Early signs point to another bad B.C. wildfire season, expert warns [Video]

A British Columbia wildfire expert is warning of another potentially difficult season, and calling for changes to help the province adapt in the long-term.

2023 marked the province’s most damaging wildfire season yet, and with the province mired in a multi-year drought, concern is mounting for the months ahead.

Lori Daniels, the Koerner Chair in Wildfire Coexistence at the University of British Columbia, said the province still has about 90 fires burning from last year, and that crews have already been deployed to douse eight new fires in 2024.

“It has been shocking to us to have new wildfires already ignited and BC Wildfire having to put them out in February,” she told Global News. “We still have those ‘zombie fires,’ those holdover fires in the peatlands and boreal forests of the northeast where they had so many fires last summer.”

The B.C. government has already warned it believes the …