As of this writing, it’s estimated that one third of the historic Alberta town of Jasper has been destroyed by wildfire activity. Tragedies of this nature are becoming ever more common in Canada, due in large part to record-high temperatures and drought conditions caused by climate change.
Last summer, wildfires burned more square kilometres of land than ever recorded in the country’s history. In August, a major fire threatened the city of Yellowknife, forcing a near-complete evacuation of its 20,000 residents.
Eventually the fire held and Yellowknife’s homes and businesses were saved from destruction. Still, the community remains vigilant. If it ever happens again, will Yellowknife be as lucky?
Today, the city is reviewing its response to this life-changing event so that when its citizens face similar threats in future, they will be better prepared. And they’re getting some valuable assistance from the University of Toronto.
In June, two professors from the Urban Studies program at Innis College brought ten graduate students to Yellowknife to research aspects of the city’s disaster response and help point the way to better policies.
This seminar, entitled Understanding the Wildfires: Redefining housing and communication resilience in Yellowknife, Canada, is one of several Multidisciplinary Urban Graduate Seminars (MUGS) being offered by the School of Cities. It was taught by David Roberts, director and associate professor,teaching stream of Urban Studies, as well as Aditi Mehta, assistant professor, teaching stream with the program.
Roberts and Mehta created the class in consultation with Rebecca Alty, Yellowknife’s mayor and a Canadian Urban Leader at the School of Cities.
“We ended up designing a course that provided a retrospective on the evacuation experience as it related to government officials and the non-profit sector,” Roberts says. “The students are now working on projects that will provide policy recommendations for the future.”
Mehta says that the seminar’s multidisciplinary nature was key to crafting a well-rounded response to the crisis.
“We were very deliberate in picking students from different disciplines so that we could create knowledge and think about what happened from different perspectives,” she adds. Students who successfully applied came from geography and planning, forestry, anthropology, landscape architecture and public health.
While in Yellowknife, course participants engaged in site visits and interviews with government officials, community organizations, residents and Indigenous leaders. They then investigated how the local housing crisis and climate change were intertwined, and explored how to build improved communication infrastructure in the city.
Examining the issue through a lens of environmental justice, they also paid close attention to the ways in which Indigenous people, including members of the Dene nation living in Yellowknife, suffer disproportionate harms due to wildfire. Research shows that while 12 per cent of the entire Canadian population is at risk of such harm, that number rises to 32 per cent for on-reserve First Nations communities.
Though he’s well-versed in wildfire science, Léo Jourdan says the seminar provided him with an opportunity to examine them from a different angle.
“The research we do in our lab,” says Jourdan, who is currently completing his Master of Science in Forestry at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, “has to do with wildfires — but from a scientific point of view, in the sense that we try to answer ecological questions about the origins of these fires. So this class was a great opportunity to broaden my perspective and learn more about the human side of wildfires. And I think it did an amazing job.”
Jourdan explains that “wildfires are actually necessary. A lot of the forest in Canada co-evolved with fires, and their ecosystems would not function without them. The issue we’re facing now, however, is that the wildfires are getting more intense and the communities closer.”
For Lilian Dart, the course offered a perfect opportunity to explore her twin interests in environmental justice and housing policy.
“One of the focuses was to look at how people experiencing homelessness were evacuated,” says Dart, a PhD student in the Department of Geography & Planning. She explains that in the wake of the event, the KPMG's Professional Services Solutions team has been conducting an audit that has revealed “significant holes in the system through which vulnerable populations have fallen. People without housing, for example, did not have social safety supports that other people did. They also had comorbidities that affected their health, making them even more vulnerable.”
Dart’s final assignment for the course is a policy paper that examines this issue. “My recommendations are mostly to do with how the municipality can better support service organizations in their collaboration with one another. How can resources be coordinated? And how can people work together to ensure a more organized response?”
For his part, Jourdan is proposing that Yellowknife adopt the principles of FireSmart, a national program founded in 1993 that leads the development of programs and resources to help Canadians increase their resilience to wildfires.
During the site visit, Yellowknife’s mayor provided the group with another bracing truth, says Mehta. “She gave an important critique of planning education in our country, noting that people rarely study the problems that cities in northern Canada are facing. Instead, we are overly focused on big cities like Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.”
Roberts says that the policy recommendations written by Dart, Jourdan and the other students will be offered “not just to the mayor, but to everyone else we talked to — those working in the non-profit field and at the territorial level, as well as those who work with the Dene. We’re now thinking about other ways of presenting this information, such as returning to Yellowknife to ensure that the dialogue we’ve started is able to continue.”