Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Agriculture and Forestry
Issue 16 - Evidence - May 6, 2003
OTTAWA, Tuesday, May 6, 2003
The Senate Standing Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met this day at 6:15 p.m. to examine the impact of climate change on Canada's agriculture, forest and rural communities and the possible adaptation options.
Senator Donald H. Oliver (Chairman) in the Chair.
[Translation]
The Chairman: Honourable Senators, I would like to welcome you as well as our witnesses and the people who are listening to us on the Internet.
[English]
Over the last few weeks, we have listened to various witnesses who explained the science of climate change while focusing on adaptation issues. This evening, we have invited three witnesses to discuss their research projects on the effects of climate change on forestry and agriculture.
Mr. Brian Stocks is a senior research scientist at the Great Lake Forestry Centre of the Canadian Forest Service. Mr. Stocks is involved with the Fire Research Network. He investigates relationships between global climate and forest fires and policy aspects of climate change research.
Mr. Roger Cox is a botanist at the Atlantic Forest Centre of the Canadian Forest Service. Mr. Cox's area of research interest includes forest response to stresses such as climate, forest health and biodiversity.
Following the presentation of Mr. Stocks and Mr. Cox, we will hear from Mr. Christopher Bryant, who is a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Montreal. One of his principal research areas is adaptation of agriculture to climate change and collaborations with other faculty at the University of Montreal in this particular area.
I would now invite Mr. Cox to begin his presentation, followed by Mr. Stocks.
Mr. Roger Cox, Research Scientist, Canadian Forest Service, Natural Resources Canada: I am here to represent scientists at the CFS Atlantic Forestry Centre. We have a program, part of which involves climate change, adaptation and impacts. The centre has 45 scientists and study leaders, 67 science support staff and 19 administration staff.
We deliver our science through the science branch, through a network of five national target-based areas: climate change and fire research; enhanced timber production and protection; forest ecosystem processes; forest health and biodiversity; and knowledge and information synthesis. These are the major target-based areas. The target-based areas are lead in the Maritimes with the forest health and biodiversity area.
This presentation, then, consists of an introduction to the program that was initiated in 1991 and currently is focused on impacts, adaptation and modeling, carbon accounting and mitigation, and forest community. Then I will conduct some concluding remarks on those issues.
The total resources of the institution, which is split between Newfoundland and New Brunswick, are $17.1 million. The climate change program here is with 8 FTEs and half a million dollars of O and M funding. Forty per cent of the climate change staff is included in that program, and 60 per cent of the funding is targeted at impacts and adaptation.
Current impacts and adaptation research at our centres include the assessment of monitoring change within the forest and impacts of climate change on forest health and productivity. An example of this is the study of forest health within forest plots across eastern Canada. As you can see in the inset on the circular that you have in front of you, there is a series of plots in which we are monitoring ozone levels, amongst other things, in relation to forest health of the trees on those particular plots.
Other interests are the variation in insect infestations in the Maritime Provinces and the creation of a spatial database to store that information. An example is seen in the lower left-hand panel on the circular, indicating the spread of the gypsy moth into the Maritimes region from the state of Maine, into southern New Brunswick and southern Nova Scotia. This, we think, is due to an increase in minimum temperatures that allows increased survival of the egg masses over the winter.
Other areas of study are the remote sensing of forest growth and structure, the development of a spectral index for balsam fir under the national strategy for biomass mapping in Canada, and the development of methods for estimating and mapping forest biomass.
In this case, we can actually try to match remote sensing images with forest inventory so that we can identify the species and stands and productivity from remote sensing platforms. Other areas of research include experimental manipulations.
We are partners with the United States in Wisconsin in a big fumigation experiment with open-air fumigation of aspen, birch and maples with different concentrations of carbon dioxide and ozone in different combinations. This project allows us to answer certain questions such as: Will CO2 fertilization be limited by a rising ozone level? What are the effects of nitrogen limitation or drought on those systems?
The answers are becoming clearer as we progress in this research. There seems to be an offset of the expected increase in production by increased carbon dioxide caused by ozone. In other words, ozone tends to limit the advantages that we would get from increasing CO2 levels in terms of productivity.
