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Bad wildfire seasons have started to feel like weather, something Canadians endure rather than monitor and control. In cooler months, the same is becoming true of catastrophic floods, atmospheric rivers and ice storms.

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We’re already building the capability to see these threats sooner. We’re just building it for a different job: national defence.

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Increasingly, modern defence requires knowing what is happening in vast, remote places before anyone else does. Systems such as rugged sensor networks that can survive months in isolated terrain, drones and autonomous collaborative platforms that need to be capable of patrolling inaccessible land, and ocean and communications systems that have to operate where cellular coverage doesn’t exist.

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These capabilities are currently being developed to monitor Arctic coastlines, remote airstrips and critical infrastructure. Yet the engineering challenge is remarkably similar when the threat isn’t a foreign enemy, but a wildfire or a flood. A sensor that can spot a threat in the darkness of winter in the Arctic can also spot a heat signature in a dry, summer forest in northern Ontario.

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Australia has already demonstrated what this kind of thinking looks like.

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Following the devastating Black Summer bushfires in 2019 and 2020, the country expanded its use of advanced aerial surveillance, national firefighting assets and early warning systems. Engineers adapted military-grade electro-optical and infrared sensors to help firefighters see through dense smoke and track fire fronts more effectively.

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In the United States, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and U.S. Forest Service are integrating satellite networks, remotely piloted aircraft and infrared sensing — all originally developed for aerospace and national security — into wildfire detection and emergency response.

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California now uses artificial intelligence to analyze imagery from more than 1,000 cameras to identify new fires within minutes rather than hours.

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Canada should be doing the same.

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Picture a network of remote sensors spread across northern forests and hydro corridors that connect our most remote regions. Instead of waiting for smoke to be reported when it reaches our communities, those systems could identify unusual heat signatures or changes in atmospheric conditions long before flames are visible from the nearest human vantage point.

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Autonomous aircraft designed to patrol enormous areas could confirm those alerts and map the fire’s perimeter with thermal imaging. They could relay real-time information to emergency crews without placing pilots in danger.

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Edge computing would allow information to be analyzed on local servers in real time, processing critical details much faster than the time it would take to send them to a central cloud.

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The difference between a fire spotted five minutes after ignition and one discovered an hour later can determine whether a community is evacuated safely or whether hundreds of homes are lost.