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Ecol. Forestry & Conservation
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DRAFTING
The NS wildfires are not ‘natural’ disasters: climate change, forest management, and human folly are all to blame
Joan Baxter in the Halifax Examiner, June 12, 2023 Baxter interviewed four forestry experts on the topic of forest fires. ““Our original forest was probably mostly mixed. It tended towards a softwood mix in some areas, and to hardwood mix in others,” Prest explains. Prior to European settlement, he says Wabanaki-Acadian forests would have good canopy coverage, and underneath the canopy it would be generally damp most of the time, without a lot of sunlight getting through to the forest floor. “And that in itself would be what would stop the fires from either starting or being widespread,” Prest says. “Certainly, the forest has changed.” But in Prest’s view, while changes to the forests are certainly not helping reduce forest fire risk, those changes are not the primary cause — climate change is…Simpson tells me that forest practices such as clearcutting and “anything that results in a preponderance of young and even-aged forests” can make forests more susceptible to forest fires and pests, both of which climate change exacerbate. He says such forest practices “tend to encourage more conifers, for a more boreal-type forest,” with an overabundance of fir and white spruce…Lancaster notes that both the Halifax and Shelburne fires were human caused, and that climate change is also a component. “So these are definitely human-driven disasters,” he says…Anthony Taylor is an associate professor of forest management at the University of New Brunswick who hails from the Musquodoboit Valley in Nova Scotia.. “Forest management practices during the 20th century and up to today have contributed to a younger Acadian forest and one with a higher abundance of spruce and fir,” Taylor says. “But it’s really tricky to say by how much as we have poor data on what the baseline pre-European settlement forest was like.” Taylor sees tree diversity as important in mitigating climate change. He is co-author of a recent paper published in Nature, which shows “conserving and promoting functionally diverse forests” promotes storage of carbon and nitrogen. That means the benefits are two-fold; a balanced mix of trees in a forest keeps more carbon in the ground and also increases soil fertility…“We know a certain amount of climate change is going to take place no matter what,” Taylor says. “In this region, the average annual temperature is expected to warm a couple of degrees in the next 30 years.” Given that bleak reality, Taylor has some other suggestions for reducing forest fire risks. “Besides stopping climate change, the next biggest thing is becoming much more aware of our role in starting fires,” Taylor says. “We have so much more access to the forest than we ever had, largely through all terrain vehicles and that sort of thing.””