Agriculture within the land-fire-atmosphere system: an occupational security and transectional framework for wildfire research and adaptation in Canada

The increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires in Canada, exacerbated by climate change, present unprecedented challenges to agricultural sustainability and food security. This conceptual paper applies occupational security, grounded in the ANT-Mobilities lineage and its transectional analysis, to reframe agriculture as embedded within a wider land-fire-atmosphere system rather than as a sector externally impacted by fire. Occupational security’s integration of sustainability, justice, peace, compassion, authenticity and accuracy, combined with recognition of non-human agency and Indigenous knowledge systems, addresses gaps in a literature that treats fire as hazard and agriculture as exposed system. We distinguish four landscape fire regimes, differentiate the agricultural actors that occupy different positions of resource, authority, and vulnerability, and clarify that recognizing non-human agency is an analytical claim whose normative weight varies by stage of the fire cycle. The 2023 wildfire season, which burned over 15 million hectares and emitted 647 megatonnes of carbon, serves as a motivating illustration of why sectoral accounting fails: these emissions are measured and reported as natural disturbance, yet excluded from the anthropogenic total against which climate targets are set and from agricultural climate assessments. We develop a five-phase transectional procedure for risk assessment, organize policy interventions by stage of the fire cycle with responsible actors identified across scales, and examine applicability to other climate hazards and fire regimes. The framework offers researchers, policy makers, and emergency planners a relational alternative to hazard-exposure-vulnerability assessment.