20% of Oil and Gas Fields Must Shut Down as Climate Change Makes Quebec Wildfires 2-7x More Likely

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The “fire-prone conditions” behind the devastating wildfires in Quebec earlier this year, and the stifling smoke they spread across much of North America, were made at least two to seven times more likely by climate change, concludes an analysis published Tuesday by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative.

An international team of 16 climate scientists “also found that climate change, caused primarily by burning fossil fuels, made the fire-prone weather about 20 to 50% more intense,” the UK-based WWA said in a release.

The news landed just as a separate briefing by Oil Change International concluded that 60% of existing coal, oil, and gas extraction will have to shut down to keep a 1.5°C climate stabilization target within reach.

“As of 2023, developed oil and gas reserves alone, if fully extracted, would cause cumulative carbon emissions nearly 25% greater than the world’s remaining 1.5°C carbon budget,” Oil Change wrote. So “a significant portion—almost one-fifth (20%)—of oil and gas fields must be shut down, even if no new fields are developed and coal extraction stops tomorrow.”

At an August 22 media conference hosted by WWA, Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) research scientist Yan Boulanger said record high temperatures and extreme drought had led to more than 5,800 fires across Canada and burned 15.3 million hectares up to that day, “making this the most devastating fire season in recent memory, and by far.” After unusually warm and dry conditions in early May, lightning strikes from several isolated thunderstorms in Quebec igniting more than 120 wildfires in a single day.

The province has seen more than 5.2 million hectares burn this year, he said, and the lands consumed in the most intensive zone between June 1 and 25 exceeded cumulative losses for the previous 20 years.

Across Canada, the fires to date have shattered the 12-month record of 7.6 million hectares that was set in 1989, Boulanger added, “and this fire season is far from being over.”

In the first seven months of the year, wildfires added 290 million tonnes of carbon to Canada’s annual output of climate pollution.

“The word ‘unprecedented’ doesn’t do justice to the severity of the wildfires in Canada this year. From a scientific perspective, the doubling of the previous burned area record is shocking,” Boulanger said.

“Climate change is greatly increasing the flammability of the fuel available for wildfires,” he added, so that “a single spark, regardless of its source, can rapidly turn into a blazing inferno.”

“Increasing temperatures are creating tinderbox-like conditions in forests in Canada and around the world,” agreed WWA co-founder Dr. Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in Climate Science at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, Imperial College London. “Until we stop burning fossil fuels, the number of wildfires will continue to increase, burning larger areas for longer periods of time.”

While it’s too soon to complete attribution studies for the devastating wildfires now sweeping the Northwest Territories and British Columbia, Canadian scientists are connecting the same dots. “At a broad scale, it’s really the interactions between the climate and the fuels that are driving these changes,” Jen Baron, a PhD candidate in forest and conservation sciences at the University of British Columbia, told CBC. But “the impacts of climate are really felt in the sense that, before, it would have been very rare to have large fire seasons that are as severe as they are today.”

“Our forest management practices, they’ve been like this since about the ’80s. So why is it we’re seeing the bad fire seasons now?” added veteran wildfire researcher Mike Flannigan of Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops. “It’s because the weather has gotten more extreme.”

Boulanger said earlier research found that a severe wildfire season in B.C. in 2017 was 90% attributable to climate change. This year’s fires already cover 50% more territory across the province.

‘Exceptional’ Fire Seasons Now More Likely

The WWA study assessed an exceptional period of wildfires across the boreal forest region of western and northwestern Quebec in May through July using NRCan’s Fire Weather Index, a tool that estimates wildfire risk based on factors like temperature, humidity, wind speeds, and forest moisture. Lead author Clair Barnes, research associate at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, explained that the findings were based on two measures: the seven-day period of peak intensity within the fire season, and the total severity of the whole season.

Using a series of climate models with high enough resolution to compute a region’s fire weather index, the research team concluded that climate change made the current peak intensity of the season at least 20% more intense, and twice as likely to occur. The total severity of the region’s fire season was 50% higher, and seven times more likely to occur.

Those numbers were almost certainly low estimates, Otto told media.

The various factors that contribute to fire weather are all affected by climate change in different ways, she explained. But temperature has a significant enough impact that WWA was confident with the devastating but still relatively modest conclusions—twice the likelihood of peak intensity, seven times the likelihood for the severity of the entire fire season—in Tuesday’s release.

“The real numbers will be higher, but it’s hard to say how much higher,” Otto said. “Our confidence on the lower bound is very high, because we know that temperature plays an important role.”

Those impacts are also on track to become more commonplace, the WWA team found.

“Although the fire-prone weather conditions were unprecedented, they are no longer extremely unusual,” the release states. “In today’s climate, similar weather conditions can be expected to occur once every 25 years, meaning that they have about a 4% chance of occurring each year,” and the risk will rise if the planet continues to warm.

Vulnerable Communities Hit Hardest

In western and northwestern Quebec, the impacts of the wildfires “were disproportionately experienced by remote communities, especially Indigenous peoples, who were particularly vulnerable due to the lack of services and difficulty of evacuations due the paucity or a lack of road access and airlifting facilities,” WWA says. Dorothy Heinrich, technical advisor at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre in The Hague, said Indigenous peoples are 30% more likely than other populations to be displaced by or experience the impacts of wildfires. In July, 75% of the people under evacuation orders in Canada were members of Indigenous communities, many of them in fly-in communities.

Meanwhile, as plumes of wildfire smoke blanketed large parts of Canada and the United States, “the most vulnerable people to the dangerous fine particles… were those with underlying health conditions, reduced access to health services, and living in low-quality housing,” the WWA release states.

Canadian Red Cross President and CEO Conrad Sauvé said the rise in extreme weather has already shifted his organization’s priorities in times of disaster.

“A decade ago, the work of the Canadian Red Cross responding to large-scale disasters and emergencies was largely overseas,” he said in the WWA release. “Now, the vast majority of the Canadian Red Cross response efforts are domestically focused, supporting Canadians impacted by destructive events. This year’s fire season has been the most destructive on record.”

West Coast Environmental Law said the WWA analysis bolsters the Sue Big Oil campaign, in which B.C. municipalities are trying to mount a class action suit against global fossil fuel companies for their fair share of the climate damages the communities face.

“Scientists keep telling us that our communities are paying the price for oil, gas, and coal-fuelled climate change, while Shell, Chevron, Exxon, and other fossil fuel giants pocket record profits,” said WCEL staff lawyer Andrew Gage. “Earlier this year, Shell and BP reneged on their promises to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because they were just making too much money from oil and gas—and now Kelowna and Yellowknife are having to evacuate as a result of wildfires. Until fossil fuel companies are forced to pay for the damage they cause, they’re going to keep making decisions that harm the planet.”