Taking action to create wildfire-safe communities

What should be done to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires in Canada? Following the catastrophic wildfire in Jasper, Alta., there has been a very public debate about forest management for wildfire mitigation. Should we aggressively remove flammable materials from our forests, or let nature take its course? And who gets to decide? While there’s a lot of disagreement, I believe that most Canadians actually agree on most things. Alice Palmer is a British Columbia-based forest industry consultant.Photograph courtesy of Alice Palmer Let’s face it: catastrophic wildfires that evacuate thousands of people, burn down communities, and blacken skies with choking smoke are bad for humans. They’re also bad for the environment: the carbon emitted from intense wildfire seasons dwarf our fossil fuel emissions. For example, early estimates indicate that the carbon released from Canada’s 2023 record wildfire season amounted to roughly triple the country’s emissions from all human-caused sources. With wildfires having such effects on both our health and our environment, it stands to reason that we should do something about them. And since emissions from a bad wildfire season can dwarf the emissions from every other source, actions to reduce wildfire intensity should be top on the list. Why so many catastrophic wildfires in recent years? Wildfires are a natural part of many ecosystems across Canada. However, the frequency of severe wildfires has been rising over the past decade. This is largely due to two factors: Climate change has led to longer, warmer, drier summers, and this has meant more fire. Climate change has also increased the prevalence of insect outbreaks, adding additional dead trees as fuel for out-of-control wildfires. The other cause of extreme wildfire behaviour is, paradoxically, a reduction of wildfire on the landscape. Since the early 20th century, common practice has been to prevent and extinguish wildfires. While this practice enabled more forests to grow to a harvestable age, it has also changed the forest’s structure over time. Without periodic fires to thin out the understory vegetation—including smaller trees—stands have become denser and organic matter has built up on the forest floor. Consequently, when fires do occur, the extra fuel makes them burn more intensely. Wildfire mitigation: reduce the fuel, reduce the risk To reduce the risk of wildfires growing out of control, we can attempt to mimic the effects smaller, less intense fires have on the landscape. The goals are basically twofold: to reduce the build-up of fuel on the forest floor, and (if necessary) to reduce stand density (number of trees per hectare) so that fires cannot as easily spread tree-to-tree. Fuel reduction can be done manually (i.e., by hand-piling the debris), mechanically (e.g., using machinery to remove some of the smaller trees from a densely-grown stand) or through “prescribed burns” and/or “cultural burns”—carefully managed, low-intensity fires. Forest hazard abatement work in the Quesnel area in B.C. Photograph courtesy of Sig Kemmler Communication, co-ordination, and co-operation So, if we all agree that we need to use forest management activities to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire, where should we start, and who should be involved? To date, the majority of wildfire mitigation projects in Canada have been in the wildland-urban interface (WUI), and they have been demonstrably successful. For example, a combination of manual brush removal and stand thinning—i.e., logging some of the smaller trees—was used on the outskirts of Logan Lake, B.C. When the large Tremont Creek Fire threatened the townsite in 2021, having lower-risk conditions in the surrounding forest enabled firefighting crews to successfully protect the community. Wildfire risk reduction treatments require the participation of many different stakeholders. In the WUI, where wildfire mitigation activities occur almost literally in families’ backyards, extensive consultation is often needed. This requires the co-operation of ordinary citizens, community leaders, forestry planners, government officials, forestry companies, and local logging and silviculture contractors. In the case of cultural burning, Indigenous Peoples have a special role to play. Prior to European contact, many Indigenous peoples carried out small, low-intensity burns for a variety of reasons such as to stimulate the growth of forage—for game species—and berries. Today, these traditions are being revived, in coordination with partners and stakeholders. Larger-scale action needed Canadian communities have begun planning to reduce the risk of wildfire in their immediate vicinity. But to reduce the number of carbon-belching wildfire years like 2023, we will need to do much more. This will take planning, coordination, and funding. It will also take creative thinking to find strategies to offset the potentially enormous cost of scaling up such as finding economic ways to utilize the biomass (i.e. branches and small logs) removed from wildfire mitigation activities. Forest industry companies are, therefore, playing an important leadership role in the scale-up. Recent op-eds by conservation groups have, unsurprisingly, expressed reservations about this. Fortunately, there are a lot of checks-and-balances in the system. Forestry is heavily regulated in Canada, and the majority of land—with the exception of the Atlantic provinces—is publicly-owned. Any forestry within a national park requires federal government approval and must support the broader objectives of the park. National parks typically prohibit commercial forestry operations. This will not change. What is changing, however, is the degree to which different stakeholders and rightsholders must work together to solve challenges in the forest. Indigenous Peoples, rural—and not-so-rural—communities, different levels of government, and companies throughout the forestry supply chain all have a part to play. Let’s do this. Alice Palmer is a British Columbia-based forest industry consultant. Her work describes the importance of sustainability issues to different stakeholders. The Hill Times

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Taking action to create wildfire-safe communities

Reducing the risk of wildfire will involve multiple forestry stakeholders and the federal government.

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