Details are still emerging but it appears that the Bird Dog aircraft was working with a larger aerial firefighting tanker on the wildfire. The incident occurred Wednesday night, local time, about 50 kilometers west of Fort Simpson.

In a Special Bulletin just published NWT Fire confirmed the death of the three people, but provided no more detail:

“With profound sadness, we confirm that three people lost their lives in the Bird Dog aircraft crash west of Fort Simpson. Responders accessed the crash site and confirmed the fatalities today. Our organization is grieving alongside the families, friends, colleagues, and the broader wildfire community as we process this unthinkable loss…

…Critical Incident Stress Management Teams are being deployed to several bases to support wildfire management personnel in the wake of this tragedy. The RCMP, Coroner, and Transportation Safety Board of Canada will investigate the incident, and the GNWT will fully participate.“

Buffalo Airways, based in Yellowknife NT, has put out a similar statement on the loss of its pilots and aircraft, confirming it was a Turbo Commander 690 aircraft.

“It is with heavy hearts that we confirm the loss of one of our Aerial Firefighting pilots while actioning a forest fire west of Fort Simpson. First responders have confirmed the fatalities of the three members onboard today.”

Buffalo Airways has operated a fleet of fire suppression aircraft in NT for 26 years.

A bird dog aircraft provides a lead-in to ensure the flight path and drop height is safe for its partner air tanker to follow behind and drop fire suppressants.

NWT Fires said the incident occurred on the FS009 fire. It has provided this update on FS009:

“This lightning-caused fire is located in the Marten Hills area and is currently 100 hectares in size. Crews and tankers are working to suppress its growth. There is no risk to communities, infrastructure or cabins at this time.”

A breathing apparatus or mask like an N95 hasn’t historically been a staple of wildland firefighters’ gear, though some have been in testing for years. The added carry capacity is one reason, along with the assumed lack of toxic chemical inhalation, since the fire burns in a natural area free from synthetic materials.

But research has since found that assumption isn’t true. Wildfire can create cancer-causing toxic heavy metals depending on where they burn and the severity of the flames.

PREVIOUS COVERAGE: Wildfire smoke toxicity worsened by heavy metals in soil, flame intensity

Reducing such hazardous exposure to wildland firefighters was the major reason for the Service’s announcement, according to a press release sent out by officials.

“Secretary Rollins has made it clear that we will no longer stand by as firefighters face long-term health risks just from doing their job,” said Forest Service Deputy Chief of Fire and Aviation Management Sarah Fisher in the release. “The action we are taking today is about doing right by the people who put themselves between our communities and escalating wildfire threats. Improving respiratory safety and expanding decontamination practices are practical, common-sense measures that will make a real difference on the ground.”

The authorization allows N95 use and requires training and standardized decontamination protocols, like mandatory showers, gear cleaning and clean-air recovery, which are compliant with Occupational Safety and Health Administration requirements.

“Firefighters who are healthy, informed, and supported are better positioned to do their jobs effectively and safely,” officials said in the press release. “The Forest Service is committed to that outcome and will continue to advance improved health protection measures with the Department of the Interior.”

Click here to read the full release.

The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre has determined that an El Niño event this year was “virtually certain” based on all seasonal forecast modelling systems. The fluctuating water-temperature climate pattern of the tropical Pacific Ocean is also forecast to reach “unprecedented” intensity, compounding the high likelihood of wildfires in numerous regions worldwide.

Although usually associated with countries close to the Pacific, the impacts of this El Nino are predicted to extend far beyond, including into Europe, with heatwaves and drought more likely.

The last El Niño in 2023-24 was one of the five strongest on record and it played a role in record global temperatures registered in 2024. But no two El Nino events are the same. The full picture is complex and contains many variables as this graphic shows:

Extreme heat is set to build across the tropics and subtropics from September, and is expected to peak between December 2026 and February 2027, persisting into the spring, the agency said in a press release.

“Unusually warm weather is expected to spread across much of the world, with the warmth growing stronger as El Niño intensifies,” according to the release. “The regions most likely to feel this are in North and South America, Central America, Africa, the Euro-Asian continent and Australia.”

At the beginning of June, the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization predicted the probability of El Niño through November to be close to or above 90%.

Two weeks later, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Weather Service declared it too, noting that in the US an El Nino tends to be stronger in winter months, with warmer than usual winters.

