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[This article is part of our partnership with the Western Canada SFI Implementation Committee (WCSIC) and our jointly hosted Wildfire Resilience and Awareness Week.] For roughly a century we have been putting out wildfire on the land and we’ve gotten pretty darn good at it. Unfortunately, this well intended policy has had unintended consequences – namely our rural communities, and the very forests that they depend upon, are at extreme risk of catastrophic loss due to a wildfire deficit. Our friend Smokey the Bear has been too successful with his wildfire prevention message! …For a holistic, full circle approach to wildfire resiliency, you must access skills and knowledge from various fire and forest specialties –operational fire experience, fire behaviour knowledge, fire and forestry ecology, fire modelling technology, community level educators, silviculture reforestation specialists …As climate change continues to express itself through larger, more frequent, and catastrophic landscape level wildfires, our ability to prepare, mitigate, respond, and recover (also known as the Emergency Management Continuum) from these events needs to adapt and grow too. We have been fortunate to be part of these conversations and work too.
Whether it is an alternative view of the landscape, designing forests for resilience first, re-introducing ecologically appropriate wildland fire to the landscape or maximizing the benefit of emerging technology and innovation to ensure informed decisions, there is significant opportunity moving forward – and we must move forward.