Opinion: We need to reduce wildfire fuel and zone better

We can stop making it easier for wildfire to destroy our communities. We need to get as good at preventing towns from burning as we are at fighting wildfires. Photo by HANDOUT/Nova Scotia Government/AFP via Getty Images

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Another summer, another procession of devastated Canadian communities and millions of Canadians and Americans breathing hazardous smoke from fires burning far away. Our firefighters perform extraordinary work under dangerous conditions. But towns and homes still burn.

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For about a century, governments across North America have aggressively and successfully fought wildfires. The unintended consequence has been the accumulation of vast amounts of combustible vegetation in our forests and around our towns. Worse, communities have grown long fingers into forested areas as people have built homes in nature and resisted harvesting nearby.

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This wildland urban interface (WUI) is where the biggest losses are occurring and where we should focus policy. Canada’s institutions evolved to sustain forests and fight fires. They now need to protect communities from wildfire.

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The provinces govern how foresters write sustainable forest management plans for harvesting and replanting to achieve a sustainable harvest level, make timber available for mills, protect sensitive habitat and biodiversity and address Indigenous and social concerns, such as cultural sites, noise, views, herbicides and recreation. Timber doesn’t get cut without an approved plan. There is room for improvement but, overall, it’s a good framework that satisfies broadly accepted ideas about sustainability.

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But it wasn’t designed for the wildfire situation we currently face. Its goal is to sustain forests, not protect communities when the forests burn. In fact, in forest management planning, wildfire is generally treated as a forest disturbance rather than a public safety issue.

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Provinces can take a decade to update forest management planning — with years consumed by consultations, reviews, objections, revisions and other process. Then it takes more years to change the plans themselves. It all happens at the speed trees grow, which is fine if that’s what matters, but not if the trees are igniting homes, which is what matters now. We need to get wildfire public safety objectives into this process.

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But we can’t afford to wait for a new planning cycle or structure. To protect public safety, the provinces should urgently identify communities that are likely to burn and provide guidelines for foresters for reducing fuels. This could mean commercial harvesting, mechanical thinning, removal of understory (the stuff growing under the canopy), prescribed burns including Indigenous cultural burning, and conversion of highly combustible forest types such as pine and fir to slower-burning types like poplar and birch.

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These changes cut across multiple ministries and levels of government. Provincial and federal governments need to co-ordinate their work and mobilize resources with the urgency of a wildfire command centre. The Canadian Council of Forest Ministers could do the co-ordinating. If it’s done right, we could start to see tangible benefits within a year.

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Who will pay for cutting down trees that are not commercially valuable? Communities might be expected to but many are cash-strapped and can’t. Many of the financial benefits of fewer fires in the WUI would flow elsewhere: governments would spend less fighting wildfires, insurance companies would pay fewer claims, businesses would remain open and families would stay in their homes.