Environment · 3D map
18.36 million hectares — what BC and Alberta have lost to fire since 2000
Every wildfire of one hectare or more in British Columbia and Alberta from January 2000 through December 2024 is plotted on the satellite-imagery base below. Each fire appears in the month it ignited and stays on the map. The 2023 fire season alone added roughly 2.84 M hectares — more than the entire decade of the 2000s combined.
What the animation shows
Every red polygon is the official perimeter of a single fire as recorded by the Canadian National Fire Database — Natural Resources Canada's authoritative fire-perimeter dataset. Bright yellow indicates fires actively burning in the current month of the timeline; dim red indicates fires that have already been contained but whose burn footprint stays visible on the cumulative map. The base layer is NASA Blue Marble true-colour satellite imagery with terrain shading.
The annotation in the top-right corner is the cumulative total hectares burned across BC and Alberta from January 2000 onward. It runs:
| Year-end | Cumulative ha burned (BC + AB, since 2000) |
|---|---|
| 2002 | ~0.9 M |
| 2009 | ~3.4 M |
| 2015 | ~5.2 M |
| 2017 | ~6.7 M |
| 2018 | ~8.0 M |
| 2021 | ~9.5 M |
| 2023 | ~17.5 M (+2.84 M from this year alone) |
| 2024 | 18.4 M (+1.8 M) |
The 2023 jump is the single largest annual addition in the 25-year record — larger than the entire 2000–2007 decade combined. Most of that 2.84 M hectares burned in BC's interior and the boreal margins of northern Alberta, with secondary footprints around the Northwest Territories border and around the Lytton / Kamloops corridor.
Why this matters
Three structural points the animation makes visible that summary statistics tend to flatten:
- The acceleration is recent and abrupt. The 25-year cumulative line is not linear. Roughly half of the total burn area on the map accumulated in the last six years (2018–2024). The first eighteen years of the record contributed the other half.
- The 2023 season was a step-change, not a trend continuation. Two thousand twenty-three's 2.84 M ha is roughly 4× the rolling 5-year average of preceding seasons. It is also roughly 1.4× the previous worst season (2018, ~1.35 M ha in BC alone). The animation makes the discontinuity visible.
- Alberta and BC's burn patterns are coupled. When BC has a high-severity fire season, Alberta usually does too, with a roughly 4-week phase lag. The shared driver is sustained ridge-pattern weather over the Rockies that suppresses precipitation in both provinces simultaneously.
What the animation can't tell you
Three things this single visualization does not address:
- Cause attribution. The NFDB data records lightning-vs-human cause for each fire, but the animation does not colour fires by cause. Lightning-caused share has been roughly stable around 50–60 % across the 25-year window; the absolute number of human-caused fires has not grown as fast as the burn area.
- Severity vs extent. A fire that burns through old-growth boreal forest at high intensity has very different ecological and carbon-emission consequences than a fire that burns through young regrowth or grass. The map plots area, not severity. Severity classifications (from the Canadian Fire Severity Index) are a separate dataset.
- What the comparable picture looks like for the rest of Canada. Quebec's 2023 season was historically large but is not in this map. Saskatchewan's 2024 season ditto. We will publish the all-Canada version of this visualization once the 1972–2024 NFDB rebuild we are running finishes.
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