The wildfires in Canada have disrupted lives. Now oil and gas are taking a hit.

What it means: Fires cause oil prices to rise.

Damage to oil and gas production would likely greatly exceed current figures, Thomas Liles, vice president of Rystad’s upstream research, said in a note. Much of Alberta’s shale gas-producing regions remained under “extreme” or “very high” wildfire warnings. An additional 2.7 million barrels of oil sands production per day was also at risk.

The disruption from the fires in Canada, a major oil and gas producing country, has helped push up oil prices. Chevron said it had shut down all production at its Kaybob Duvernay oil and gas fields in central Alberta. Paramount has temporarily shut down a natural gas processing plant along with production in several gas fields, the company said in its latest update on Sunday. Both companies said they prioritized the safety of their employees.

Background: Oil and gas are also vulnerable to climate change.

It’s not the first time Canada’s oil and gas fields have been hit by fires, and the closures are impacting a small portion of the country’s total oil and gas production for now. Yet they underline how oil and gas production, the main driver of climate change, is also vulnerable to the increasingly severe impacts of a warming planet.

As climate change intensifies, the risk of devastating wildfires around the world will increase, the United Nations warned in a landmark report last year. Researchers found that in regions with a long history of wildfires, such as the western United States and Canada, burning has become larger and more intense over the past decade.

The fires come amid a multi-year drought and much warmer than normal temperatures in Western Canada, which climate scientists attribute to climate change. And in recent years, Alberta has been hit by more climate-related disasters than almost any other part of the country, including severe flooding in 2013, an earlier round of devastating wildfires in 2016, and thunderstorms that caused billions of dollars in damage in 2018.

While it’s hard to say how many climate disasters will hit Canada’s oil and gas industry, the country can expect more shutdowns, said Ryan Ness, director of adaptation research at the nonprofit Canadian Climate Institute.

“Canada is in a difficult situation because the oil and gas industry has long been a very important part of our economy,” said Mr. Ness. “But the reality is that the world needs to move away from fossil fuels and meet our greenhouse gas emissions targets, or the types of extreme weather and wildfires and things we see will become simply unsurvivable.”