Thank you very much.
I'd just like to take a few moments to outline the role that climate and climate change is playing in forest disturbances and make some special references to the mountain pine beetle, moving forward.
As Mr. Henry points out, natural disturbance is a part of forest ecosystems and indeed an integral part of forest ecosystems, and it can affect thousands to millions of hectares of Canadian forests annually. What tends to be counterintuitive to most people, however, is that the impacts in Canadian forests caused by insects actually tend to be much greater than those associated with fire. As I said, this is counterintuitive largely because, of course, fire gains so much attention in the media.
What we found is that insects cause the mortality of trees over a much greater area than fire does annually, and of course the synergies that this can play with subsequent fires is of prime concern, especially given the impacts in British Columbia over the past year with fuel loading quite likely from the mountain pine beetle outbreak that has been impacting the province for the last couple of decades.
There's evidence that disturbance from insects in forests is actually getting worse, and in fact, since about 1980, roughly 50 million hectares or more of western North America have suffered some level of mortality caused by bark beetles, of which mountain pine beetle is an example.
The question that brings forth, and one that I focus on as well as colleagues of mine—the few of us who do work on these issues—is whether climate change will exacerbate these impacts into the future.
As you might expect, this is a very difficult question to get into, but we can actually gain some lessons and insights from studies that have occurred from deep time, from millions of years in the past. Recent evidence shows, based upon fossilized evidence of insect disturbance in forests, that as temperatures warm so will that disturbance increase. We have every expectation, as our climate continues to change, that we will suffer increasing levels of insect mortality or insect disturbance across Canadian forests.
To that end, evidence is actually emerging, too, that we do have bourgeoning evidence that the mountain pine beetle, the spruce beetle and indeed the western spruce budworm in western Canada have all been affected by a warming environment. In fact, we continue to work on that as we focus further and further on the issue.
There are two primary ways in which a warming environment can affect forest disturbances. These are not mutually exclusive, but the first is that for a range-limited species, a warming environment can actually create new habitat and allow that species to move into areas that it couldn't previously occupy. The mountain pine beetle is the best example of that sort of issue.
The second is for species that are ubiquitous. In other words, they occur everywhere their host trees occur. Examples of this could be the eastern spruce budworm, or the spruce beetle, for that matter. In this particular case, we are noticing that, in a warming environment, the outbreaks themselves that are associated with these species tend to be getting worse in terms of their frequency, their severity and their duration. To this end, we have the spruce beetle in Yukon and northern British Columbia as a very good example in that particular case.
I mentioned that I was going to focus a bit on the mountain pine beetle, and I know it is an important issue and it's one that I've worked on extensively. Indeed Mr. Henry referred to the TRIA-Net. I'm actually a principal investigator and a theme leader in that particular network.
The mountain pine beetle is perhaps the first and best example of climate-related impacts in terms of forest disturbances in Canada.
It's important to point out that it's a problem that actually has arisen as a consequence of a couple of things. The first and foremost is our success at fire suppression across the west. We have become very good at putting out fires across Canada and particularly in British Columbia, to the extent that we have removed fire—aside from this past couple of years—almost entirely from the pine-dominated ecosystems. This has actually caused an increase in the amount of older trees, which would be the preferable food source for the mountain pine beetle.
In doing so, in the absence of climate change, we created a smorgasbord for the mountain pine beetle and have effectively allowed the populations to build to unprecedented levels.
On top of that, the second driver of this big outbreak has been a warming environment. This has allowed the beetles to survive better. It has allowed them to expand their range, as I mentioned earlier. This range has expanded to the point where the beetles have breached the Rocky Mountains and have begun to spread across Alberta.
In fact, in the 10 or more years since it's been on the eastern side of the Rockies, it has continued to spread across Alberta and we now have it right on the border of Saskatchewan. Indeed in the Cold Lake air weapons range, we have a population detected already. It's quite a concern.
Given the work that I have done with colleagues associated with the TRIA-Net, the NSERC-sponsored program in which I was involved, we can pretty much conclude that as long as populations remain in the outbreak phase—in other words, they remain large and they remain aggressive—eastward expansion remains highly likely. Beetles in that particular phase are capable of finding and successfully attacking Jack pine trees without too much of a problem.
The difference, though, is that if the populations are able to collapse, if we are able to slow the spread to the point where beetle populations actually return to a sub-outbreak or endemic state, then spread becomes much less likely. Indeed, some emerging evidence from my lab shows that persistence in the long run in these new pine habitats by sub-outbreak populations of the mountain pine beetle is actually highly unlikely, as a consequence of competition from other aspects of those forests.
The last point I'd like to emphasize is that the Government of Alberta has actually devoted a great deal of resources, roughly half a billion dollars, to slowing the spread of the mountain pine beetle in the last 10 or 12 years, certainly since 2006.
I recently completed a study, funded in part by the Government of Alberta, looking at whether these efforts have been effective. We can conclude that, yes, indeed, they have been effective. The efforts on the part of Alberta have slowed the spread of the mountain pine beetle significantly. This is a highly important point, especially in combination with the point I made just a moment ago in terms of the collapse of populations back to the endemic level. If we can continue to focus on the mountain pine beetle in efforts to slow its spread, then we might get lucky enough to have these populations finally collapse to this sub-outbreak phase and, in doing so, essentially reduce the likelihood of eastward spread by a considerable amount.
Finally, I'd just like to conclude by saying that you might recall that I mentioned that the mountain pine beetle is perhaps the first and best example of a climate change impact. However, it's only one of a whole series of species that are likely to respond to a warming environment by increasing their disturbances in Canadian forests. We effectively have a canary in the coal mine in so far as future disturbances are likely to occur associated with other species.
Thank you very much.