Thank you very much for the invitation to be here.

My name is Dr. Lori Daniels. I'm a professor of forest ecology and the Koerner chair of wildfire coexistence at the University of British Columbia. I'm coming to you today from the ancestral territory of the Musqueam first nation.

I have studied historical fire regimes and their impacts on forest dynamics in western Canada for the past 20 years. Thank you for the opportunity to share insights from the research we have conducted, both on the factors that contributed to the Jasper wildfires and also the strategies that are urgently needed in order to make our ecosystems and communities more resilient to future fires and climate change.

I have three core messages for you today.

First, the Jasper wildfire complex was a century in the making. Our research shows that the historical fire regime in Jasper began to change in the early 1900s. Over several centuries, from the 1600s to the 1800s, low-severity fires burned somewhere in the Athabasca Valley once every 20 years on average, scarring trees but not killing them. Patches of high-severity fire would kill trees and provide openings where grasses, shrubs and broadleaf and needle-leaf trees regenerated. Landscape photos from the early 1900s show a diverse mosaic of ecosystems.

The fire scars stopped in 1915. This is the beginning of the fire suppression era, when indigenous people were removed from their land and their good fire stewardship was terminated. Ignitions by lightning and people were suppressed to protect the forest. The paradox is that this good intention has had unintended consequences. Without repeat low-impact fires, the forest simultaneously matured, creating a uniform landscape of continuous needle-leaf forests with abundant flammable fuels, strongly contrasting with historical landscapes and fire regimes.

These mature forests were also optimal habitat for the mountain pine beetle, which spread into Jasper. The beetle is native to western North America, but it is novel to forests east of the continental divide. Its eastward expansion was facilitated by climate change, and the beetles have caused high tree death rates in Alberta. Field surveys and experiments conducted with Parks Canada have shown that abundant dead lodgepole pine trees and logs contribute to fire intensity and rapid rates of fire spread and emit large amounts of heat, smoke and carbon, so the stage was set, after 100 years, for the fire this summer.

My second message to you is that Jasper is not an anomaly. Disruption of indigenous fire stewardship, fire suppression and widespread forest health problems have cumulative effects across the forests in Canada. Climate change is now superimposed on vulnerable landscapes and amplifies the effects. Mountain pine beetles impacted 19 million hectares of forests in western Canada; fires burned 15 million hectares across our country in 2023 alone.

My third and final point is that transformative changes are urgently needed. We need to diversify our approaches and amplify the pace and scale of our response to recent wildfire extremes and climate change. We also need to recognize that specific strategies are as complex as the diverse ecosystems and forests across Canada.

Proaction requires support from all levels of government, including the federal government. Strategies include, but are not limited to, investing equal amounts in emergency response to wildfires and proactive management to mitigate future wildfire effects through mechanical treatments and prescribed and cultural burns. This is an underfunded and underutilized approach that is costing Canadians billions of dollars due to the direct and indirect effects of wildfires.

Second, we can invest in FireSmart programs at home and community levels to expand education and actions to improve resiliency; we need to support indigenous-led programs, given that fires are disproportionately affecting indigenous peoples, communities and territories; we need to implement landscape fire management to reduce the negative consequences of catastrophic fires, improve ecosystem resilience and sustain a forestry sector; we need to support the bioeconomy and bioenergy to overcome economic barriers; and we need to invest in post-secondary training to build much needed capacity in pyrosilviculture, and prescribed and cultural burning.

These transformative actions are urgently needed to mitigate climate change, adapt our forest management and proactively prepare for wildfire impacts on Canadian ecosystems and communities.