Canadian forest fires are the latest costly climate disaster that public accounts fail to capture

You don't have to tell the people of Calgary and other Canadian communities breathing orange air that forest fires have a cost.

And while repeated studies draw a direct line between an increase in costly forest fires and climate change, economists and accountants right up to Canada's Parliamentary Budget Officer say the benefits of stopping climate change and thus reducing the many harms it creates are simply impossible to measure for public accounting purposes.

It is an interesting conundrum and the thousands of people displaced from their homes or breathing smoke from the current spate of forest fires are caught in the middle. 

While federal budgets include all the costs of fighting climate change, the other side of the ledger, the notional income from the benefits of you not breathing smoke, or at least breathing less, remain blank. Since there is no benefit, it is harder to justify spending the money.

While some of the effects of a warming planet seem distant from our daily lives, including the slow-moving impacts of rising sea levels or disasters affecting other people someplace far away, the smoke from forest fires has an in-your-face impact affecting millions of Canadians that makes it harder to ignore.

People in smoky areas are being advised to stay indoors, and repeated studies show high pollution days lead to increased deaths. Of course there are many costs from forest fires short of death. Some are relatively easy to calculate — like increased dollars spent on firefighting itself.

"The annual national cost of wildland fire protection exceeded $1 billion for six of the last 10 years," says a data analysis from Natural Resources Canada. "On average, costs have risen about $150 million per decade since data collection started in 1970."

It's much harder to capture the damage to the quality of your life from sheltering indoors, or facing a summer without blue skies or clean air.

Meanwhile nearly 20,000 have been forced from their homes. Properties have been lost. Hectares of burned forests in Alberta, nearly 700,000 ha this week — challenging the roughly 900,000 ha burned in all of 2019, the previous biggest fire year — represent trees that cannot be harvested, and are no longer absorbing carbon.

Oil and gas companies have been forced to shut down production again this week. In the past rail traffic has been interrupted by fires. A report from DBRS Canada out Wednesday said that while there have been rail service interruptions, grain shipments overall have not yet been seriously affected, although "the situation remains volatile and unpredictable."

For Dave Sawyer, principal economist with the Canadian Climate Institute, the costs of climate change in our daily lives are obvious, including from the current forest fires.

"The particulate matter exposure and the air quality is serious," said Sawyer on Wednesday. "There's going to be a spike in deaths. There's going to be a spike in morbidity outcomes, hospital visits, respiratory illness."

"Really, there's no minimum exposure." 

He is afraid that some people will refuse to accept the link between climate change and the increasingly costly disasters, including fires.