There is no indication of nitrogen limitation after four years of experimentation. There is evidence for water balance changes due to both carbon dioxide and ozone.
The project allows us to answer other questions of how will the increase in CO2 affect insect and disease interactions. There is the potential to alter insect communities and their ability to identify and use their hosts. There is a change in the host chemistry that makes them more or less attractive under different circumstances.
Productivity gains by CO2 tend to be offset by the effects of atmospheric ozone concentrations. The net result is little change in productivity, but there might be a small change in pest or insect defoliation interactions with the plants. We might expect some surprises maybe as climate change proceeds.
Another area of interest is mapping historical tree declines in relation to winter thaws. We have determined that there is an increase in frequencies of biologically relevant thaws followed by refreezes.
We have some indication that such a thaw situation set off the 1936 birch decline in the Maritimes and into Ontario. These thaws are particularly dangerous after a certain threshold in which they then receive a refreeze. The colour indication panel on the far right of the deck indicates an area of refreezes after the 1945 thaw, which matches some of the observed occurrences of decline that we saw after that event.
We are in the process of developing risk assessment under climate change scenarios. We verified this model approach with the climate record, but we will develop a predictive risk assessment on the basis of future changes in climate so that we may be able to predict the risk of decline to some of the northern adapted hardwoods.
We do this using a birch decline model, which is a frost hardness model. We have conducted experiments that produce die back. We know what thaw durations produce the die back and what level of accumulated thaws with a following refreeze can do to the plants.
The panels on the presentation to the right represent the 1935-36 thaw, which initiated the birch decline. You can see in the columns under ``shoot frost risk'' the effects of a late frost on the shoots of birches indicating that there was a high risk of damage later in the winter.
If we look at the root frost risk, the intersection of the lines indicate an early thaw event that affected root health. In 1935-36, there was a double event that first affected the shoots and then the roots of these trees. It was rather a nasty event that was reflected by a period of decline in the species for at least a decade or so after that event.
The Chairman: I do not quite understand the root frost risk. I am looking at the three maps. The only difference I see in the dotted lines is that when you get to the months of March and May, it suddenly shoots up. I do not know how to read it.
Mr. Cox: The top line is the temperatures, and the dotted lines below are the frost hardness curves. The intersections can be seen well on the black and white version. There is a risk of damage to either the shoots or the roots where those lines intersect.
Another area of research being conducted at our centres is spruce genomics and adaptation to climate change. We expose seedlings to out-planting stress, both with these shelters that increase the temperature as well as the water stress. We can control the temperatures and water stress in these chambers. We can select individual seedlings that are tolerant to various combinations of water, stress and temperature. We can determine the effects on water relations, gas exchange, carbon isotope discrimination, freezing tolerance, nutrient relations and light-use efficiency.
We know the physiological effects of selecting these individual seedlings under these harsh environments. We then out-plant them in a series of out-plantings under different forestry practices to see what combinations of forestry practices or out-planting techniques using strip cuts are better to allow for establishment of these seedlings under different temperature regimes. This will help determine those which might be better to use during climate change.
Another area of research besides looking at impacts is carbon accounting and mitigation. This is the Fluxnet Canada program of which we are an active partner with the University of New Brunswick. We are setting up flux towers to study the flux of carbon dioxide, heat and water for mature undisturbed forest sites at important eco-regions across Canada. This includes the eco-regions or eco-districts of New Brunswick.
We are trying to determine the sink-source relationships of carbon dioxide under different forestry practices and in different forest stands. We are trying to determine the effects of forestry practices on the ability of the forest to act as a sink for carbon dioxide in the hope that we can develop techniques to increase the sink nature of the forest.
Another aspect of carbon accounting and mitigation is the feasibility assessment for forestation for carbon sequestration, in partnership with Nova Scotia Power Incorporated. We will test the incentives and mechanisms necessary to enable afforestation to be conducted on private land. They are trying various incentive programs to try to get woodlot owners to respond to a climate change scenario.
The model forest network of the Canadian Forest Service is also working towards developing and testing the generic carbon accounting model in collaboration with the CFS carbon accounting team. This is to promote a widespread application of that model by forest managers and interested users across Canada and internationally.
