Despite being considered one of the best tools to reduce wildfire risk, prescribed burns are not that common.
For instance, a controlled fire on Kelowna‘s Knox Mountain last October was one of only two performed in the city in 2025.
In neighbouring West Kelowna, there’s been plenty of fire damage over the years but not a prescribed burn.
“For us here, we’ve never done one here in West Kelowna,” said West Kelowna fire chief Jason Brolund. “It’s very complex. It takes a lot of work to prepare in advance and the people who are doing it need to be highly trained and highly skilled.”
The types of resources used have been in shorty supply in Canada. However, a first-of-its-kind program hopes to change that.
Called the Canadian Prescribed Fire Training Program, it’s been co-developed by UBC-Okanagan and the Ontario-based Weston Family Foundation, which has donated $8 million to ignite it.
“To be more resilient to fire can only come if people are trained and they have the capacity to do this kind of work,” said Dr. Mathieu Bourbonnais, assistant professor with UBC-O’s Faculty of Science.
Bourbonnais, a former wildland firefighter himself, is leading the charge and will help administer the nationwide program.
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“Unlike suppression, where we’ll share resources across the country, in prescribed fire, we don’t have the framework for doing that right now,” Bourbonnais said. “It’s kind of created this capacity gap.”
The new program will train more people to safely plan and carry out prescribed burns, create national training standards and provide hands-on experience in the field.
The initiative will also support Indigenous-led fire stewardship and cultural burning practices.
“Every province and territory and jurisdiction does things a little bit different, and what that’s done is it’s limited opportunities for both people in wildfire agencies to get trained up,” Bourbonnais said. “It’s also limited opportunities for, you know, broader groups that might be involved in this, to get trained in prescribed fire.”
That training is critical when it comes to lighting fires to remove dangerous fuels with many factors to consider.
“We’ll assess the fuels, the topography, what we’re going to see for weather, the type of fire behaviour that we want to kind of put on the ground,” Bourbonnais said.
“We also want to make sure that we’re communicating well with the public around, you know, hey, this is happening.”
Brolund said prescribed burns have several advantages, including being cost-effective and impactful.
“It’s something that had been practiced for thousands of years but we lost it,” Brolund said. “And if we’re going to make a dent on a scale that is really measurable, we need to re-learn those skills and be able to apply fire to the ground over a large area to, you know, really have an impact on these fires that we face.”
The new program will help establish five regional hubs (Western, Northern, Central, Eastern, and Atlantic Canada) to tailor training to local ecosystems and governance realities.
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