With hundreds of wildfires burning out of control, Canada’s 2025 fire season is already the second-worst on record, as scientists report climate change is prolonging and exacerbating the burning, leading to more destruction, evacuations and smoke-filled skies.

More than 470 fires across the country are currently classified as “out of control”, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC).

7,318,421 hectares of land in Canada have burned due to wildfires this year – close to 78% more than the five-year average of 4,114,516 hectares, according to the CIFFC’s latest data.

The 2025 fire season is only behind the explosive 2023 wildfire season, which resulted in an astounding 17,203,625 hectares burned.

“This is our new reality… the warmer it gets, the more fires we see,” said Mike Flannigan, the BC research chair for predictive services, emergency management and fire science at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops.

A June analysis on the 2025 fire season in Canada published by United Nations University in Shibuya, Japan, concluded that the fires are a “stark manifestation” of climate change and that warm, dry weather in the spring resulted in temperatures 2.5C above average.

The warmer temperatures extend the fire season and increase the frequency of lightning that sparks fires, said Flannigan. A hotter climate also causes the atmosphere to suck moisture out of fuel, dead vegetation and the forest floor – creating ideal conditions for fires to start, he explained.

“It means more of the material is dried out, is available to burn when the fire does come, it leads to bigger flames, higher intensity, which gets to be difficult to impossible to extinguish,” he said.

So far, the worst of the fires have been concentrated in the prairie provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, which together account for about 60% of the hectares burned so far this year in Canada.

Tens of thousands of people in communities across the country have been evacuated due to the wildfires. In Saskatchewan, the Canadian Red Cross reported it had assisted more than 17,000 people in the province from over 6,700 households to evacuate.

Thirteen communities in north-west Saskatchewan are under an evacuation order, several of which are First Nations, according to the province. One of the most affected areas of this year’s wildfire season in the province is Denare Beach, a north-eastern village that was mostly destroyed in June due to a blaze.

The season has also now hit the east coast of Canada, as wildfires are currently raging across Newfoundland and Labrador and several towns are under evacuation orders.

John Abatzoglou, a professor of complex systems management at the University of California, Merced, co-authored the June report from United Nations University.

Abatzoglou said this year’s fire season is the third year in a row Canada has seen fire activity that is well above average. The fires are also causing widespread smoke to cascade from the country into the United States as well, prompting severe air quality warnings in several states this month, is also an indication of how the fires are hurting populations beyond evacuations.

It’s an international element of the fires that officials are having to contend with on a wider scale, Abatzoglou said.

“This is a really key point that’s different from other natural hazards and its ability to impact everything from quality of life to … human health and even mortality,” he said.

Governments and public health will have to address how to change public behaviour and public policy to contend with “smoke days”, where you have to stay inside, he said.

“I know communities that may not have great infiltration systems … so more efforts there to provide resources to communities so that they can be safe indoors during acute smoke periods.”