Wawanesa Insurance is providing more than $200,000 in Community Wildfire Prevention Grants to help 11 communities and organizations strengthen local resilience.
The grants were given as the threat of wildfires continues to intensify. They are part of the Wawanesa Climate Champions program, which invests $2 million annually to support groups working on climate-related risks.
This year’s Community Wildfire Prevention Grant recipients are the District of Squamish, the Cheslatta Carrier, Wet’suwet’en and Gitanyow Nations, and Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc in British Columbia; Teslin Tlingit Council in Yukon; the Biosphere Institute of the Bow Valley in Canmore, Alberta; the County of Grande Prairie and Greenview Fire-Rescue Services in the Municipal District of Greenview No. 16, Alberta; the Rural Municipality of Big River No. 555 in Saskatchewan; and the Rural Municipality of Lac Du Bonnet, Thompson Fire & Emergency Services in Thompson, and the Town of The Pas, all in Manitoba.
The funding will support a range of community-led wildfire prevention initiatives, including vegetation management programs, risk assessments, community education campaigns and local FireSmart Canada projects. FireSmart programs focus on reducing vulnerability in the wildland-urban interface through measures such as managing fuels around homes and critical infrastructure, improving emergency access and egress, and engaging residents in neighborhood-level risk reduction.
“As wildfire season approaches, these communities and organizations are stepping up with decisive, meaningful action to reduce risk and protect what matters most,” said Mitchell McEwen, Wawanesa’s director of sustainability, climate resilience and community impact. “As a mutual insurer, we’re driven to support efforts like these that build lasting resilience, helping communities not only withstand growing risks, but thrive in a changing world.”
The Community Wildfire Prevention Grants were developed in collaboration with FireSmart Canada and the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction. To date, Wawanesa has invested more than $660,000 in wildfire prevention projects, supporting 46 communities across the country.
The program comes as Canada continues to grapple with a marked shift in wildfire activity and losses. The 2023 season was the country’s worst on record, with more than 6,000 fires burning roughly 16.5 million hectares of land and triggering mass evacuations and prolonged smoke events across North America. Although the area burned in 2024 was lower, wildfires such as the Jasper complex and other severe weather events helped drive total insured catastrophe losses in Canada to a record $9.2 billion, far above previous years.
For property and casualty carriers, those seasons reinforced that wildfire is no longer a peripheral peril confined to a few Western communities. Insurers have absorbed major losses in multiple provinces, including British Columbia, Alberta and the North, with events such as the Fort McMurray fires in 2016 and subsequent British Columbia fire seasons already among Canada’s costliest catastrophes. Against that backdrop, investments in mitigation and FireSmart projects are increasingly viewed by underwriters and reinsurers as a necessary complement to pricing, reinsurance purchasing and exposure management.
“Wildfire risk in Canada is evolving at a pace some have thought unimaginable just a few years ago,” said Paul Kovacs, executive director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction. “Wawanesa’s investments in wildfire resilience demonstrates true leadership, helping communities strengthen their defenses, learn from one another, and lessen the far-reaching impacts these destructive events have on people, property, and the economy.”
The grant program highlights how mitigation spending links directly to portfolio performance.
Community-level projects such as vegetation management, defensible-space work and FireSmart neighborhood initiatives can, over time, reduce expected losses in high-risk zones, support the continued insurability of certain communities and help ease pressure on rates and availability of coverage. That is particularly relevant as reinsurers and capital providers scrutinize Canadian catastrophe accumulations after several years of elevated weather- and climate-related losses.
The geographic spread of this year’s recipients also reflects how wildfire risk has broadened beyond traditional hot spots. That shift is prompting more emphasis on client-level risk reduction measures, documentation of FireSmart actions and closer collaboration with municipalities and First Nations on land-use planning and emergency preparedness.
While a $200,000 annual grant pool is modest compared with recent insured losses, market observers said targeted, community-based investments of this kind can help bend the loss curve if they are sustained and replicated across the sector.
