The Chain of Lakes Trail is blocked off in Halifax, N.S. on Aug. 7, after the provincial government announced banning access to wooded areas due to elevated wildfire risk.Darren Calabrese/The Globe and Mail
Last week, the province of Nova Scotia, facing an extreme risk of wildfire caused by hot, dry weather, banned people from entering forests and national parks as a precautionary measure.
The ban immediately ended hiking, camping, fishing, picnicking and tooling around on ATVs in the woods and on Parks Canada trails. Private landowners are not allowed to let guests roam their property. The measure will last until Oct. 15, barring a change in conditions.
New Brunswick followed suit on Saturday with an open-ended ban on commercial and recreational activity on Crown land. Private landowners were asked to follow suit.
It’s not hard to understand the provinces’ desire to prevent more fires during this summer of heat and smoke.
But we note that, as of Sunday, Newfoundland – where fires have forced thousands of people from their homes and the government has declared a state of emergency in one part of the province – had not gone to the extreme of banning responsible citizens from the woods.
We respectfully suggest that Nova Scotia and New Brunswick’s decision to cancel summer in early August is draconian, and that their over-abundance of caution may speak to the fact that, like the rest of Canada, they do too little to prevent forest fires in the first place, creating a higher risk of intense and dangerous events.
The problem isn’t just the weather or irresponsible human activity – it’s the lack of political will to take the steps needed to limit the threat of fires as the planet heats up.
As we argued last month, the federal government and the provinces focus too much attention and money on suppression, mostly in the form of expensive water bombers, and too little on prevention measures, the most important one being prescribed burns.
Climate change has made wildfires more frequent and more intense, altering the calculus that goes into Canada’s forest management policies. Simply buying more and more water bombers and spending billions on containment no longer amount to the responsible custodianship of the country’s vast woodlands.
Canada needs to develop a national regime of prescribed burns – the deliberate setting of fires under controlled circumstances to eliminate debris and grasses that serve as wildfire fuel. Prescribed burns also serve to open the canopy and limit crown fires that spew embers into the wind.
New Brunswick law allows for controlled burns on Crown land, although the extent of their use is not clear. Parks Canada uses them on its lands in the Atlantic provinces. But Nova Scotia has long rejected their use on the grounds that its Acadian forests – a mix of deciduous trees and conifers – aren’t suited to it.
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A higher proportion of hardwood and greater moisture content means that Acadian forests are more resistant to forest fires than boreal forests. That makes them less well adapted to the natural cycle of fires that rejuvenate woodlands, and they can’t recuperate as well after a prescribed burn.
Nova Scotia’s woodland is 70-per-cent privately owned, which further complicates matters.
But none of this exempts the province from the responsibility of ensuring its forests don’t become climate-change time bombs. Prescribed burns can be replaced by the mechanical elimination of wildland fuel, a labour-intensive effort that uses chainsaws, bulldozers and wood chippers to remove the dead material and undergrowth that fires feast on.
Nova Scotia does little of that. Its only apparent mitigation effort is the federal government’s FireSmart program, which focusses on removing brush and trees around homes and infrastructure, and emergency preparation. The province’s budget for FireSmart, partly paid for by Ottawa, amounts to less than $1-million per year.
And yet one study from 2011 estimated that the province’s 4.2-million hectares of forest potentially contain 589,000 hectares of hazardous woodland fuels.
Like other overseers of Canada’s forests, the Atlantic provinces must face the fact that, because of climate change, they need to start spending money on prescribed burns or mechanical fuel reduction on both public and private land.
They can do that, or they can face the prospect of having to call off summer more and more frequently because of the increasing threat of fires breaking out in forests that have been primed by poor management to burn fast and hard.