Summits | Meetings | Publications | Research | Search | Home | About the G7 Research Group
|
Summits | Meetings | Publications | Research | Search | Home | About the G7 Research Group |
|
G7 and G20 Performance on Wildfires, 1975–2024
John Kirton, G7 and G20 Research Groups
June 4, 2025
When G7 leaders gather for their 51st annual summit at Kananaskis, Alberta, on June 15-17, wildfires will be much on their mind.
Although wildfires will probably not surround their physically well-prepared meeting spot in Alberta’s majestic Rocky Mountains, they may feel, and even see, the smoke from the many wildfires raging in that province as well as British Columbia to the west and Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Ontario, and Newfoundland and Labrador all the way to the east.
In nearby resort-town Banff, where the G7 international media centre will be, space could be scarcer should it be commandeered to help house the many thousands of Canadian evacuees turned out of their threatened homes elsewhere.
And G7 leaders will fly to Kananaskis knowing that on June 3, less than two weeks before their summit starts, the smoke from these unprecedented Canadian wildfires had already reached as far south as Florida, when US president Donald Trump lives, and even across the Atlantic, to the United Kingdom, where its prime minister Kier Starmer lives and works.
President Trump will remember that the northern suburbs of Los Angeles went up in flames in January, as he was being inaugurated, and subsequently wildfires broke out very early in the season near New York City, where he used to live, as well as in North Carolina that had voted for him.
Canadians will remember that one third of Jasper, another resort town just down the road from Kananaskis, burned to the ground last year, as did all of nearby Lytton, British Columbia, a few years before.To deal with this burning crisis, along with the many other ones G7 leaders face, they and their citizens may want to know what G7 summits have done to control such deadly, devastating wildfires since their summits started in 1975.
The short answer is not much, and not nearly enough.
Since G7 summits started in 1975, their leaders have made only five public, collective, precise, future-oriented, politically obligatory commitments on wildfires in their summit’s communiqués (see Appendix A). This is a tiny fraction of the over 7,000 commitments they have overall.
The first came only in 2006 at St. Peterburg, Russia, hosted by President Vladimir Putin whose heavily forested Russia was then a full member of the G8. The next came two years later, at the Toyako-Hokkaido Summit in Japan. The years after, at L’Aquila, Italy, in 2009, G8 leaders produced two, one of which explicitly noted that forest fires were caused by climate change.
Then after a gap of 15 years, G7 leaders, back in Italy, now at Apulia, produced the next one last year. They promised that “we will also take steps to prevent, manage, and address the negative impacts of extreme wildfires.” They recognized for the first time that forest fires were “wildfires” and that those wildfires had now become “extreme.”
The bigger broader, G20 summits, which started in 2008 and include all G7 members, have done even less. This is despite the fact that this group has always included Russia, tree-covered Indonesia, and tropical forest–rich Brazil. Its Amazon forests have long been and are now again in flames, from severe drought and from fires set by inhabitants to raise cattle and crops, sometimes in illegal ways.
G20 summits have made only two commitments on wildfires (see Appendix B). The first came in 2023 at the New Delhi Summit. The second in November 2024 at Rio de Janeiro, where they promised not just to prevent, mitigate and manage wildfires, but also to address the negative impacts of droughts and of wildfire that were now “extreme.”
Last year, then, both the G7 and G20 leaders promised to act against extreme wildfires.
Will the Kananaskis leaders, now with Trump there representing the United States, promise again to act against wildfires, and do so in bigger, better ways?
There are many doubts, given that Trump denies the existence of climate change, claimed the wildfires in devotedly Democratic Los Angeles were caused by the failure of its local politicians and the failure of Americans to send enough water down from the north to douse them soon enough.
But there is still some hope.
At the G7 foreign ministers’ meeting in Charlevoix in March, all G7 ministers, including US secretary of state Marco Rubio, noted in their consensus communiqué on Maritime Port Security and prosperity the harm cause by “extreme weather events.”
And the core communiqué issued by the G7 finance and central bank governors – including US treasury secretary Scott Bessent – at their meeting in Banff in late May identified the threats to all economies from health and natural disasters, and the importance of supporting vulnerable countries with tools “including Climate Resilient Debt Clauses and Insurance.” The word “climate” had finally appeared in a communiqué from Canada’s G7 in 2025, and one close in space and time to the Kananaskis Summit itself. And by June 3, the evacuations from wildfires had already stopped activity at Alberta’s oil sands, the harming the homegrown energy security that G7 leaders will seek to advance at Kananaskis on June 15–17.
Brittaney Warren, June 3, 2025
N=5
1975–2005
None
2006 St. Petersburg
2006-135: We shall promote international cooperation in the area of forest management, primarily in addressing deforestation and forest degradation, the trade in illegally harvested timber and forest fires. (environment)
2008 Toyako-Hokkaido
2008-88: We will also consider ways to enhance our cooperation to combat forest fires.
2009 L’Aquila
2009-72: [To address the increased threats of natural disasters and extreme weather phenomena caused by climate change, such as increased flooding, storm surges, droughts and forest fires, we will act to improve risk preparedness, prevention, monitoring and response times, particularly in developing countries, by]defining common guidelines for disaster prevention and management to be used in developing national plans, in collaboration with the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), building on the Hyogo Framework for Action and on national experiences, as well as improving management of risks, awareness raising and training of the population and civil protection real-time response, such as logistical support for emergency situations; (climate change)
2009-79: reinforce international cooperation and information sharing for sustainable forest management, including use of forest resources, prevention and management of forest fires and monitoring of pests and diseases. (environment)
2010–2023
None
2024 Apulia
2024-228: We will also take steps to prevent, manage, and address the negative impacts of extreme wildfires. (environment)
Brittaney Warren, June 3, 2025
2008–2022
None
2023 New Delhi
2023-158: We commit to prevention and mitigation of wildfires (environment)
2024 Rio
2024-129: We will also take steps to prevent, manage, and address the negative impacts of droughts and extreme wildfires. (climate change)
 — 
|
This Information System is provided by the University of Toronto Libraries and the G7 Research Group at the University of Toronto. |
|
Please send comments to:
g7@utoronto.ca This page was last updated June 04, 2025. |
 |
 |
 |
 |
All contents copyright © 2025. University of Toronto unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved.