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Though the number of wildfires nationwide has slowly dwindled over the years, the fires themselves are getting more severe. One of the reasons, forestry experts say, is that we’ve gotten a little too good at putting them out.

Climate change, which brings us longer, hotter, drier seasons, is also driving the increase in intensity. But part of the problem, said forestry expert Kira Hoffman, is that fire is no longer our friend.

Where once we’d let forest fires burn if they weren’t threatening a community or infrastructure, and where once Indigenous people would practice cultural burns — setting fires around habitation sites for safety and resource management — decades ago the needle swung toward suppressing fires.

The result: modern-day fires find themselves with much more fuel to burn.

“There’s this kind of big shift that happens in the 1930s where we start to think of fire as really the enemy,” said Hoffman, a post-doctoral researcher in fire ecology at the University of British Columbia.

“(But) a lot of our forests need fire in order to survive and thrive and really be healthy. And I don’t think that people really understood that very well in the past, except for Indigenous people who always knew that.”

Indigenous cultural burning was banned by the Forest Act in the 1930s. From that point forward, the wildfire management tendency was to suppress fires.

And as techniques and equipment improved — now many fires are fought with air support and water bombers — we got more efficient at controlling and extinguishing those fires.

To be fair, provinces have adopted different policies on fire management. In B.C. and Alberta, where there are logging concerns all the way north to the N.W.T. border, containment policies lean strongly toward trying to put out all fires. Hoffman calls it the “10 a.m. policy,” where the goal is to control a fire by 10 a.m. the day after it’s spotted.

Indeed, as of Aug. 11, the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System fire map showed the majority of fires still burning in those regions were listed as “Under Control” or “Being Held.” Just across the border in N.W.T., however, the majority of fires were designated as “Out of Control.” The same applied to northern Saskatchewan and northern Manitoba fires.

The result of that overly efficient fire suppression, said Hoffman, has been essentially the decades-long stockpiling of tinder in the nation’s forests.

“We’re dealing with a major backlog in fuel accumulation,” she said. “We’ve been suppressing fires so successfully for about the last hundred years, we have an accumulation of those dead and dry fuels that are becoming more dense in our forests, and then we’re getting larger fire events.”

At first glance, it appears difficult to make the case that we’re overly efficient on wildfire suppression.

In Newfoundland, four active fires were burning in the central part of the island late last week, with smoke causing serious air quality problems. Premier Andrew Furey declared a state of emergency, since lifted, that advised residents of nearby communities to prepare for a potential 24-hour mandatory evacuation order.

It is, government officials said, the worst fire season in Newfoundland in 60 years.

The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre listed 448 active fires across the country as of Aug. 11. Of those, the vast majority — 281 — were in Yukon and the Northwest Territories. Alberta and B.C., between them, had 102 fires. And there were 36 fires burning in northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

That all seems pretty dire, but the rest of the country, Ontario and points east — Newfoundland excepted — are largely being spared from active wildfires.

For the country as a whole, the 3,067 fires that have been identified so far this season rank at only 71 per cent of the 10-year average for this point in the season.

Natural Resources Canada’s data from the last 31 years shows that, overall, the number of fires per year has decreased slightly. But, significantly, the area being burned has increased slightly.

“If you go back into the 1980s, maybe even into the 1990s, you’ll see some big spikes where there’s really a large area burned, but they’re quite often followed by three or four or five years with a very small area burn,” said Richard Carr, wildfire research analyst with Natural Resources Canada.

“But what we’re seeing now is more of those areas that are stacked up together with an above-average area burn,” he said. “We’re seeing fewer years with the really small totals. Climatological studies have shown that the annual area burned will probably end up doubling sometime this century.”

And we’re seeing fires in places — like Nunavut and Vancouver Island — where we have rarely seen them before, Carr said.

Part of the reason is climate change. Changes in weather patterns have meant higher temperatures and less precipitation, leading to a dried landscape. Fires start more easily. And decades of fire suppression have left behind more fuel to be burned.

We’re also seeing indications that fires ignited by lightning — currently about 50-50 nationwide along with humans as the leading cause of wildfires — will increase in frequency over the years.

A lightning storm over Vancouver Island last Wednesday morning produced more than 800 lightning strikes on the island, sparking 10 new fires. And in Newfoundland, all four active fires were started by lightning strikes — a phenomenon more common to Labrador — three of them on the same day.

“Our lightning data sets aren’t very old, and they keep on changing the sensors and they keep on changing the locations, so we can’t say with all confidence yet, but the principle ‘a warmer world should have more lightning’ seems reasonable,” said Mike Flannigan, a wildfire specialist and professor at Thompson Rivers University.

A 2015 study by Berkeley researchers published in Science in 2014, predicted a 12 per cent increase in lightning strikes across the continental U.S. for every degree of rise in global average air temperature.

As climate change creates a warmer atmosphere, vegetation — the fuel for wildfires — becomes drier. And there’s more of it, meaning any given lightning strike has a greater chance of starting a fire.

Both fire-management policies and climate change have created the scenario in which we currently live: that though there are fewer fires, they cause more damage; and that those fires caused by lightning — which we can’t control has a knack of starting fires in historically unusual places — are likely to increase in number.

The needle has only just begun to swing back. Hoffman, the UBC expert, said there’s a huge push on for becoming friends with fire again, of adopting more “modified responses” to fire management.

That may include reducing fuel for future fires by letting some current fires burn unchecked.

“I would argue that we actually need more controlled fire and more prescribed burning and more support for cultural burning so that we can start being proactive about how we engage with fire so we can coexist with fire and in a better way,” she said. “So, using fire to fight fire, but also using fire to manage the landscape in a way that it’s been managed for a very, very long time.”

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