As Alberta’s wildfire seasons become increasingly severe, the city is creating a wildland urban fire strategy to better prepare for the possibility of an emergency within its boundaries.
Calgary Emergency Management Agency Chief Sue Henry confirmed the plan is in the works while presenting her annual status of emergency preparedness report to council’s emergency management committee on Wednesday. However, the plan is “still in its infancy,” she said.
“We know our summers are getting hotter and drier,” she said after the meeting. “We know our communities are growing and building out into some of the more wildland urban interface areas.
“What we’re doing is bringing the entire agency together to do an overarching strategy to make sure that we understand all of the impacts, we understand potential mitigation, and if there’s other areas that we can improve as an agency.”
Henry noted the number of grass fires in Calgary limits is on the rise, and some neighbourhoods situated beside forested areas, grasslands, river valleys or large parks are more at risk of a localized wildfire.
While this would be the municipal government’s first wildfire mitigation framework, Henry noted that some city business units address wildfire risk in other ways, such as the practice of clearing vegetation in Calgary’s public parks.
CEMA initiated a wildland urban interface strategy at the end of 2025, and is in the process of understanding what policies exist within some of the city’s business areas, Henry said.
“We’re in an information-gathering stage where we’ll be able to see the gaps once we’ve gathered all the information,” she said.
CEMA updates disaster risk assessment
Henry’s presentation also highlighted that CEMA’s 2025 responses centred on both preplanned and emergency response events, including the G7 Summit in Kananaskis Country last June; a hazardous materials response following the discovery of a potentially explosive substance that led to evacuation of businesses near Macleod Trail last August; and the repeat rupture of the Bearspaw South feeder main on Dec. 30, 2025 — an incident whose response carried into the new year.
A dump truck and an earth berm contain a controlled detonation of explosive materials in the 4700 block of 1st Street S.W. on Aug. 27.
Calgary’s emergency operations centre was opened for 13 days in 2025 to co-ordinate emergency response or planning efforts related to these incidents. Eight of those days were for preplanned events, including six related to G7 preparations.
CEMA also refined its strategic approach in 2025 by integrating lessons from past emergencies, reassessing disaster risks and preparing for anticipated increased demands in 2026, according to the report.
The agency also revised Calgary’s Municipal Emergency Plan to include enhanced response capacity.
“Folks will remember 2024 was a big year for us with lots of different events, so a huge part of the focus last year was making sure that all of the lessons that we had learned from those events were incorporated into what we do now,” Henry said.
Reflecting Calgary’s exposure to potential disasters, the city’s quadrennial disaster risk assessment was updated this year. It now outlines 67 hazards and threats to Calgary. This year’s assessment includes 22 high-risk scenarios, three more than the number of high risks outlined in the previous assessment from 2022.
Some of those include floods, critical infrastructure failures, cyber attacks, extreme cold or heat, or dam breaches along either the Bow or Elbow rivers.
The increase is a result of some disaster risks going up, Henry said, though she added other scenarios were downgraded to the medium category.
“There’s lots of different changes, and a lot of our risks are critical infrastructure-based, they are weather-based and they are human-induced,” she said. “They’re gathered into those three categories, but we’ll see some of our critical infrastructure has been pulled out due to the high-risk nature of it, and identified alone.”
Climate change has made CEMA busier, as natural disasters become more frequent and complex, Henry said, noting at least eight of the 22 high-risk scenarios on the disaster risk assessment are influenced by climate change.
“We can guarantee we’ll have probably a hailstorm at least once every single year, and that makes it more taxing on our agency to be able to respond to those events,” she said.