For thousands of years in British Columbia, natural fires and cultural fires deployed by First Nations peoples occurred on a variety of landscapes. There was a healthy ecological balance. However, in recent decades, fires were put out and First Nations people were prohibited from conducting their cultural burns. The result over time is some of our forests have become older and older, over-crowded and unhealthy. Fire is an important and natural force that normally rejuvenates and restores ecosystems. Many plants and animals need fire on the landscape every so often to thrive. Now that we have more over-crowded forests combined with climate change marked by hotter and drier summers, the conditions are ripe for catastrophic forest fire infernos, different from more frequent, lower intensity fires. We have learned that although humans can delay fire on landscapes for a while, the longer we exclude and delay fire, the hotter it will burn and the more damage it will cause. It’s like having a campfire. Adding more and more wood causes the fire to get bigger and hotter. In the case of catastrophic forest fires, the flames can reach several storeys high.
The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory website (New NASA Study Tallies Carbon Emissions From Massive Canadian Fires | NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)) reported, “stoked by Canada’s warmest and driest conditions in decades, extreme forest fires in 2023 released about 640 million metric tons of carbon, NASA scientists have found. That’s comparable in magnitude to the annual fossil fuel emissions of a large industrialized nation.” The writer further shared, “the Canadian fires released more carbon in five months than Russia or Japan emitted from fossil fuels in all of 2022.” However, the good news from the article is, “As the forest regrows, the amount of carbon emitted from fires will be reabsorbed.” In other words, as the trees grow back, they will reabsorb the carbon that was released by the fires.
In addition to carbon dioxide, the BC government (Forest fires and air quality – Province of British Columbia) notes that wildfires and smoke have additional impacts to human health, “forest fire smoke includes pollutants such as: fine particulate matter, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and volatile organic compounds.”
The BC government (GHG Emissions – Environmental Reporting BC) reports that, “total greenhouse gas emissions in 2021 in B.C. were 62 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.”
The BC government summarizes the 2023 wildfire season as the most destructive in British Columbia’s recorded history:
- More than 2.84 million hectares of forest and land burned
- Tens of thousands of people were forced to evacuate, many from urban centres
- Hundreds of homes and structures were destroyed or damaged
- Significant impacts to cultural values, ecological values, infrastructure, and local economies
- Indirect economic impacts to agriculture, tourism, and other weather-dependent businesses
- Unquantifiable impacts to people’s health and wellbeing.
Black Press Media quoted Mark Parrington, senior scientist with the Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring System (CAMS) in an article, “CAMS estimated 102 megatonnes of carbon from wildfires in British Columbia for 2023,”
To put it all together, in 2023, 2.84 million hectares burned in B.C., which could plausibly have been 213 million cubic meters (one cubic metre is roughly equal to a telephone pole), or 4.75 million logging trucks. That’s four years of sustainable timber harvesting for all of British Columbia. Ken Kalesnikoff, CEO of Kalesnikoff Lumber said, “The estimated amount of timber volume burned in one year was enough to run Kalesnikoff’s sawmill and value-added mass timber facilities (350 employees) for 700 years.”
Good forest management by First Nations, communities, and forest professionals could restore more natural forest conditions, which would be good for workers, communities, the economy, and the environment. It’s a win-win solution which is why forestry works for B.C.
