Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee, for this invitation. I'm grateful to be here to support this discussion on factors leading to the recent fires in Jasper National Park.
This is taking place on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe people.
The Canadian forest service at Natural Resources Canada plays an important, ongoing role in wildland fire management. We're the Government of Canada's primary source of federal wildland fire technical and scientific expertise. The CFS delivers essential functions to support wildland fire management across the country. This includes subject matter expertise to inform government reporting and response, the delivery of tools and information for national situational awareness and decision support, leadership on national strategic wildland fire policies and frameworks, and international engagement on wildland fire. We also work closely with other federal departments, such as Public Safety and Parks Canada.
Just days after the Jasper fire began, officials at Parks Canada requested support from CFS to study the factors that caused the rapid escalation and extreme fire behaviour taking place. CFS researchers and technicians were on site to conduct an analysis by August 1. Analysis is ongoing, and a report is in development. Research activity is concentrated on a number of aspects, including understanding the factors that contributed to the rapid ignition, acceleration, intensity and spread of the fire, its spread direction, the influence of wood killed by the mountain pine beetle on fuel consumption and fire intensity, and identifying areas of extreme fire behaviour.
There are some initial findings. Fire activity was exacerbated by conditions such as historic levels of drought, extreme high temperatures and low humidity, an abundance of dry fuels, and extreme fire-induced wind speeds that drove the fire to spread.
Wildland fire is a growing risk across Canada. Research tells us that we will continue to experience larger, more extreme fire events and behaviour in the coming years. We know that 2023 was off the charts in terms of fire activity and total area burned, and it looks like 2024 will rank second for total area burned over the last 20 years. This makes the work we are doing to transform wildland fire management more critical than ever. Programs such as the fighting and managing wildfires in a changing climate program and the wildfire resilient futures initiative are providing investments for community-based prevention and mitigation in order to build response and preparedness capacity while stimulating whole-of-society engagement that will contribute to wildfire resilience.
Through bodies such as the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers, or CCFM, and the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, also known as CIFFC, we work in continuous partnership with provinces and territories to ensure we are prepared to respond to wildland fire emergencies, and to build Canada's resilience over the longer term. Utilizing our scientific foundation, this includes delivery of cost-shared federal investments for specialized wildland fire equipment and firefighting training, as well as programming, prevention and mitigation. It also includes work with the CCFM to deliver Canada's first-ever wildland fire prevention and mitigation strategy, released this past June.
I am happy to be here with Dr. Dan Thompson, who is leading CFS research activities in Jasper, and director general Mike Norton, the lead for NRCan's wildland fire risk management program. He is joining us virtually to answer any questions you may have related to our ongoing analysis of the Jasper wildfire and the work under way to increase Canada's overall resilience to wildland fire.
Thank you.