Environment committee  Could you just please clarify what the 1% was that you were referring to? Did you mean 1% as the area burned by forest fires?

Environment committee  Basically, the question is, what can we do to reduce the emissions from forest fires? Is that correct?

Environment committee  Yes, I appreciate that. First of all, we have to appreciate where these fires occur, because most of these fires and most of the areas burned are caused by lightning, and much of it occurs in remote areas where we do not have the kind of infrastructure that is required to suppress forest fires effectively.

Environment committee  Yes, but as I said, that was an extreme year. There have been a couple like that since greenhouse gas reporting, 1990 to the present. Having said that, you have to remember that much of the boreal forest across Canada is regrowing following forest fires. Yes, you have the direct emissions, but you also have vast areas of forest that are removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Environment committee  The emissions that occur in one stand in one year, the stand that is burned, are offset by emissions from other stands surrounding that stand that are regrowing. So yes, the stand that burned will take 100 years or whatever to remove the carbon dioxide that was released from the fire, but the forest is characterized by stands of many different ages that are in different stages of their life cycles, and these other forests are removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Environment committee  Actually, if the forests were large enough, they could do that. The problem is two things. You have to remember that the area annually burned is measured in one to three.... It went from one million hectares to about three million hectares on average at the present. Recall that the forest area of Canada is about 347 million hectares.

Environment committee  No, I didn't say that at all. I did say that we have large interannual variability in area burned. You gave the example of 25 million tonnes of emissions in a year. In years in which we have only 25 million tonnes of emissions, the forests as a whole, including the anthropogenic and natural disturbance components, would be a carbon sink.

Environment committee  The annual emissions from forest fires vary greatly between years. In extreme years the direct emissions from forest fires can be as high as 250 million tonnes of CO2 equivalents. These are just the direct emissions. Forest fires also kill trees, so these trees will decompose in subsequent years and release more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, but they will also rejuvenate the forest dynamics, allowing new forests to grow back.

Environment committee  No challenge at all. The fundamental issue with forest fires and their increases over time—and they have increased threefold in the last 50 years in terms of area annually burned—is that we have a combination of warming temperatures, reduced precipitation and increased periods of drought that together have led to an increase in forest fires.