Last week, Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology officially declared it. While predicting lower rainfall and higher temperatures over the current southern hemisphere winter the Bureau and other experts are cautious on the fire potential for the next summer.

“Large-scale climate drivers like El Niño can influence broad conditions such as temperature and rainfall, but they do not determine whether fires start or how they behave on the ground. Bushfires remain a complex, localised hazard that depend on whether the right conditions and an ignition coincide,” said CSIRO Principal Research Scientist Dr Andrew Sullivan.

“The relationship between El Niño and bushfire activity is not straightforward. The occurrence of an El Niño event does not translate directly into bushfire occurrence or impacts, and some of Australia’s more severe fire seasons have occurred in non-El Niño years.”

#WFCC26 is in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada from 19-23 October 2026.

#WFCC26 will bring together wildland fire management agencies, Indigenous knowledge holders and experts, scientists, partners, and collaborators from across Canada and around the world.

This biennial conference focuses on wildland fire management, science and knowledge-sharing.

Don’t forget to choose a Workshop and a Field Trip.

• 11 Workshops – with most over half a day.

• 3 Field Trips – including one overnight.

The full program will be out in mid-July.

The last WFCC was in 2024 in Fredericton, New Brunswick. The first was in 2010 in Kitchener, Ontario.

The theme for 2026 is Connecting Operations, Research and Community Action.

WFCC26 is in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada from 19-23 October 2026.

Register here:
wildlandfirecanada.com

Idaho Gov. Brad Little, at a June 16 press conference, joined state, local, and federal partners to say the state is prepared – with the state’s firefighting resources fully staffed and investments in forest management and federal partnerships. The preparation, however, was called into question when it was revealed just before the press conference that the state legislature’s funds for wildfire response had hit $0.

State lawmakers voted to transfer $32.8 million to the wildfire deficiency fund on July 1, the first day of fiscal year 2027, but Little said the state would “pretty much burn through” the funds, given that an active fire season would cost the state $70 million or more, according to the Idaho Capital Sun. Any funds spent over that $32.8 million would be paid using “deficiency warrants,” or bills applied to future sessions of the Idaho Legislature, that would worsen an already tight budget squeeze.

“If we have an above-average fire season, we’ll probably run out of (the funding),” Little said at the press conference. “We’re going to be okay for a while, as long as we don’t have an abnormal fire year.”

Idaho is expected to have an abnormally active fire year. The National Interagency Coordination Center’s wildland fire outlooks list Idaho as having “significant” wildland fire potential from July through September, set up by above normal temperatures and below normal precipitation worsening drought throughout the majority of the state.

PREVIOUS COVERAGE: Record-low water shortages expected ahead of very active US wildfire season

“Above normal fire potential is forecast for portions of northern Idaho and southwest Montana in July, expanding to all of north Idaho and southwest Montana in August,” the National Interagency Fire Center said during the June release of the report. “Above-normal fire potential will also expand to all the northwest, including all of Idaho, western Wyoming, and southwest Montana.”

As California’s population boomed — from 10 million in 1950 to over 40 million today — the number of people living in fire-prone areas multiplied. Over the decades, millions of new homes and commercial buildings sprang up to accommodate the needs of the state’s growing population, and many of those structures stand in areas prone to wildfires.

As a result, more communities are now in harm’s way. The 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles show exactly how destructive urban wildfires can be. More than 16,000 buildings were destroyed, and 31 people lost their lives. By the time the recovery is complete, the cost of repairing the damage from those wildfires could approach a quarter of a trillion dollars.

This article appeared in Berkeley Engineer magazine, Summer 2026

“We are front and center in the wildfire crisis,” says Michael Gollner, associate professor of mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley. “California is beautiful, but everything aligns for fires here. We need to learn to adapt, to limit the damage that wildfires cause. A lot of people live in fire-prone areas, and most of the country’s major urban wildfire disasters have happened in California.”

Despite the thousands of wildfires in California each year, we still don’t know that much about them — especially when it comes to how they spread in urban areas. The wildland-urban interface is the zone in which buildings and infrastructure border natural areas. Homes in this zone are at higher risk of burning, but quantifying that risk is challenging.

Until recently, the mathematical models used to predict wildfire spread largely ignored these areas. Where a simulated wildfire reached a developed community, the models treated the land as unburnable. Which, of course, it’s not.

“Understanding fire spread between built structures is a totally different equation than understanding fire spread in wildlands,” says Gollner. “It’s different physics, and until recently, it was not well enough understood to be integrated into the parameters of mathematical models. We still can’t do everything at scale, but we’ve begun to be able to simulate wildfires in urban areas.”

