MONTREAL, Canada — Faced with another summer when wildfires have scorched millions of hectares of land and blankets of smoke have disrupted daily life nationwide, Canada is trying to limit the annual devastation. Yet, despite procuring new water bombers and deploying forest management strategies to protect populated areas, experts caution that intense wildfires will remain a fixture of Canadian life. "We're going to have to live with this," said Normand Lacour, who spent decades at Quebec's wildfire prevention and detection organization (SOPFEU). Canada is home to about a quarter of Earth's boreal forest area and average annual temperatures in the country are increasing roughly twice as fast as the global average. That makes conditions in Canada particularly "conducive to intense and very extensive forest fires," University of Ottawa geography professor Patricia DeRepentigny told AFP. Canada's last three wildfire seasons have been among the 10 worst on record, including the devastating summer of 2023 when 18 million hectares (44.5 million acres) were torched, an area nearly as large as