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Good afternoon, and welcome to Globe Climate, a newsletter about climate change, environment and resources in Canada.

Why is Montreal’s snow-fighting army so famous?

In an average year, Montreal clears 12-million cubic metres of powder – enough snow to fill the city’s Olympic Stadium 10 times over. The snow removal, or déneigement, takes about 2,500 vehicles and 3,000 workers, and is one of the most impressive such efforts in the world.

On extremely snowy days, like the ones we saw across the country recently, the speed and scale of the operation is the envy of other Canadian cities. And a quiet point of pride.

Now, let’s catch you up on other news.

1. World: In Mongolia, long known as the Land of the Blue Sky, air pollution has reached a crisis point
2. Tariffs: Global salmon farmer Grieg Seafood swimming away from Canada
3. Immigration: Climate change may mean migrants can’t be returned to hard-hit regions: internal IRCC document
4. Policy: Former Alberta energy minister must appear for questioning in coal case, court rules
5. Innovation: On the outskirts of Toronto, a new model for cities, nature and agriculture takes root
6. Analysis from The Narwhal: How the Greenbelt scandal is quietly shaping Ontario’s 2025 provincial election

For this week’s deeper dive, we take a closer look at Jesse Winter’s reporting and photography on the mitigation efforts to keep future fires from burning unchecked in British Columbia.

Although winter may seem like an odd time of year to be fighting wildfires, that’s essentially what Matty Captan is doing.

It’s late December in the mountain forest outside Lee Creek, in British Columbia’s North Shuswap. He’s placing a propane torch into a pile of snow-soaked branches trying to get them to burn as part of wildfire fuel mitigation project.

Nearly 100 years of aggressively suppressing wildfires and outlawing Indigenous cultural burns has left many Western Canadian forests unnaturally loaded with vegetation that, under the right conditions, becomes fuel for fires. This type of work takes many different forms, and while the results won’t stop a fire in its tracks, they can significantly improve the chances that more structures in its path will survive the blaze.

Climate change makes it even harder to prevent such fires. Years-long droughts and hotter days makes it so that when fuel-loaded areas catch light, they burn for longer and with much higher intensity.

Fuel mitigation work requires careful planning. A unique prescription is written for each plot of land to be treated. It’s typically done in the late fall and early spring, when cool temperatures and high humidity make the chances of an accidental wildfire very low. Hundreds of thousands of hectares across the province could need this type of treatment.

The project Captan is working on outside Lee Creek, for Paxton Ridge Contracting, covers only 60 hectares – less than one square kilometre.

Last winter, the team mechanically thinned the forest by chopping down some of the trees. This winter they’re focused on “limbing” the ones remaining, cutting off their lower branches and removing swaths of understory shrubs and smaller plants, either burning or wood-chipping the leftovers. It’s expected to take about two years from start to finish.

Wildfire ecologist Bob Gray, who works in B.C., said he looks to Indigenous communities across western North America and their efforts to bring back both prescribed and cultural fires to their landscapes. “How do you live in a landscape full of chaparral? Well, Indigenous people did for about 15,000 years, and they found a way,” he said.

See all of Jesse Winters’s photos and read his full story here.

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• Marineland succeeds in bid to sever property so it can raise money to move animals
• Countries meet in Rome to make fresh attempt at $200-billion nature finance deal
• Trump administration fires 1,000 workers at National Park Service, raises maintenance concerns
• Singh talks up east-west clean electricity grid, not pipelines, as top NDP energy priority
• Environmental groups sue to block Trump’s offshore drilling expansions
• Climate change is shrinking glaciers faster than ever, with 7 trillion tons lost since 2000
• Webb telescope observes violence around the Milky Way’s central black hole