In the wildland-urban interface, fires will move freely between natural landscapes and developed lands. And the 2025 Palisades fire did exactly that. What began in the brush of the Santa Monica Mountains swept through residential neighborhoods in Pacific Palisades, before it crossed Mandeville Canyon and burned other parts of Greater Los Angeles. But predicting, and ultimately slowing, this kind of fire behavior remains a complex problem.

“To make good decisions about the risks communities face, we need more science,” Gollner says.

Evolving science for a changing landscape

The increase in wildfires tearing through California communities isn’t just due to population growth. Historically, much of California burned every 7–15 years, a natural process that thinned forests and removed accumulated ground fuel.

“It’s actually restorative,” says Scott Stephens, a professor in the Rausser College of Natural Resources. These periodic fires created forests that were more fire resistant. Over time, California’s forests came to be dominated by fire- and drought-resistant pine trees, which shade the forest floor.

But a century of fire suppression policies and logging has changed the composition of our forests. As many of the largest pines were felled, forests grew thicker and less fire-resistant tree species flourished. Now, California’s forests are much more flammable than they once were.

“The effects have been profound,” says Stephens. “The fires we have today would have been unimaginable 50 years ago. In California, we put out more than 98% of wildfires, but the 2% that we can’t put out are responsible for burning 95% of the land.”

And the amount of land that has burned in California is mind-bending: more than 12 million acres since 2013. That’s an area more than twice the size of New Jersey. The damage hasn’t been confined to forests and chapparal, but has also torn through some of California’s largest cities.

As wildfires push into urban areas, they behave in ways scientists are only beginning to understand. But Gollner is figuring out how to predict what urban wildfires will do next — by turning fire modeling into a complex, evolving problem.

“There are so many things that go into modeling a fire; you need to account for the weather, the fuel chains and the fire itself,” Gollner says. “We are working on how to do those calculations for urban areas, but there are so many unknowns and uncertainties. Sometimes, we are just revealing what those uncertainties are. Other times, we are starting to put numbers to them.”

In research published in 2024, Gollner developed a landscape-scale model for predicting the spread of fire in the wildland-urban interface. Unlike other models that existed at the time, Gollner’s addressed the spread of wildfire through both vegetation and buildings.

“Other models treated them separately, but ours seamlessly couples the two,” says Dwi Marhaendro Jati Purnomo, a post-doctoral scholar in Gollner’s lab who led the development of the model. “It’s driven by the key mechanisms of fire spread in the wildland-urban interface: direct flame contact, radiation and firebrands — airborne pieces of burning material that are responsible for igniting many of the buildings that burn in wildfires. Our modeling framework also incorporates heat flux — the amount of heat that travels through materials. That allows us to quantify the hazard to nearby houses.”

Gollner and Purnomo tested their model using data from two highly destructive events from California’s recent past — the 2017 Tubbs and Thomas fires. And they were able to fine-tune the model to make predictions with a high degree of accuracy. Their model predicted the extent of the fires with more than 85% accuracy and the number of damaged houses with roughly 70% accuracy. Importantly, the researchers found that nearly a third of house ignitions were caused by embers, something ordinary Californians can take meaningful steps to guard against.

“There are two basic types of mitigation. The first is defensible space — basically clearing flammable things away from a house and reducing the amount of fuel available to a fire,” says Gollner. “The other is to harden a house, to make it more difficult for the building to ignite by changing the windows and siding or by installing ember-resistant vents. These are simple-ish things, but hardening a house can be expensive.”

Fire-resistant siding is made of non-combustible materials like stucco or metal, and installing it in a new build doesn’t cost that much more than traditional wooden siding does. But the costs of replacing the siding on existing houses can be high, especially when you multiply those costs across millions of houses. Gollner’s modeling is helping identify in which areas this type of mitigation will have the greatest impact.

“That’s the billion-dollar question,” he says. “We don’t have all the tools yet, but we do know that if you did all these things and have good spacing between your house and your neighbour’s house, you will be way better protected. But it takes money and time, so there is a question of exactly how much needs to be done. A house right next to the forest? Sure, we need to do that. But how far into a community do these mitigations need to go? We still don’t know exactly in which areas these investments will have the biggest payout.”

