Road closures, evacuations, travel disruption and stern warnings from officials have become familiar hallmarks of Canada’s wildfire season. But as the country experiences its second-worst year on record, the fires have taken an unusual turn: few are burning in the western provinces, traditionally the centre of devastation.

Instead, the most destructive blazes have struck the prairie provinces and the Atlantic region, with parched conditions reshaping how Canada confronts a threat that is expected to intensify as the climate continues to warm.

Experts warn that this shift is a stark reminder that wildfire danger extends across the vast, forested nation.

In recent weeks, tens of thousands have been forced from their homes. Saskatchewan and Manitoba have been hardest hit, accounting for more than 60% of the total area burned across Canada. Meanwhile, stretched resources in Atlantic Canada have been tested as officials in Newfoundland and Labrador battle uncontrolled fires.

In response, Newfoundland’s premier, John Hogan, announced on Wednesday a temporary ban on off-road vehicles in forested areas, saying the province “simply cannot afford any further risks, given the number of out-of-control wildfires we have”.

The move follows a similar measure in Nova Scotia, where a 15-hectare (37-acre) wildfire is burning near Halifax. Authorities there have also closed hiking, camping and fishing in forests, reflecting the troubling reality that nearly all wildfires in the province are caused by human activity.

“Conditions are really dry, there’s no rain in sight, the risk is extremely high in Nova Scotia,” the province’s premier, Tim Houston, told reporters. “I’m happy to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to protect people, to protect property and try to just get through this fire season and really just pray for rain.”

Blazes have even broken out in Ontario’s Kawartha Lakes, a rural region less than 160km (100 miles) north of Toronto, popular with city residents as a summer retreat.

For more than a century, Canada’s largest and fiercest fires – and the greatest destruction – have been concentrated in the western provinces, driven by geography, climate and industry. That pattern shifted dramatically in 2023, when Canada endured its worst wildfire season on record and thick smoke blanketed parts of the United States.

“We had fire everywhere. We had evacuations everywhere. We had smoke at a scale that was remarkable,” said Paul Kovacs, the executive director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction at Western University. “And so for the first time, we had a different thought about wildfires as a country. With all of the smoke, it became a global conversation. This year is repeating all of that. This is a national issue. This can show up anywhere.”

This year, according to Kovacs, whose organisation focuses on preventing property loss, more buildings have already been destroyed than in 2023. He warned that many residents of the most fire-prone regions, including British Columbia and Alberta, have yet to take basic steps to protect or “harden” their homes against fire. He hopes a broader national awareness of risk will prompt people elsewhere to assess how vulnerable their properties might be to fast-moving flames.

“That’s the behavioural change we’re hoping to see next, because there will be many years of fires to come,” he said. “The size of the burned area will not go back to where things were 25 years ago. This is just our new reality and we need to be prepared. We need a change in mindset and a recognition that this can, and probably will, happen in so many parts of our country.”

So far in 2025, nearly 7.5m hectares (18.5m acres) have burned across Canada – far above the 10-year average.

Despite the nationwide threat, there is no single approach to reducing risk, said Jen Baron, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Wildfire Coexistence.

“British Columbia and Alberta have long been the poster children for this wildfire problem for a long time, but other regions are beginning to experience some of those same challenges,” she said. “This speaks to the pervasiveness of climate change: even if a location was relatively low fire risk in the past, with the extended droughts that we’re seeing, that’s no longer the case now and into the future.

“Even though some parts of the country are having a wet year on average, things across the board are still warmer and drier than they were in the past.”

This uncertainty has prompted the federal government to invest a multimillion-dollar funding effort to investigate risk and adaptation, with Baron noting that “there are very few parts of Canada that would be totally protected from wildfire”.

With an international focus on wildfires, experts such as Baron hope recent years of vast blazes and choking smoke will drive a response that takes account of the forestry industry’s legacy, urban sprawl into wilderness areas, and the role of Indigenous stewardship in forest management.

“We’re just starting to catch up to the scale of the problem,” she said. “Wildfire is a natural ecological process, but it’s become increasingly challenging to manage with changing climatic conditions.”

Canada’s challenges are echoed across the Atlantic, where southern Europe is facing one of its worst wildfire seasons in two decades.

In Spain, officials last month struggled to contain 20 major blazes. The prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said during a visit to the north-western region of Galicia: “There are still some challenging days ahead and, unfortunately, the weather is not on our side.”

After fires killed three people and consumed more than 115,000 hectares, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez pledged to introduce a “national pact” to address the climate emergency.

“We need to reflect deeply on how we can rethink our capabilities, not only in terms of responses but also in terms of preventing everything related to the climate emergency, whether it be fires, storms, or any other climate-related natural disaster,” he said.

In Portugal, around 139,000 hectares have already been burned this year – 17 times more than in 2024 – according to preliminary figures from the Institute for the Conservation of Nature and Forests. Elsewhere, countries including Greece, Bulgaria, Montenegro and Albania have appealed for help from the EU’s firefighting force as exhausted crews contend with flames fanned by record heat, drought and strong winds.

In Canada, Baron said the relative mildness of this year’s western wildfire season offers a glimpse of what the future might look like.

“Instead of one big fire year every 15 or 20 years, every year will be big in some part of the country,” she said. “We really don’t know exactly how climate change is going to continue. It doesn’t drive things in linear ways. And we can’t predict where there’s going to be a drought next year. But it will be somewhere.”

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