We are also concerned of what the impacts might be on forest communities. This is little studied at the moment, but such impacts of climate change may be major storm-blow-downs.
The Maritimes provinces are prone to hurricanes up the eastern seaboard. These can produce strong winds on occasion. There are downbursts that can affect forestation in the way that the photograph suggests. This picture is the Christmas Mountain blow-down in 1934 where 30 million trees blew down. They were worth about $100 million.
Over 2 million cubic meters of wood were salvaged from that operation in three years. Three years of allowable cut, then, were salvaged by all major licensees in New Brunswick over a period of three years. This had quite an impact on the local community, but the sustainability of that forest now is a problem in terms of the maintenance of jobs in the area. Although it was a boom in the short term to the area, in the long term it may provide a less consistent source of income.
There are community effects that might be felt by these types of extreme events, which may increase because of the increased energy within the hydrological cycle. We might expect increases in these kinds of events.
The Atlantic Forestry Centre, AFC, has been conducting climate change research since the early 1990s. Change in climate variability and seasonality are expected to be more important to the eastern forests than increases in mean temperature. Potential impacts include changes in the distribution and levels of insect populations and diseases; changes or reductions in growth and yield; species shifting, which may cause local extinction or extinctions of rare species; increases in invasive and exotic species due to changes in minimum temperatures; and survival of egg masses that would otherwise be killed by frost. These all may be problems worth examining in the future.
Impacts on the forest sector, reductions in timber supply and changes to forest practices and influences on non- timber products and services challenge the ability to conserve, manage and protect wilderness areas within the face of a changing biome. It is a difficult job. This must be revisited in terms of a paradigm shift within the conservation ethic. Subsequent impacts on viability of forest-based communities are also important.
The research thrusts of our institutions in terms of reducing uncertainty regarding future impacts include developing and testing adaptation and mitigating strategies and integrating biological, ecological and social sciences. These undertaking will be important in the future.
The Chairman: We will now move to Mr. Stocks for his presentation. We will then ask questions of you both.
Mr. Brian Stocks, Senior Research Scientist, Forest Fire and Global Change, Natural Resources Canada: The Great Lakes Forestry Centre, where I have been working for the past 35 years, has similar programs to those that Mr. Cox described across the climate change and forestry disciplines. They are similar to that which you heard in Victoria and Edmonton.
Tonight, I choose to talk further about the fire and climate change issue because we feel strongly that forest fires will be significantly impacted by any change in climate and will be a significant driver of much carbon loss and impacts in the Canadian forest. I want to describe some of our current and planned research.
Our work began in the 1980s and was advanced under the Green Plan in the early 1990s. In the last few years, since the Climate Change Action Fund came into force, we have been funding much of our research through proposals to the Climate Change Action Fund and Action Plan 2000.
We put together a team including provincial people and interdepartmental participation. We have been working on this problem for some time now. We also have a number of collaborative research agreements in effect with various provinces, so we are leveraging funds and cooperation from different provinces across the country.
As you can see, there are a number of authors on this particular paper. We are all working together on this.
I will give you a bit of an overview about circum-boreal forest fire activity. I understand that you may have heard some of this in Edmonton. We estimate the annual area burned across the boreal zone in Canada, Russia and Alaska to be somewhere between 5 and 15 million hectares annually. It is highly variable from year to year.
If you look at the lower graph on the left, you will notice that the Canadian and the Alaskan areas burned tend to be highly episodic and vary greatly from year to year. The Russian burns seem to be fairly constant. Russian statistics are not reliable at all. They have been deliberately altered in the past. They should probably be 5 to 10 times higher than what you see on this graph. We are working on gaining reliable information by using remote sensing.
The main drivers of fire activity across the boreal zone are the highly continental climate; extreme fire weather and fire danger conditions; multiple ignitions, which are the result of lightening storms; and closed canopy forests, which rely on fire for their regeneration.
Why are boreal fires important? They are one of the dominant disturbance regimes along with insects in the Canadian boreal forests and in boreal forests around the world. They are natural to ecosystem maintenance. In other words, we need a certain amount of fire in the forests to keep the forests the way they should be; to promote carbon cycling and biodiversity.
Fire is sensitive to climate change. There are major carbon budget implications with 40 per cent of the world's terrestrial carbon stored in the boreal forest zone.