Developing a playbook to fight fire in urban areas

Gollner’s ultimate goal is to craft a playbook for wildfires that communities can use to protect themselves. Right now, there isn’t one. But Gollner’s work to quantify wildfire risk is giving communities the data they need to set priorities. And one of the communities doing that is Berkeley.

“Berkeley is in a fire-prone landscape,” he says. “We had major fires in 1991 and 1923, and we have mostly forgotten about them. But the weather conditions that happened during those fires will happen again; we just don’t know when those conditions will occur.”

Even the tiniest spark can generate an inferno, he adds. And whether one does is largely a matter of luck. In the right conditions, a fire can spread rapidly. Right now, there’s little to stop a fire from spreading through the tightly packed wood-framed buildings that line Berkeley’s narrow streets.

“How destructive a fire is depends a lot on the direction and the timing of the winds,” Gollner says. “If the winds only last a few hours, the fire might stop, but when a wildfire is raging at peak intensity, there is just not a lot that humans can do about it.”

When a wildfire enters a city, it sends embers flying everywhere, and they can ignite buildings by the thousands. No fire department in the world can handle a hundred burning buildings, much less a thousand, and no amount of investment in firefighting will allow us to extinguish urban fires on this scale.

“There is just no way to tackle this problem with an active approach,” says Gollner. “We need to limit the ways fire can spread. If we can do those simple things, we can make a difference.”

But you need to get people on board, and that isn’t always easy. In January 2026, the City of Berkeley implemented an ordinance called Effective Mitigations for Berkeley Ember Resilience (EMBER). It mandates a five-foot vegetation-free buffer zone around houses and also identifies areas at the highest risk from wildfires as priorities for enforcement. 

Under EMBER, fines for non-compliance can reach up to $500 per day, and some local opponents have argued that EMBER is overly intrusive. But Gollner’s research highlights the value of defensible space. In a paper published in 2025, he found that houses with a five-foot, vegetation-free buffer were much less likely to be destroyed in a wildfire.

Gollner conducted a machine learning analysis of data collected on the ground after five major historical fires in California’s wildland-urban interface — the 2017 Tubbs, 2017 Thomas, 2018 Camp, 2019 Kincade and 2020 Glass fires — and found that houses with a vegetation-free buffer area were much more likely to survive a wildfire. The difference is stark. Just 20% of houses without a buffer survived these wildfires, while 37% of houses with a buffer did. In a major urban wildfire, that 17% difference could add up to hundreds or even thousands of houses saved.

“Clearing the vegetation that is closest to the house isn’t perfect, but it is one of the cheapest and easiest ways to reduce risk,” Gollner says. “The vegetation that’s right there has the highest likelihood of igniting a house. But people can be really protective of their plants, and some people are just opposed to doing it.”

But retired fire chief Dave Winnacker is using the data to convince people of the value in compliance. Winnacker spent about 20 years in the fire service in Fresno, Alameda County and the Moraga-Orinda Fire District. And now, he’s returned to his hometown of Berkeley to help the city implement EMBER.

“Dr. Gollner’s research has really given Berkeley a theoretical grounding to operationalize this initiative,” says Winnacker.

In the same 2025 paper, Gollner calculated that implementing both house hardening and defensible space could prevent the loss of 52% of all the structures lost in the major urban wildfires he studied.

“Fire is opportunistic,” Winnacker says. “And it will find a way to spread. But when you take mitigation measures, communities won’t burn. In the last 20 years, 80,000 homes in California burned, give or take. Halving that number to 40,000 homes still would not be great. But it sure would be a lot better than 80,000.”


When more people adopt defensible space and harden their houses, the effect is amplified. Each house that doesn’t burn breaks a chain of ignitions — it means fewer houses burn overall. That’s a message that Winnacker has taken to the public.

“Urban fire is a big macro-phenomenon, and it is hard for people to connect the dots between these micro-mitigations, which can seem inconsequential, and this huge destructive thing,” Winnacker says. “But Dr. Gollner’s work allows us to do that. It helps us understand the drivers of loss in the urban environment. And from there, we can prioritize mitigations, so that we get the greatest value from a risk reduction standpoint. Otherwise, we would just be guessing.”

Read more on this research in the Berkeley Engineer.

The increase was driven by significant wildland fire activity across the country, with the potential of additional large fires remaining elevated in the days ahead, the NIFC said. Nearly 5,000 personnel are actively assigned to fires nationwide,

Over 33,000 fires have been reported and 2.6 million acres burned so far in 2026, far above the 10-year average year-to-date of 24,685 fires and 1.6 million acres burned.

