As firefighters across the country battle Canada’s second-worst wildfire season on record, the federal government announced details Tuesday of $45.7 million in research funding to better understand and mitigate fire risks.
The money is going to 30 research projects nationwide — run by non-profits, private organizations, provincial governments and Indigenous groups — to improve fire knowledge and risk assessments, and put in place best forestry practices.
Ten of the grants will go to Indigenous-led projects, receiving a total of $3.9 million.
Calgary Confederation MP Corey Hogan, parliamentary secretary to the minister of energy and natural resources, made the announcement in Calgary Tuesday morning.
“These investments will play an instrumental role in helping us understand how we can reduce the impact of wildfires on Canadians, by accelerating how we develop and adopt innovative and adaptive wildfire and forestry practices,” Hogan said.
The announcement includes a number of projects already underway with previously committed federal funding, such as the Indigenous-led Blood Tribe Fire Guardianship, for which Ottawa announced $500,000 in March.
Hogan said Indigenous communities are disproportionately affected by wildfires, and this research will help put into better use traditional Indigenous practices.
“Things like controlled burns for example, that have been used for hundreds of years by Indigenous communities, but are really being better understood by non-Indigenous communities really only in the past couple of decades,” said Hogan.
Joe Desjarlais, research director with the B.C. Métis Federation, said the organization is combing through archives to research how Métis people have interacted with fire in the past, and how those fires have affected their communities.
“We’re training [people] to do wildfire research to recover their own knowledge for their own benefit, to give them a voice,” said Desjarlais.
The funding comes as the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre — which is among the organizations awarded grants — estimates more than 7.3 million hectares have already burned across the country this year.
Hogan said some of the research is likely to provide immediate short-term guidance on where to allocate resources, but much of it is expected to help shape wildfire responses in the long-term.
“One of the reasons we’re doing this is to build a body of knowledge, and inherently that means there’s going to be a bit of a ramp-up as we expand the amount we know, and the amount that we are able to do,” said Hogan.
