The FESBC Board of Directors and Staff Members are thrilled to accept this award.
The Forest Enhancement Society of BC (FESBC) has been honoured with the prestigious 2024 Canadian Forest Management Group Achievement Award by the Canadian Institute of Forestry/Institut Forestier du Canada (CIF-IFC). The award acknowledges groups or teams that have made noteworthy and exceptional contributions to forest management in Canada. It recognizes the multidisciplinary nature of forest ecosystem management by honouring the various groups that must collaborate. The award promotes excellence and leadership in group contributions to Canadian forest management.
“Our organization was very pleased when we received notification that we were the fortunate recipients of the award for 2024,” remarked Dave Peterson, chair of the FESBC Board of Directors. “FESBC continues to play a key role in the forests of B.C., working with our partners to create healthier, more productive forests for the future. We are so proud to receive this award from a prestigious organization such as the Canadian Institute of Forestry/Institut Forestier du Canada that acknowledges the achievement of this collaborative group of people throughout our province.”
CIF-IFC recognized FESBC’s significant contributions to Canada’s economic and social well-being. Loni Pierce, president of CIF-IFC and Margaret Symon, vice-president of CIF-IFC, shared in a letter that, “The organization has funded and supported numerous forest enhancement projects, investing millions of dollars across British Columbia and creating over 2,100 full-time equivalent jobs in the B.C. Forest sector.”
Steve Kozuki, executive director of FESBC, highlighted the organization’s unique role as a catalyst, effectively bridging the gap between landowners, the province of British Columbia, and the private sector.
“By leveraging the strengths of these entities, FESBC has been able to consistently deliver excellent environmental outcomes, social benefits, and economic gains for all involved,” remarked Kozuki. “I would also like to acknowledge our Board and FESBC staff who have all contributed their expertise and wealth of experience to the organization.”
CIF-IFC also acknowledged FESBC’s dedication to collaborating with Indigenous partners by funding numerous projects led by or involving First Nations. FESBC’s collaborative approach, which brings together the provincial government, local governments, Indigenous peoples, citizens, forest workers, large companies, small companies, forestry associations, and many others, is helping to tackle the complex issues and challenges British Columbia’s forests face.
Kozuki shared, “Our model is to tap into expertise at the grassroots level in First Nations and local communities. People who know their local forests and their priorities come forward and propose projects that work for their circumstances, so it is a real honour to accept this award on behalf of all those who have worked so hard. Thank you again for this recognition. It will inspire us to continue doing more work like this in the future.
Wildfire season has become a fact of life in recent years; every summer, wildfires erupt and threaten ecosystems, communities and our health—and now are further accelerated by climate change and forest fuel buildup.
The recent devastation in Jasper National Park is a solemn reminder of this impact. Now more than ever, we need a “whole of society” approach to a problem we can no longer ignore. Governments, industry, communities and the forest sector must work together to implement sustainable forest management practices; ones that protect the forests and ensure they remain places for future generations to live, work and play in.
By looking at B.C. in particular, where high-intensity wildfires ravaged the landscape last year, the importance of making wildfire resiliency a primary focus becomes clear.
Fire: friend vs foe
Fire is often considered a major threat—and with good reason. The 2023 wildfire season was the most destructive in B.C.’s recorded history with more than 2.84 million hectares of forest and land burned, tens of thousands of people forced to evacuate, hundreds of homes and structures lost or damaged, and an immeasurable impact to local economies.
That said, wildfires have served as an important part of ecosystems for centuries by clearing out the forest floor, creating openings in the forest and regenerating soil and vegetation.
“Wildfire naturally plays across landscapes to keep healthy ecosystems functioning,” says Steve Kozuki, executive director of the Forest Enhancement Society of BC. “Fire, over thousands of years, comes and goes with a certain periodicity. In the semi-dry areas of the interior of British Columbia, it might be as frequent as every 10 or 20 years. Plants and animals come to depend on that fire to maintain their habitats.”
However, in recent decades, wildfire has been prevented from carrying out its critical role in B.C. forests. “When a fire starts, we apply the Smokey Bear mentality—that every fire is evil and needs to be put out,” explains Kozuki. “And we’ve been incredibly successful with that. We have excluded fire from our ecosystems here in B.C. And the result of that very successful fire suppression is a forest that becomes artificially old. I grew up looking at an ocean of continuous green forests, and I always thought it was beautiful. To my shame, I now understand that, in the absence of fire, it was actually degraded and detrimental to a healthy, functioning ecosystem.”
Long-time forestry consultant Bruce Blackwell agrees. “Over the last 100 years, strong wildfire suppression policies meant that more trees have filled in our forest. It’s led to stressors like drought, insects and disease, because we have more trees competing for the same resources. More trees means more fuel, which means fires burn hotter, they get larger and burn more area and they’re more difficult to control. And it’s the heat of those fires that is changing ecosystems such that they can’t recover as easily. They burn off important forest structure—organic matter, nutrients—and in some cases, they’re burning so hot that they’re basically creating sterile soils.”
