Researchers advocate for sustainable logging to safeguard against global flood risks

By University of British Columbia
Phys.Org
January 24, 2024
Category: Forestry
Region: Canada, Canada West

It’s time to recognize the power of healthy forests in managing global growing flood risk, and to shift towards more sustainable forestry practices and policy. This call is emphasized by UBC researchers in an article in the journal Science of the Total Environment. Dr. Younes Alila, a professor in the faculty of forestry, and his graduate student Henry Pham synthesized decades of hydrology studies and found that many “severely and consistently underestimated” the impact of forest cover on flood risk. As a consequence, it led to forest management practices that were either unsound or poorly informed. …Dr. Alila says the probabilistic framework is designed to understand and predict, for instance, how much of the 2021 Fraser Valley floods could be attributed to climate change, land use change or logging. The approach also can be extended to investigate the causes of flood risk in other cities.

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