Canada’s wildfire seasons are no longer episodic shocks. They are systemic and growing more costly with every passing year. Leading wildfire experts who are changing how we think about wildfire science, Indigenous fire stewardship, forest management, and emergency preparedness clearly underscored that new reality during a recent FPAC policy webinar.

What stood out from this event was the degree of alignment around one central truth: Canada already has strong provincial wildfire systems. The federal role is not to replicate them, but to enable them to work better, faster, and at scale. Five key lessons from the event point to a clear conclusion: policy must evolve from reacting to wildfire disasters to building long-term wildfire resilience.

1. Wildfire is a national resilience issue
2. Suppression-first approaches have created today’s wildfire risk
3. Prevention and mitigation deliver strong economic returns—but only if scaled
4. Indigenous fire stewardship is essential to effective wildfire management
5. Canada has the tools to act—the cap is the implementation

Introducing the Wildfire Resilience Consortium of Canada (WRCC): Throughout Canada, people are doing inspiring work to improve our wildfire resilience – from FireSmart™ in communities, to efforts on the fire line, to stewardship of lands, to research across sectors, diverse groups of people are pitching in. You might be one of them! Though this inspiring work happens from coast-to-coast-to-coast, it can be challenging to know who is doing what, where it is happening, and how others can learn from it. The Wildfire Resilience Consortium of Canada (WRCC) is a national non-profit that was established in 2025 to help empower people to work together to transform wildfire resilience in Canada. Based on strong foundational work by wildfire leaders in Canada, the WRCC is specifically designed to support Indigenous fire stewardship, enhance knowledge exchange opportunities, and accelerate wildfire technology and innovation.

To make our work place-based, the WRCC is establishing seven regional networks in Canada, each convened by a Regional Coordinator. In 2026, the Regional Coordinators will launch webpages to highlight regional success stories and share upcoming events. Visit our website to learn who your Regional Coordinator is, find updates on these offerings, and reach out to help direct our work.

In much of Canada, provincial and territorial fuel classification layers are built on vegetation inventory information that can be many years out of date. The inputs behind those layers are often unvalidated and the conditions they describe may not reflect current reality. …Forests change considerably over time. As an example, past harvest activity has restructured stands, and bark beetle infestations have converted millions of hectares of mature lodgepole pine into standing dead fuel. …Provincial layers typically describe fuel type classifications but say little about the structural attributes of those fuels, and nothing about their current seasonal condition. …In the WUI, the difference between a fuel-free buffer and a continuous shrub corridor can be measured in meters. Legacy maps cannot resolve these issues. The consequences of missing them are not abstract.

Forsite’s Fuel ID tool was built to address these gaps. Fuel ID encompasses a series of machine-learning approaches that use satellite imagery and, where available, LiDAR data to generate current, validated fuel information across the full canopy-to-surface profile. It is not a single product — it is a flexible system that generates resolution-appropriate outputs depending on available data inputs and the operational question being asked.