Thank you. That's an excellent question.
I think there is a bit of a paradigm shift that needs to happen. I completely support what Rob has mentioned about trees being the answer. Having productive, working, healthy forests will do a lot to mitigate catastrophic fire and consequential flooding.
Flooding is a bit more complicated. I would suggest that, given climate change, given that we are in these natural disturbance-driven ecosystems, what we've learned from the past is not necessarily going to guide our future.
If we're having hotter fires with more serious burning, I think we need to look at a few things. One is doing vulnerability assessments. This is something that NRCan, Natural Resources Canada, provides some funding for right now. We would encourage it to expand that funding. That is for provinces, forest management companies, regions, community-managed forests, to understand what their vulnerabilities are. That will be different in different regions. It may be drought, it may be wildfire, it may be pest outbreaks, depending on where you are. It may be a combination of those.
It's actually a Canadian Council of Forest Ministers, CCFM, mandate framework vulnerability assessment. It walks an organization through what the steps are: “What are my vulnerabilities, given climate change, and then what are my options to adapt to those to further mitigate them?” Some of them are no-regret options; really, they're just the right things to do. Some of them will require more money, more investment.
Some of them may require policy changes. For instance, some jurisdictions have a fairly prescribed set of what trees you can plant and where you can plant them. Perhaps we may say, let's plant some adapted seed stock that may come from a little further south that we weren't allowed to plant before. We know that particular seed tree is going to be adapted to the future climate. It might be drought resistant. It might be pest resistant, etc. I'm not talking about genetically modified trees; I'm talking about natural seed stock that's been adapted.
I think there are some excellent things we can look at and that the federal government could be supportive of.
Then, I also think we need to look at the FireSmart concept. That's at the community level. It needs to be expanded, because some of those same principles may not apply to a much larger landscape. For instance, when our forest managers go into a community forum to manage forests, particularly in British Columbia right now, communities will say that they have to leave those forests because of visual quality constraints, or they have to leave the trees because of a deer winter range. All of these are important values and what we call “constraints on the landscape”.
However, now the community is saying that they'd prefer to mitigate the risk of wildfire: “I don't want to have to evacuate my town. Can we look at going in there and thinning some of those forests and treating some of those forests, so we have a better mitigation plan so we don't have a catastrophic fire come through?” Some of that wood might be used.... We might pull the residue out, the fuel out, and that can be used for a biofuel or a bioproduct.
I think there are lots of things we can do, but it requires looking at things a little differently from how we have in the past, having an honest conversation about values, and having fire and flooding risk as part of that analysis.
Thank you.