High in a tree in Vancouver’s Stanley Park, an arborist dangles from a climbing harness with a chainsaw… The work is part of a significant – and, to some, distressing – intervention to address the Hemlock looper moth outbreak that killed almost a third of the public park’s 600,000 trees between 2020 and 2023. …what’s happening in the park underscores the broader challenges of managing city green spaces in the era of climate change. …The city says those dead trees pose many risks, and the only way to deal with them is with saws. Joe McLeod, the city’s associate director of urban forestry, called it a “risk mitigation project for public safety.” …To better understand the twin risks of wildfire and falling trees, the city hired veteran wildfire ecologist and forester Bruce Blackwell. …None of this has sat well with Stanley Park Preservation Society founder, Michael Robert Caditz. …But fuel mitigation isn’t about preventing the most common fires; it’s about protecting against the worst possible ones, the kind of fires that occur on the most extreme weather days, when high temperatures, low humidity and strong winds combine to drive the wildfire risk into the red. [A Globe and Mail subscription is required for full story access]