More than 10 million hectares (24.7 million acres) of forests have been burnt in wildfires in Canada this year, according to data released Saturday.
The prior all-time high occurred in 1989, when 7.3 million hectares were burned, according to national figures from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center (CIFFC).
In total, 4,088 fires have occurred since January, including many blazes that have scorched hundreds of thousands of hectares. Along the way, more than 150,000 people have been displaced.
Given the scale and multitude of fires, authorities have had to leave most of them to burn.
The majority of fires have occurred in forests, far from inhabited areas – but they still have serious consequences for the environment.
"We find ourselves this year with figures that are worse than our most pessimistic scenarios," Yan Boulanger, a researcher at Canada's natural resources ministry, told AFP.
"What has been completely crazy is that there has been no respite since the beginning of May," he said.
As of Saturday, there were 906 active fires in the country, including 570 deemed out of control – with no province spared.
The dire situation has shifted across the country in recent months: In May, at the beginning of the wildfire season, Alberta in the west was the center of attention, with unprecedented blazes.
Several weeks later, Nova Scotia, an Atlantic province with a mild climate, took up the baton, followed by Quebec, where massive fires created plumes of smoke that blanketed even parts of the United States.
Since the beginning of July, the situation has taken a dramatic turn in British Columbia, with more than 250 fires starting in just three days last week, triggered mainly by lightning.
Much of Canada suffers from severe drought, with months of below-average rainfall and warm temperatures.
The country is warming faster than the rest of the planet because of its geography and has been confronted with extreme weather events whose intensity and frequency have increased due to climate change, scientists say.
Smoke from wildfires in western Canada, meanwhile, was creating unhealthy air quality conditions in parts of the upper-central United States – similar to episodes in June when blazes in the Canadian province of Quebec cloaked the U.S. East Coast in a noxious haze.
While it can be hard to attribute a particular weather event to climate change, scientists insist that global warming – linked to humanity's dependence on fossil fuels – is responsible for the multiplication and intensification of heat waves in the world.
The U.S. heatwave comes after the EU's climate monitoring service said the world saw its hottest June on record last month.