I will note some of the characteristics of boreal fires. They have high levels of fuel consumption in comparison to savannah fires in Africa or South America. They have fast spread rates and sustained high intensity levels. The burning period is long. As a result, there are towering convection columns that can reach into the upper troposphere and even into the lower stratosphere. The possibility of long range smoke transport where smoke from Canadian fires would reinforce smoke from Siberian fires is a distinct possibility.
Canadian fire statistics are incomplete prior to 1970. Large parts of the northern parts of our country were not monitored thoroughly. After 1970, with remote sensing capability, we are pretty sure that we have a complete record.
There is greater uncertainty as you go back further in time. At this time, we are averaging between 7000 and 8000 fires a year with 2.8 million hectares being burned.
The annual cost of fire management in Canada is around $500,000 dollars a year. That varies from year to year, as well.
The area burned is highly episodic and can vary in area of magnitude from 700,000 hectares a year to over several million hectares a year.
I mention on the slide the level-of-protection issue. That drives home the point that Canadian fire managers are required to protect resources; not just forest industry resources but also community and recreational resources. They are also attempting to include natural fire where possible to promote biodiversity and ecosystem maintenance.
Lightning causes only 35 per cent of the fires, but they account for 85 per cent of the area burned, because they occur in more remote areas.
Only 3 per cent of the fires in Canada get larger than 200 hectares. That is what we are using in our large fire database, which I will discuss later. The remainder are suppressed early; however, the 3 per cent of fires that do get larger than 200 hectares account for 97 per cent of the area burned in the country.
The next slide is the large fire database. We are trying to assemble a large number of information polygons with attributes to look at fires larger than 200 hectares, post-1950, across the country. You can see an example for the central part of Canada in the 1980s in the middle. The attributes would include things like fire size and cause, when it started and ended and all these polygons that we acquire from the fire management agencies of different provinces and territories across the country. It is updated annually and we are working backwards in time with satellite imagery. The satellite image ray on the right-hand side is from the early 1970s and shows a number of fires that are not included in the records for northern Canada at that time. We are trying to go back and accumulate and improve this database.
The next slide talks a bit about lightning and human-cause fires. As you would expect, most lightning-caused fires occur in the North. If you look at the map, the human causes of fires generally occur along the travel corridors: the roadways, railways and that sort of thing. Because someone is there to start them, these fires are usually detected more quickly and therefore, they are accessed more quickly and generally controlled at a smaller size. Lightning fires generally grow larger because they are occurring randomly, the detection takes a little more time and the access is sometimes a problem as well.
You can see from the graph on the right that, of the 12,000 fires that we have in that large fire database, the lightning fire contribution is increasing in recent decades.
The next slide talks about action and non-action fires. A lot of fires in Canada are allowed to burn naturally, particularly in the North where they do not threaten values at risk or resources in any way, so they are allowed to burn and perform their natural function. They are also occurring in areas where the timber is not merchantable, so spending a lot of money to put the fires out does not make a lot of sense. Based on our large fire database, about 50 per cent of the forests burned in Canada over the last 30 years has been this kind of fire activity.
If you look at the next slide, the Large Fire Database Fire Size Distribution by Ecozone, the greatest area burned is occurring in the boreal and taiga zones in west central Canada, where unsuppressed fire is common and where the fire climate is the most severe. You can see from the graph on the bottom right that the larger fires, although less frequent, account for most of the area burned. It is usually a small amount of large fires each year that drive the ``area burned'' statistics in the country.
One of the other issues we have been looking at is carbon released through fire. Based on the large fire database going back to 1959, we estimate a direct release to the atmosphere of around 27 terragrams of carbon per year. That is about 20 per cent of our fossil fuel emissions. If you look at the graph on the bottom left, you can see that during peak fire years, when you burn close to 7 million hectares, you are actually approaching the fossil fuel emission limit as well.
A key issue is that younger forests, after they burn, are weaker carbon sinks than mature forests and it takes 20 to 30 years to fully recover after fire. We have confirmed this through flux tower measurements, as well as aircraft and satellite measurements. If you see more fire in the future, you will see younger stands and those younger stands will not sequester carbon at the rate that the mature stands they are replacing sequester carbon.
