Fighting wildfire with fire: Advocates in B.C. call for more spending before, not during wildfires

Summers in BC keep getting hotter and smokier, but the threat of climate change doesn’t mean it’s a lost cause to combat wildfires in the Thompson-Okanagan region.

As the Okanagan deals with another summer of dangerous wildfires, it’s a reminder for Jesse Zeman that B.C. needs a new strategy to maintain its forests.

“(Climate change) just points more and more to these weaknesses we have, and the lack of adequate or proper investment in our landscape,” Zeman said, who is executive director for the BC Wildlife Federation.

The non-profit is calling for BC to invest more heavily in managing forests and watersheds.

“The bigger picture here is, how do people like their smoke? We can have it in a controlled way… or we can have what we have now,” he said.

Meanwhile, funding for local governments and FireSmart programs is up in the air. The province topped up its multi-million-dollar program earlier this year, but the future is uncertain as the money runs dry.

For places like West Kelowna, the government funding has been invaluable, but the work is far from over.

“We’re kind of scratching our heads a little bit. It seems like such a tiny investment for such a big payoff,” West Kelowna fire chief Jason Brolund told iNFOnews.ca.

Cities were getting up to $200,000 per year for the wildfire prevention work, but West Kelowna could use five times that amount to fund its wildfire strategy that includes prescribed burns, wildfire training, urban planning, emergency preparation and research.

Homeowners in the Thompson-Okanagan are no stranger to FireSmart principles, especially as more wildfires encroach into BC communities.

While West Kelowna’s plan isn’t solely focused on strategies to protect private properties, he said it proved effective when the 2023 McDougall Creek wildfire ripped through the Okanagan.

“That fire tore through areas that had been mitigated and it just made no difference whatsoever, but we also have numerous examples of homes that did have mitigation work done around them and they survived,” Brolund said. “So it’s not a lost cause.”

The province’s FireSmart funding has provided more than $175 million to BC cities since 2018, with local government competing for the money. This year, the province topped up the fund to $40 million, but it’s not clear what program will replace it next year.

For Zeman, focusing on the fire risk within a city like West Kelowna isn’t enough.

“The province and the federal government is happy to show up when there’s a crisis, but when it comes to funding mundane, year-after-year investment in the landscape, there’s very little interest in that,” he said.

Ministries overseeing water, land and forests have seen less funding over the last few decades relative to the overall provincial budget, he said.

The province has seen increasing numbers of prescribed burns annually, with 76 in 2025 burning more than 6,000 hectares.

The Kamloops Fire Centre had 18 of the preventative fires, but only 320 hectares were treated.

According to the Fraser Institute, Canada’s prescribed burning has fallen drastically since the 1990s, when there were more than 30,000 hectares burned per year. That dropped to a few thousand per year or less by 1997.

Zeman also said cut blocks in the region’s watersheds, often largely replanted with coniferous trees, have worsened the Okanagan’s drought. It’s something Okanagan water utilities and irrigation districts have also seen, with annual freshets melting off more quickly or evaporating.

The wildlife federation builds human-made beaver dams to help.

“If you do a bunch of small systems, you end up holding back a lot of water. The water crisis here in the Okanagan, this is the worst it’s ever been in recorded history,” Zeman said.

The area around the massive Bald Range wildfire near Summerland, which is now at nearly 16,000 hectares, has seen a few dozen hectares treated with prescribed burns since 2013, while another 54 hectares were planned in 2016 and never completed, according to provincial government records.

“These is the same as the world of education and health care. If you invest in them and do preventative, proactive work, you won’t have these huge crises,” Zeman said.

“If you don’t invest in the landscape, the landscape will bite you.”