Round 1 — Connecting the Dots
How relationships, networks, and knowledge-transfer mechanisms underpin effective wildfire management. Lessons from the 2023 Canadian fire season, France–Québec operational cooperation, social-science framing, the U.S. Joint Fire Science exchange model, and a pan-Canadian wildfire resilience indicator project.
assets/graphic-notes/round1-en.jpg- Pre-existing partnerships are what made the 2023 wildfire seasons response work — not improvisation.
- Invisible coordination across Société de protection des forêts contre le feu (SOPFEU), the Red Cross, Sécurité civile, the Armed Forces, municipalities, tribal councils and the Grand Council of the Cree was the actual backbone.
- When responders already knew each other, interventions flowed fluidly. When they didn't, response was slower and harder.
ISC navigated the 2023 wildfire season through relationships built since 2010 — funding First Nations emergency-management plans, training, host-community capacity, and structured agreements stress-tested during COVID-19. That investment meant ISC could operate proactively rather than reactively, using an Incident Command System-based regional emergency plan.
After the season, ISC reinforced existing capacities, clarified jurisdictional responsibilities, and ran joint tours with Québec and First Nations to align response roles for what's coming next.
- Wildfire's social topics are interconnected, not parallel — community agency, evacuation, mental health, and risk perception all belong on the same map.
- The cross-cutting question: how do we support communities while letting them act for themselves?
- Eastern Canada urgently needs Western and anglophone social-science knowledge transferred into French.
Théberge presented the results of a December workshop in Québec City co-organized with sociologist Solange Nadeau, designed to identify social-science research needs around wildfire and to build dialogue and trust between researchers, communities and responders. Her draft synthesis diagram links community agency, urban/rural networks, land use, suppression choices, evacuation and host communities, mental health and trauma (drawing on the work of Deborah Davidson and Julien Belleville), risk perception, and compounding hazards.
She closed on the importance of transferring Western and anglophone social-science knowledge into French in eastern Canada, and breaking silos through gatherings like this one.
- The real wildfire challenge is no longer capacity — it's interoperability.
- What makes the partnership hold: monthly exchanges, common training to European standards (S-130/S-190), and a real plan for the first days on the line.
Wilm, a French firefighter colonel and former head of France's interministerial crisis-management center, founded UISF after deploying French resources to Canada in 2023, when he saw international cooperation could be more than ad hoc. He argued that the real wildfire challenge is no longer capacity but interoperability — saturated systems, scarce qualified personnel, and difficulty integrating external reinforcements (lessons from France 2022 and Manitoba 2024, where UISF deployed 40 personnel).
Laetitia Masson, UISF's Canada representative based in Kamloops, B.C., described pre-positioning, response, and pre-season targeted-mission models — with over 200 personnel ready and a structured partnership with SOPFEU built on monthly exchanges.
- The JFSP's hardest lesson: prioritize relationship-building over outputs (webinars, fact sheets).
- 15 regional Fire Science Exchanges have worked since 2009 because they co-produce with managers, practitioners and communities — not for them.
- Direct message to the WRCC: invest in unified branding and messaging from the start.
Dante-Wood described the Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP), created by Congress in 1998 and based at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. The 2009 Fire Science Exchange Network connects scientists, managers, practitioners and communities across 15 U.S. regions (including Alaska, Hawaii, and the Pacific Islands) through co-production.
She illustrated impact with two examples: the Southern Fire Exchange's duff-moisture workshop led a Florida burn boss to adopt go/no-go duff checks in prescribed burning; and "Fueling Collaboration," a multi-exchange virtual dialogue series born during COVID-19 that uses participant-driven questions on timber, wildlife, water, and the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) rather than presentations.
- A national framework is being co-developed to assess how prepared Canadian Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities are for future wildfires.
- The work proceeds in phases: international scan → technical expert team → spatial-temporal resilience index → case-study validation → web platform.
- Open invitation: fire agencies, civil-security agencies, and Indigenous organizations are wanted on the technical team.
Jeanneau (working with Solange Nadeau and Calum) is co-developing a national theoretical framework to assess Canadian wildfire resilience at appropriate spatial and temporal scales, integrating multi-source data to support emergency-management planning and recovery resource allocation.
In Q&A she addressed concerns that publicly available risk-assessment tools used by insurers can over- or under-estimate risk, noting that case-study validation is built in to mitigate that.
