With wildfires raging months ahead of schedule in Northern B.C. and Alberta, many are pointing towards climate change as the culprit.
While warm weather and low snowpacks undoubtedly contribute to tinder-dry forests, the relationship between climate change and forest fires is a bit more complicated, according to two UBC researchers.
For one, blaming increasingly-destructive wildfires on climate change alone overlooks the crucial role of forest management and how, in some cases, B.C. has gotten too good at stopping fires in their tracks.
According to Dr. Lori Daniels, a professor in UBC’s Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences, wildfires can actually do more good than harm when allowed to occur naturally.
Until 2011, wildfire fighters and B.C. were able to contain a whopping 92 per cent of wildfires—holding them to less than four hectares within 24 hours of detection.
That means suppressing even forest-cleansing wildfires—the so-called low-severity, stand-maintaining fires that are crucial to reducing fuel density in the forest under layer. Without these fires, dry fuel builds up making the fires that do occur more severe and threatening to human settlements. That’s changed somewhat since 2012, Daniels notes, when B.C. adopted new management strategies aimed at diversifying fire response beyond just suppression.
So instead of looking at wildfires as being “caused” by climate change, Daniels considers the warming climate one of a trio of “cumulative human impacts” influencing wildfires—alongside forest management and insect outbreaks.
In the short-term, forestry policy and special development rules for forested communities are ways to minimize the most destructive forest fires. Now, there are calls for a national forest fire firefighting strategy.
In the medium term, though, there’s risk of a feedback loop of hotter climates and more destructive wildfires.
Simon Donner, a UBC Climatology professor, said El Niño temperatures this year have set records, contributing to the rash of early wildfires in Western Canada.
"Fires have happened in the past and fires would happen in the future, even if there wasn't a human impact on the climate, and how a fire starts may have nothing to do with climate change," Donner said in an interview with The Weather Network. "The issue is how much these fires can spread, and how quickly they can spread. That is what climate change is doing.”
Canada has some of the world’s largest forest areas, including more forest areas per capita than most other countries.
Boreal forests will likely be particularly affected by the increase in fire-prone conditions, leading to severe environmental and economic consequences.
Forests provide many important eco-system services, including maintaining the Earth’s carbon balance. More fires "in combination with longer, more frequent droughts and a greater incidence of insect outbreaks, will add to the atmospheric carbon emissions by forests.” More emissions, means acceleration in climate change.
The forest industry accounts for 6 per cent of all Canadian exports (2014), equivalent to $31 billion. In fact, the “forest sector creates more jobs and contributes more to the balance of trade for every dollar of value added than the minerals and metals sector or the energy sector.”
By Jonny Wakefield, 24 May 2016