The next deck shows the impact of fire on the carbon budget. If you look at the graph on the top left corner, it has clearcuts, fire and insects on there. It shows that there is a rise in natural disturbances post-1970, particularly fire and insects. The harvesting level has been roughly the same and you can see in the bottom right-hand graph what happens when you convert that to the carbon budget. There is a corresponding decrease in the carbon sink strength of the Canadian forests post-1970. We are now at a stage where, from year to year, depending on the amount of natural disturbances we have, we are either a moderate sink or a modest source of carbon to the atmosphere. We are definitely not a sink that can be relied upon in that regard.
What we have been looking at in the next slide is fire danger and fire season length, to try to get some sort of ballpark estimate of where we can expect more significant levels of fire danger across the country. You can see that seasonal fire danger increases by 50 to 100 per cent over the next 90 years or so. Fire seasonal length also increases by 10 to 50 days, depending on where you are in Canada. For these, we are using the general circulation models and the current climate prediction models that are available.
In conclusion, in terms of anticipated fire impacts, we are obviously looking at all the climate change scenarios that are out there. Expect an increase in the weather conditions that are conducive to fires. As Mr. Cox mentioned, we are looking at a more highly charged atmosphere in the future as a result of warming and increased convective activity. We are looking at more frequent and more severe fires, particularly in the occurrence and impact of lightning fires. The projected impacts would logically follow that you would have more area burned, a shorter fire return interval and a younger age class structure. There would be some ecosystem boundary and vegetation shifting. People have all heard about species migrating northward as a result of the changing climate. The end result would be less terrestrial carbon storage, which would impact on forest industry, communities, and health and pollution issues.
It is also anticipated that there will be a positive feedback to climate change from increased fire activity, because you will be increasing greenhouse gas emissions from fires. That will warm the atmosphere more, which will create more fires.
There is a need to quantify the impacts to assess what options we have. Some of our latest proposals deal with adapting to the problems that we have.
Our ongoing CFS climate change fire research efforts are addressing the impacts and adaptation, in collaboration with the provinces and the territories. We received a lot of funding in the past through the Green Plan; we are getting a fair amount now through Action Plan 2000, the Climate Change Action Fund and through different cost-recovery agreements with provincial governments.
Finally, what are we doing about adapting to increasing fire activity? This is something we try to discuss with the provincial and territorial agencies on a regular basis.
At the local scale, we have talked about things like FireSmart community protection and how you can better protect your community and individual homes against fire. I believe you were introduced to the Fire Smart manual when you were in Edmonton.
At the regional scale, we have begun things like pilot fuel break projects, trying to break up fuel continuity at a landscape scale to limit fire effects on fibre production by breaking up the landscape so that fires cannot grow as large. We are doing a number of level-of-protection-effectiveness studies, trying to determine what the cost of maintaining the status quo is.
When look at increased fire risk in the future, or what is the cost of being as effective in terms of fire suppression as we are right now, the logical conclusion is that we know that throwing more money at forest fires in terms of suppression in the future is not the answer. There is a law of diminishing returns here. A large number of these major- fire episodes occur under such extreme conditions and such multiple-first-start conditions that they would overwhelm any suppression agency, no matter what their capability.
At the national scale, we know we cannot mitigate fire impacts across the whole boreal forests, and we also know we do not want to. It is economically impossible and ecologically undesirable. We will adapt and probably change the values at risk over time. We will try our best to develop these strategies and evaluate the impacts of increased fire regime so that provincial and federal policy makers can benefit from that. Thank you.
The Chairman: Mr. Stocks, on three occasions in your presentation, you suggested that having fires is natural. It is something that you expect in nature, and fires should be allowed to burn to perform their natural function, as you put it. You said that we need fires to promote biodiversity and for ecosystem maintenance. Basically, you are saying that some forest fires are good, and we should have them.
Could you elaborate on that so that our record will be clear? What are some of the main reasons why we should not put out forest fires, and why do we need them?
