Decades of industrial logging and fire suppression are pushing British Columbia’s forests past a tipping point, increasing the risk of catastrophic wildfires and undermining the recovery of wild salmon, a new report has found. Released Tuesday by the Raincoast Conservation Foundation, the research assessed almost 90 individual studies, reports and government documents, concluding that the current crisis of more frequent and severe wildfires is due to the cumulative effects of a century of fire suppression, changes in forest structure from clear-cut logging, and a warming, drying climate. …The Raincoast report comes less than a week after Robert Gray and Robin Gregory published a paper in the journal Science that argued spending billions of dollars to fight catastrophic wildfires in British Columbia is an ineffective strategy, with long-term spending likely to balloon out of control unless measures to prevent them aren’t put in place. 

Press Release by the Raincoast Conservation Foundation: Increases in high-severity wildfire have implications for water and fish: report