“While current resource capability remains sufficient to sustain incident operations, geographic areas are increasingly utilizing national support to accomplish incident management objectives,” the Center said in its latest update. “The increase reflects growing demand for firefighting resources and heightened fire potential across several regions of the country.”

Fire activity is largely concentrated across the Northwest, Great Basin, Southwest and Rocky Mountain areas, Center officials said. Severe large fires recently triggered evacuations and threatened structures in both Washington and Oregon. New fires in Idaho, Nevada, Arizona and Nebraska are also rapidly growing.

Fire risk remains elevated throughout the western third of the U.S. due to persistent triple-digit heat, single-digit relative humidity, and breezy conditions, according to the Center’s report. Incoming thunderstorms with only spotty rainfall also heighten wildfire risk over the northern Sierra, southeast Arizona, southern New Mexico, and west Texas.

“Unprecedented” snow drought and record-low water shortages are expected ahead of what is forecast to be a very active fire season, according to federal officials.

“Many of the rivers are likely to experience well-below median streamflows, which may rival the lowest flows on record for the region,” the Service said in the Department’s most recent Water and Climate Update. “Water shortages are anticipated in many locations, especially for entities that rely on surface streamflow water, without the benefit of having access to stored reservoir water.”

PREVIOUS COVERAGE: Record-low water shortages expected ahead of very active US wildfire season

A study in the International Journal of Wildland Fire identified census tracts across the US where high wildfire risk and high social vulnerability intersect – and found that American Indian/Alaska Native communities, Hispanic/Latino residents, and mobile home residents are disproportionately concentrated in these areas.

Most of these tracts are located in less populated areas of western and southern states, and concentrated mainly in California, Texas, and Florida.

With nearly 21 million people living in these high-risk, high-vulnerability zones, this research has implications for wildfire mitigation and disaster preparedness, particularly for communities that have historically been underserved.

This is not the first study to make the connection – lead author Professor Jayajit Chakraborty from the University of California, Santa Barbara, explains that we have known for a while that vulnerable communities bear a disproportionate burden from wildfires.

“What we are doing differently is asking where exactly does this happen and using rigorous spatial statistics to answer that,” said Prof Chakraborty.

The study overlaid a number of databases and analytical tools to get the result – mainly, the bivariate Local Indicators of Spatial Associations (LISA), and the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) that was developed by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to map areas of vulnerability for public health and emergency planners.

The use of LISA at a national scale provided spatial precision. “Previous studies have documented the relationship but had not really pinned down the specific neighborhoods where high wildfire risk and high social vulnerability coincide spatially. That’s the gap we were trying to fill”

So, what does a more precise approach for these communities actually look like? It really depends on the community, Prof Chakraborty says.

“For Indigenous communities, for example, it’s not just about dropping fire mitigation resources in – it’s about meaningful consultation, respecting tribal governance, and supporting things like culturally grounded prescribed burn programs that many tribes have practiced for generations.

“For Hispanic communities, a lot of it comes down to language access and trust issues. Evacuation notices that only exist in English, or disaster relief programs that exclude undocumented residents – these are fixable barriers.

“For mobile home residents, the needs are more physical – these homes are genuinely more fire-vulnerable, and their residents often don’t have the financial resources to make improvements on their own, so you are looking at approaches like subsidized retrofitting or community-level preparedness programs.

“The broader point here is that the High–High tracts identified in this study essentially provide a spatial targeting layer — agencies and decisionmakers can overlay this map with existing program boundaries identify gaps and prioritize investments in overburdened communities.

But how do we explain the LA fires of 2025 that burnt into some of the most expensive real estate in the country?

“The rich can be exposed to wildfire, but they are not socially vulnerable to it in the same way. The findings from our IJWF article show it is American Indian, Hispanic, and mobile home communities – disproportionately in rural western and southern areas – who face the combined burden of high risk and low adaptive capacity,” said Prof Chakraborty.

“The LA fires were a high-visibility event in an economically affluent area; the communities our research identifies face similar or greater physical risk with far fewer resources to prepare, respond, or recover.”

Read the full research paper by Professor Jayajit Chakraborty and Masters Student Sara Soroka in the International Journal of Wildland Fire.

An emerging Australian company has seized the power of AI to develop a scenario package that moves faster, adapts to sudden changes, reacts to multiple pressures, and responds to decisions in real time, for better or for worse. Capital Shield’s Foresight platform is pitched as the next level full-dress rehearsal for wildfire and other emergency agencies.

