The Goode's Creek wildfire burns at night, seen from across the lake in West Kelowna, B.C. in 2018. Scientists say without further action, increasingly intense wildfires is a trend that's going to continue. (Jesse Winter / Star Metro)

New research has confirmed that human-driven climate change helped fuel wildfires that ravaged British Columbia in 2017.

In all, a record 1.2 million hectares were destroyed in the province that year, and the area burned was seven to 11 times larger than would have been expected had humans not had a hand in altering the planet’s climate.

That’s the finding of a study conducted by scientists with Environment and Climate Change Canada and the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium at the University of Victoria. They compared the likelihood of the risk factors affecting the extreme fire season to an estimate of what the likelihood might have been without the human component to quantify the role climate change played.

They found that human‐induced climate change contributed greatly to the probability of extreme warm temperatures, high wildfire risk and large burned areas. Specifically, extreme temperatures during the 2017 fire season were made over 20 times more likely because of climate change.

Those temperatures, combined with dry conditions, increased the likelihood of wildfire ignition and spread.

“I don’t think I would say I was surprised,” ECCC scientist Megan Kirchmeier-Young said of the findings.

“I understand that our climate is changing because of human influence. There is a very strong signal of (that) in the temperatures we’re seeing. And I understand how that should be impacting wildfire risk.”

When asked, Kirchmeier-Young said she thinks this sort of research helps Canadians “understand what climate change might mean for this country.” But without further action, she and her colleagues warn this trend of devastating wildfires will continue and intensify.

“If we continue globally on the emissions track that we’re on, then we can expect temperatures to continue to rise. If they do, we can continue to expect to see increased wildfire risk,” Kirchmeier-Young said.

“Extreme wildfire seasons will be more likely.”

That won’t just impact forest management, but also public health and infrastructure.

2017 was the single worst season for wildfires in British Columbia’s history. And while two years don’t make a trend, government statistics indicate 2018 reached the second-worst mark, having burnt more than 9,450 square kilometres of land by the end of August.

While her team has no plans to study the 2018 wildfires, Kirchmeier-Young said given the understanding of how extremely high temperatures were more likely as a result of changing climate, “we can extrapolate that there was probably a significant role for human-induced climate change (in the 2018 fires) as well.”

The findings were published in December in the journal, Earth’s Future.

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