The Development of a Wildfire Simulator

As an insurer, The Co-operators interests on the impacts of severe weather events on the Canadian landscape in the context of climate changes. The 2016 Fort McMurray fire was the costliest catastrophic event in the history of the country. With years like 2021 and 2023 having had unprecedented wildfire activity, the Co-operators is driven to better understand the risk that wildfire poses both to the insured and insurers.

To better understand exposure and enhance our communications with partners, a project was started to internally develop a Canada-wide wildfire simulator to estimate probable maximum losses (PML). To realize these objectives, we needed to develop a flexible approach around different spatial, temporal, and weather conditions to ensure the whole country was modeled under multiple weather conditions and possible scenarios over many theoretical years. This enables us to better understand wildfire risk across multiple provinces and climate scenarios.

This presentation will explore the motivations and context for the development of a simulator. The simulator is composed of three modules, i) an ignition module, which models when and where a wildfire is likely to start, ii) a spread module, which grows an ignition point using cellular automaton to predict a fully developed wildfire footprint, and iii) a loss calculation module, which assigns a dollar amount loss caused by fire, smoke, and embers.

These three modules result in 55 000 simulated years with millions of simulated fires. All those fires cause losses that can be aggregated to better understand individual risks, but most importantly the dependencies between locations.