The story starts back in 2020, when a group of undergraduates at the National Security College at the Australian National University established the Australian Crisis Simulation Summit. They brought together around 100 students from across Australia with Australian Government support to focus on realistic national security scenarios using a range of software platforms built for such exercises.

Tim Hobbs, CEO of Capital Shield, says the problem was that none of the platforms did what was actually needed. “They couldn’t generate a genuinely realistic exercise environment. We could build a compelling scenario on paper, but the tools couldn’t bring it to life.”

And so, Hobbs and his co-founder, Connor Kneebone, built a new software platform, using AI to lift the standard to include more complex, more dynamic scenarios, that can twist and turn in real time.

“It’s a browser-based environment built around doctrine that recreates the pressure of a real incident, with live spatial mapping, radio traffic, media calls, social media sentiment and stakeholder pressure all arriving at once, against a compressed operational clock,” he said.

“An agency can build a scenario in its own geography, with its own fuel loads, fire weather and community assets, then run its IMT through it. Because the environment is adaptive, the fire responds to the team’s decisions.”

Capital Shield has established relationships in the Defence and national security space with several Australian Government agencies using the platform, which links to the Australasian Inter-service Incident Management System (AIIMS), or as needed, to a state emergency plan, or to an organisation’s own crisis management plan or competency standards.

Capital Shield was an exhibitor at the IAWF Fire Behaviour and Fuels conference in Hobart in April this year and attracted strong interest demonstrating Foresight.

Foresight is also aimed at international use with take-up by agencies in Germany and Japan, and early approaches being made in the US and Canada.

The exercise can be delivered by one facilitator in person or remotely, with participants in different places able to share the same simulation for fire, flood, storm or other events.

Hobbs says the platform offers a better option to static and scripted exercises in current use worldwide. “They are often PowerPoint-based, with a facilitator reading injects off a list and giving a subjective debrief at the end. Everyone agrees it’s a great way to learn, and it is. But the pressure isn’t real, the realism isn’t there, and performance isn’t measured.

“We’ve taken exercises to the next level. In Foresight you’re making the decisions you’d be expected to make on the day of a real incident, in a live, reactive environment, but a safe one. The fire responds to your suppression strategy, the media and the community push back through the same channels you’d really use, and the clock doesn’t wait.

“Then at the end it recalls all of it and gives you a structured after-action review: here’s how you went, here’s where the gaps were, measured against the doctrine your organisation actually operates under. So, it’s not just a better way to rehearse, it’s the first time most teams can demonstrate their readiness rather than assert it.”

For more on Foresight go to:

https://www.capitalshield.com.au

White, in an editorial in the Journal, said he has seen an increased focus on firefighter health at many international wildfire conferences, including the 4th International Smoke Symposium in Tallahassee earlier this year. The growing focus led him to create a framework for researchers, agencies and decision-makers to integrate a health focus into how we manage fire and treat firefighter health as fire management infrastructure.

“This is not simply a matter of individual well-being: it influences operational capacity, how long crews can work safely, how reliably they can make decisions under pressure, how quickly they can recover between deployments, and whether they remain in the workforce,” White said in his editorial. “Yet in many jurisdictions, wildfire personnel still receive little or no coordinated, central monitoring and support.”

Through White’s lens, the health of wildfire crews isn’t a consideration after the fire is contained, but rather one of the many other considerations made when fire planning, like fuels, weather, logistics and equipment. White argues that the same logic should apply to people.

“If physical and mental health shape safety, effectiveness, and retention, then they belong in the core fire management framework, not at the periphery or as something to ‘follow up later,” White said. “The question, then, is what changes when we treat wildfire personnel health as infrastructure: something we prepare for before the season begins, manage actively during operations, and support intentionally during recovery.”

“The wildfire workforce is a precious resource. Sustaining it will require the same mindset applied to other infrastructure: plan early, manage actively, support recovery, and learn systematically, season after season.”

Anthony White is an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Wildland Fire. This editorial was written as part of IJWF’s initiative to spotlight emerging topics and foster discussion within the wildfire research community. White presented his research on wildfire smoke impacts on the brain at the 4th International Smoke Symposium in Florida, United States, earlier this year, and will speak again at the AFAC26 conference in Melbourne, Australia in August.

Click here to read White’s full editorial.