An all-too-familiar scene is playing out in western Canada, this week: forests in flames amid extreme heat while hazardous smoke engulfs cities downwind of the fires. Similar scenes have unfolded in Australia, California, the Pacific Northwest, Europe and China. As both heat waves and wildfires worsen, recent research is tying these extremes ever more strongly to climate change. …“This is a concerning situation given there is so much fire on the landscape already,” said Michael Flannigan, a professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia. …As heat-driven fires continue to become real-world disasters, there is more evidence pointing to the fuel behind them. A study published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Research Letters… found that nearly 40% of the total forest area burned in the western US and Canada between 1986 and 2021 can be attributed to emissions from fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers.
You don’t have to tell the people of Calgary and other Canadian communities breathing orange air that forest fires have a cost. And while repeated studies draw a direct line between an increase in costly forest fires and climate change, economists and accountants right up to Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Officer say the benefits of stopping climate change and thus reducing the many harms it creates are simply impossible to measure for public accounting purposes. It is an interesting conundrum and the thousands of people displaced from their homes or breathing smoke from the current spate of forest fires are caught in the middle. While federal budgets include all the costs of fighting climate change, the other side of the ledger, the notional income from the benefits of you not breathing smoke, or at least breathing less, remain blank. Since there is no benefit, it is harder to justify spending the money.
As B.C. grapples with catastrophic floods and wildfires rage in Alberta causing widespread destruction, Ottawa has announced its first national risk assessment to address the rise in climate crisis-related disasters. The National Risk Profile, announced Thursday, examines disaster risks from three of the most concerning hazards facing Canadians — earthquakes, wildfires, and floods. It includes training 1,000 firefighters, launching a national earthquake warning system in 2024 and creating an online flooding portal for Canadians. The next phase of the profile will focus on heat waves, hurricanes and space weather. …As the world continues to experience these disasters, it is crucial to increase risk awareness to inform decision-making for preparation and response, federal government officials said, at a news conference in Ottawa Thursday. …Billed as a “whole-of-society approach,” the National Risk Profile aims to help residents prepare for, manage, and recover from emergencies, and help them understand the realities of increased disasters related to climate change.
With the planet’s changing climate, governments across the globe have implemented ambitious climate goals which have caused a seismic shift toward clean energy. The landscape is changing, accelerating the use of clean energy. As a result, bioheat from wood pellets is also shifting from niche to mainstream. Wood pellets sourced from responsible producers in well-regulated countries like Canada are unquestionably sustainable and a part of the solution. …Today, nearly three quarters of the world’s renewable energy is from biomass. Bioenergy accounts for about 10 per cent of total final energy consumption and two per cent of global electricity generation. …At 2.8 million tonnes of annual consumption of wood pellets, North America lags behind Europe (35.6 million tonnes, incl. UK) and Asia (7.2 million tonnes). …Canada’s wood pellet consumption is tiny by global standards, entirely due to the lack of access to modern highly automated wood pellet boilers.
In 2021, Canada’s logging industry released nearly as much carbon as the Alberta oil sands, but a new report out today has found the federal government failed to report those emissions properly. The report by Nature Canada and the National Resources Defense Council, found Canada’s 2021 national greenhouse gas emissions inventory reported the country’s forests acted as a carbon sink when in fact, they were the source of 73 megatonnes of carbon pollution. …”Canada has been obfuscating its emissions in forestry for years now,” said Jennifer Skene, one of the report’s authors and the NRDC’s Natural Climate Solutions Policy Manager for Canada. “It treats it as a climate non-entity.” The report comes less than two weeks after Jerry DeMarco, the Commissioner on Environment and Sustainable Development, released an audit finding Canada won’t get even a tenth of the two billion trees it promised to plant in the ground over 10 years.
New changes to the Province’s building code will ensure cleaner, more efficient buildings are built in line with B.C.’s commitment to zero-carbon new construction by 2030. …Effective May 1, 2023, the BC Building Code will require 20% better energy efficiency for most new buildings throughout the province. The Zero Carbon Step Code provides tools for local governments to encourage or require lower emissions in new buildings. Together, the changes meet commitments in the CleanBC Roadmap to 2030 to gradually lower emissions from buildings until all new buildings are zero carbon by 2030 and are net-zero energy ready by 2032.
Families and individuals collectively control 39% of U.S. forestland, in parcels averaging 66 acres. If managed well, that land, estimated to total nearly 300 million acres, could absorb about 350 million metric tons of CO2 per year, or about as much as 78 million fuel cars emit. Yet hardly any of that land is managed optimally for carbon sequestration. That’s because owners often lack the expertise or resources to make the most of their forests’ potential. …The Family Forest Carbon Program was launched by The Nature Conservancy and the American Forest Foundation in 2020. It …connects owners of small land holdings to carbon markets, allowing them to get paid to implement carbon-enhancing practices such as letting existing forests grow to their full potential, planting climate-adapted trees and creating no-harvest zones on their properties. …But while forest carbon offsets have grown into a multibillion-dollar industry, they remain a controversial climate mitigation strategy.
Warmer and drier climate conditions in western U.S. forests are making it harder for trees to regrow after wildfires, according to a recent study undertaken by dozens of researchers from around the country. “We can’t expect that forests will recover following wildfires the way they have in the past,” said Kimberley Davis, lead author of the study. The research considered the aftereffects of 334 wildfires that occurred between 1984 and 2018, and how well eight species of conifer trees regenerated after those burns. Davis and her coauthors found that these severe burns often wiped out the seed sources needed to regenerate conifer forests, and even when seeds were available, young trees struggled to survive in landscapes that were becoming hotter and drier. The study, however, did offer a ray of hope. If forest managers take steps to reduce wildfire severity over the next 2 decades, they may negate, at least partially, these climate-related losses…
Mosses play a crucial role in fighting climate change, new research shows. Researchers learned that through photosynthesis, mosses sequester around 6.43 billion metric tons more carbon into the soil than what is stored in bare patches of soil without any plants. That calculates to six times the annual global carbon emissions caused by worldwide changes in land use, such as deforestation, urbanization, and mining. The study published in Nature Geoscience and was led by a dryland ecologist in Australia and an ecosystem ecologist in Spain. One of the scientists who co-authored the recent study was forest ecologist Peter Reich, director of the Institute for Global Change Biology at University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability. …The study found that moss-covered soil not only enhances carbon storage in soil, but also accelerates rates of organic decomposition and leads to fewer cases of soil-borne plant pathogens.
Harnessing the carbon-capturing potential of forests is a key component of plans to mitigate global climate change. Planting new forests is a common strategy, but this approach can have negative social and ecological impacts and substantial costs. Roebroek et al. instead investigated how ceasing management (e.g., wood harvesting or fire suppression) of forests would change their global carbon sequestration capacity. The authors assessed the differences between the biomass of similar forests with and without human activities and used machine learning to predict the additional biomass gain from removing human activities from global forests. Even if all management ceased (an extremely unlikely scenario), global forest carbon would only increase by about 15%. This work provides further evidence that changing forest management is not an alternative to cutting carbon emissions.
