbated by accumulated fuel from historical fire suppression and dead trees from pine beetle infestations. Before last year’s wildfire, Parks Canada took some measures to reduce wildfire risk, such as forest thinning, prescribed burns, firebreaks, and some vegetation restrictions for new development in the municipality.
In response to the devastating fire, Parks Canada introduced stricter development regulations for the town, including bans on wood siding or roofing, mandatory buffer zones of non-flammable materials around homes, and requiring new conifers to be planted at least 10 metres away from buildings.
These are important and evidence-based measures; yet critical gaps remain. The Town of Jasper’s zoning regulations still lack enforceable requirements on where to build more safely to avoid wildfire exposure. While the new development regulations encourage stronger FireSmart measures for new homes, such as installing metal roofs and eavestrough covers, these remain voluntary.
Jasper’s distinct governance structure adds complexity to managing wildfire risk. As a town within a national park, the municipality handles local services like utilities and social programs while Parks Canada (a federal agency) was responsible for land-use planning and forest management. After the summer’s fires, the federal government passed new legislation transferring land use planning and development authority to the municipality to accelerate rebuilding efforts.
This complexity isn’t unique to Jasper. Outside national parks, forest management falls under provincial jurisdiction, while land-use planning responsibilities are shared in varied ways between provinces and municipalities. Regardless of how these responsibilities are structured, coordinating wildfire risk reduction across orders of government in Canada remains inherently challenging.
The lesson here is clear: these coordination challenges lead to fragmented approaches, and policy gaps leave communities exposed to wildfire devastation. Those risks will only grow without stronger collaboration across governments to align policies, clarify roles, and implement risk reduction measures.
Assembling a wildfire adaptation toolkit
Eliminating wildfire risk entirely may not be possible for many communities, but it can be significantly reduced. Governments can use a range of tools and approaches to step up wildfire adaptation efforts. That toolkit has three main dimensions:
- Minimize risk in new developments: Governments can reduce future wildfire risk by managing where and how new developments are built. Provincial and territorial governments can play a central role by strengthening land use policies to limit development in areas with very high wildfire risk, redirecting it to areas of low risk. The federal government can take similar steps on federal lands, including national parks. Federal and provincial governments can also update building codes to mandate fire-smart design, construction, and landscaping. Municipalities, when granted the authority, can use zoning bylaws and regulations to enforce more stringent local standards for where and how homes are constructed.
- Retrofit existing homes and buildings to be FireSmart: Protecting existing homes and buildings in wildfire-prone areas is also critical, but it is costlier and more complex. All orders of government can invest in retrofitting existing at-risk homes and buildings with fire-resistant materials and defensible spaces by scaling up programs like FireSmart. Expanding these efforts from individual properties to entire neighbourhoods and community scales can make all the difference between survivable fires and catastrophic losses.
- Invest in landscape-level wildfire risk reduction: Provinces and territories play a central role in managing wildfire risk across broader landscapes, while the federal government does the same on federal lands. These governments can implement forest management programs—fuel thinning, prescribed burns, and fire breaks—to reduce fire intensity and spread, especially near urban areas. At the same time, governments can support traditional fire stewardship practices by Indigenous communities, such as cultural burning, which have been successfully used as a tool for managing landscapes and protecting communities for centuries. Scaling up these landscape-level actions will require unprecedented collaboration and funding—and sometimes departures from conventional forest management approaches—but they are critical to adaptation efforts in the face of growing wildfire threats.
From crisis to action: combining tools at all scales
The rising frequency and intensity of wildfires demand a coordinated and urgent response among all orders of government—regulating new development, retrofitting existing homes and neighbourhoods, and managing forested landscapes.
Failure to act will come at an ever-growing cost. Out-of-control wildfires, fuelled by climate change, are increasingly common—and the 2025 wildfire season will be here before we know it. The devastation in Los Angeles is another horrific indication of what can happen when runaway wildfires strike populated areas. For Canadian policy makers, both Los Angeles’ and Jasper’s recent experiences present a clear warning: fragmented approaches and inadequate preparation leave communities exposed. By using the full range of tools available, governments and communities in wildfire-prone areas can be better prepared and reduce the risks from future wildfires.
