The land that burned · The road to COP31

At every date with published figures, 2026 was well below 2025. On 9 July, when 1.4 million hectares had burned in 2026, the figure for the same date in 2025 was 4,614,713 hectares.

Below 2025 is not the same as a quiet year. On 18 August, the Canadian Press reported that federal officials expected the season to finish as the fourth-worst on record.

The smoke travelled. More than 120 million people in the US Midwest and Northeast were affected by dangerous air quality, WWA reports, with alerts from Minnesota to New Hampshire.

WWA studied fire weather: the hot, dry, windy conditions that let fires spread. It did not study the area burned. In the Northwest Territories it found that climate change made the peak 7-day fire weather about 5 times as likely, at today's 1.4 °C of global warming. In Ontario its combined estimate is about 2 times.

Sources

• S-20 · World Weather Attribution, Climate change means extreme fire seasons in Canada are here to stay, 6 August 2026
• S-21 · World Weather Attribution, same study (share of area burned in five weeks, citing CWFIS)
• S-22 · World Weather Attribution, same study (fire-weather attribution)
• S-23 · World Weather Attribution, same study (air quality, citing CNN)
• S-24 · Government of Canada, Public Safety Canada wildfire-season updates, 28 May, 11 June, 9 July and 18 August 2026
• S-25 · Hashtag Investing, Canada's 2026 wildfire burn area passes 10-year average with 4.48 million hectares burned (secondary, citing CWFIS)
• S-26 · The Canadian Press via Medicine Hat News, Wildfire season tracking to be 4th worst on record, 18 August 2026

Corrections to this story are listed on the last page.