“Trees and other vegetation have grown in, and biomass has accumulated on the forest floor creating more fuel,” adds Jennifer Gunter, executive director of the B.C. Community Forest Association. “And now we have an increased risk of large high-intensity fires that threaten the safety of communities and the health of our forests. This situation, created by our history of suppressing fire, along with land use and forestry decisions is, of course, made worse by climate change.”
Wildfire resiliency is critical
“A resilient forest is one that can withstand periodic events, like heat stress or very cold or very dry or very wet conditions,” says Kozuki. “Plants and animals have adapted to a certain range, including fire. You can have a disruption, but the ecosystem and everything in it can take a punch and keep on rolling.”
But because many B.C. forests haven’t had low-intensity fires in many decades, the trees have become much older than they would have naturally. “Trees are like people,” says Kozuki. “When they get older, they’re more susceptible to disease and other ailments. Similarly, the trees started growing more closely together and encroaching into natural grasslands, which impacts wildlife habitats.”
And when these overgrown forests catch on fire, especially during drought, “then we have uncontrollable, high-intensity fires, and they burn so hot that it incinerates everything,” he says. “With these mega fires, it’s going to be decades for ecological recovery as well as all the human trauma, and the financial cost of trying to protect those communities is massive.”
Kozuki points to the importance of the FireSmart BC program to help reduce wildfire risks to homes, neighbourhoods, critical infrastructure and natural resources through principles including education, emergency planning and vegetation management. It involves hardening homes and infrastructure against fire by removing fuel from rain gutters full of dried leaves or tree needles and creating a shaded fuel break—usually two kilometres wide—between the forest and a community, thinning the forest in the area so fire can’t jump from tree to tree.
“Fire plays an essential role ecologically and culturally,” affirms Gunter. “But the very large, high-intensity fires that we are seeing can be extremely damaging to communities. The impacts to communities, and to society as a whole, are ecological, social and economic. The effects on community members are physically and emotionally taxing. We see both short-term, and long-term impacts. So, in community forestry, we are extremely motivated to reduce the risk of these sorts of fires.”
Fighting fire with fire
“We’re thinning, we’re removing that fuel to reduce the intensities of fire and we’re doing some prescribed burning, but it’s a very small amount relative to the scale of the problem,” says Blackwell about restoration efforts. “The only way we’re successfully going to make the fire problem go away is that we have to get scale in terms of the treatments, whether that’s prescribed fire, whether that’s thinning or some form of harvesting. There has been a call for increased prescribed burning since the firestorm of 2003 in Kelowna that burned a lot of homes. That’s when it became very apparent that we needed to bring about fire on the landscape.”
Indigenous communities have long used prescribed burning as a practice to rejuvenate the land and the growth of new trees, plants and grasses. That said, prescribed burning is much more complicated now because of the number of people and all the infrastructure that exists. “Hydro utilities, wind farms, businesses like lodges, skiing areas—you can’t just burn those areas, and many of them would be too hazardous to burn without some removal of fuel before you try to burn them,” says Blackwell. “There’s a lot of areas that you can’t just burn without doing some kind of treatment to prepare the site ahead of burning. You can’t think of burning as a quick fix. It’s a long-term program that’s going to have to be done carefully in combination with treatment.”
How else can we make forests more resilient?
When it comes to harvesting and replanting, Natural Resources Canada has said that the rate of projected climate change is expected to be 10 to 100 times faster than the ability of trees to migrate naturally in Canada. By regenerating forests with trees better adapted to warming temperatures and changing climate conditions, foresters work with nature to help forests adapt to a changing climate.
Modern forest management strategies also involve carefully planned harvesting and replanting, which mimic natural growth cycles to minimize the impact of human intervention while mitigating the severity of climate change. And having younger trees to absorb carbon faster than mature ones helps balance forest growth and its capacity to store carbon for future generations.
“We grow the forest in a manner that nature would,” says Kozuki. “It’s often different age classes. It’s just like a human population. You wouldn’t want all of your humans to be between 60 and 100 years old.”
Community forests serve as a successful model for resiliency
Community forests are a unique part of B.C.’s forest tenure system that give forest management rights to communities through local governments, community groups or First Nations. B.C.’s Community Forest Program aims to create multiple benefits through forest management, increasing community participation and promoting innovation. Reducing the risk of wildfire to communities is a top priority.
“We are learning more and more about how forest management can play a key role in both mitigating and adapting to climate change,” says Gunter. “Managing forest fuels around our communities and creating more resilient forests at a landscape scale is urgently needed. It’s not forestry business as usual though; it involves new approaches that really improve the resilience of our forests.”
After coming off another wildfire season, it’s clear that sustainable forest management must go hand in hand with a collective and scaled-up approach to wildfire resiliency.
“By managing forests sustainably, we can create local jobs and economic benefits while working to create healthy forests that are more resilient to wildfire and climate change,” affirms Gunter.
