Well

thanks very much and good afternoon everybody.

Thank you very much, Christophe, for the opportunity to speak at the conference and thank you all

for attending and taking part.

I wanted to talk to you about what's really an important issue going on in Canada right

now.

We're facing very significant wildfires that are creating all sorts of different problems

from damaging the communities to creating air quality problems.

In general, it's a very hard problem to address because we have such a huge geography to deal

with and not a really good way of monitoring that.

So what I'm going to talk to you a little bit about is just the nature of how we're

going to look to address that using buoyant technology.

So as I was saying, they don't just cause a lot of costs and disruptions.

They affect millions of people.

I think some over in Europe were encountering the smoke that was coming even through just

atmospherically throughout the summer.

We had tremendous conditions.

Where I'm living, we had times where you go outside and the sky in the middle of the day

is orange, which is really unusual.

It's obviously kind of a crazy situation to see.

So for us in Canada, it's a problem.

We've seen some major fire disasters happening over the last 10 years in really heavily populated

areas, which is again very unusual.

You can see on the maps here

we've got again a fairly significant forest area on the map

over to the right.

And on the left

we have an indication of the forest fires that have occurred over the

last 35 years or so listed there

but a tremendous amount of them have happened in the last 10

years.

There seems to be this general nature that the environment is trying to change our boreal

forest into a prairie just kind of by its nature.

So this is creating a lot of problems and fires that would normally not happen in the

areas we were expecting them are starting to happen more regularly.

We spend something in the order of about a billion dollars annually to just combat fires

but then we also have tremendous costs that have developed from those fires as well

too.

Insurance claims for the 2016 fire in Fort McMurray reached over 9 billion.

And in 2023, through a combined number of communities, it was over 10 billion of damages.

So it's a lot of problems and a lot of expense that seems in a lot of ways like it could

be prevented if we had a little more early detection than we've got now.

So we really don't have a good way of monitoring the sheer volume of forest that we have.

And a huge amount of it, as I showed on the previous slide, is in areas we don't really

populate.

Canada has most of its population in the south, near to the U.S. border.

We have a few communities northern, but the level of population there is not high.

And ultimately, because of the lack of population density, there's not as much monitoring of

the spaces as things happen.

So as a result, sometimes a lot of fires, when they start, they go unchecked for a long