Mr. Stocks: It is exactly for those reasons. Before man came along and started to compete with nature for the forests, whether for recreation use or the forest industry, fire cycled the forest. The forest adapted to fire to the point that, without fire, it would not regenerate properly. When we come along and decide that we will harvest this land and plant it, we are basically replacing fire in that area. We need to look at that effect because, all of a sudden, you have a whole bunch of plantations on the landscape that may have different biodiversity factors compared to the natural forest. We can accept that. We are also looking to have natural fire as much as possible in wilderness areas, not just in the far north where values at risk are low, but also in wilderness parks. Parks Canada is doing a whole number of large prescribed fires to reintroduce fire on the landscape for the very reasons of increasing biodiversity and maintaining carbon cycling in a manner that is natural.
There are many good reasons for trying to maintain both aspects of fire: suppressing fire where obviously communities or industry are at risk, but also recognizing and having the public recognize the fact that a certain amount of fire on the landscape is essential to maintaining the integrity of these ecosystems.
Senator Ringuette: Does hardwood or softwood act as a greater sink?
Mr. Cox: That would depend on the community structure and the age class of the particular forest in question. It would have to be broken down by species and age class and site conditions. I would not like to say that one or the other would be a more powerful sink. It depends on where the particular communities and ecosystems are and what soils they are on, and so on.
Senator Ringuette: All right. That was a quick answer.
You mentioned in your presentation a model forest network. In my area, there is a softwood model forest, and shortly, if not already, there will be a hardwood model forest. I come from the northwest area of New Brunswick. Are those two model forests within the network that you were talking about in your presentation?
Mr. Cox: I am not sure. The model forest in New Brunswick is in the south, but I think there is one being started up in the north. I am not sure of the details involved in that at the moment.
Senator Day: That is part of the University of Moncton in Edmundston. They have woodlots up there.
Senator Ringuette: Are they not part of your network?
Mr. Cox: I suspect they would be.
Senator Day: They are not now.
Mr. Cox: Are they trying to apply for model forest status? Is that the case?
Senator Ringuette: I will check that out.
Regarding which species would be acting as more of a sink, I gather from both your presentations that a same- species plantation is less of a sink than a natural growth forest.
Mr. Cox: I think it depends on the age. As Mr. Stocks was intimating, during establishment of a plantation, it would be a weaker sink than something that is 20 or 30 years old in an active growing phase with a closed canopy, which manages captured C02. It is dependant on the age structure of the population rather than just whether it is hardwood or softwood.
Senator Ringuette: Which area of New Brunswick are you studying or is under consideration in your model?
Mr. Cox: In my die-back study, I am involved in looking at yellow birch and white birch over its whole range, which includes New Brunswick right through to Ontario. We are actually mapping climatic events to the birch decline. We are using historical declines to verify the model, and then we will use that model to develop a risk assessment for future climates.
Senator Ringuette: I have a small question about the communication aspect of the research that is being done. We have heard many scientists who are each studying their specific field. I wonder about that: the communication, the centralization of that expertise and knowledge into one centre across departments, and then going outbound to the users, the communities, and the corporations. Do you have a communication plan in your department?
Mr. Cox: Yes, we have. We are learning rapidly now to increase our communications skills both on the web and as scientists going out to communities. We recently had a meeting with the Nova Scotia pulp and paper industry on climate change issues — last week, in fact. We are starting to get out and visit the forest managers and woodlot owners to try to get them interested in climate change issues.
Such questions as you have asked may or may not be answerable. We do not know until we have looked at sink strengths by flux net operations what are good sinks and what are not good sinks. Some you can guess at by the rate of growth of these stands, but what about carbon? Is carbon associated with that growth? How much carbon is being taken up? How much carbon is being released? Not until we get these flux net towers in position and over a varying type of forestry practice, over different ages and soil types, will we know what the real source sink relationships are.
Senator Fairbairn: Those were interesting briefs. I am from Western Canada, from the deep south of Alberta. I know that your focus is on Atlantic Canada, but I wanted to ask you both a few questions that, in a sense, are connective with the whole country.
As you probably know, in parts of western Canada, we have for years now been suffering from severe drought.
Whereas, we focus on that almost stoically now. In the last few years that word has extended across Canada. Travelling in Labrador, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, I kept hearing about the bad drought situation that they have been having in the last three years.
That has a great affect on agricultural communities. It also has a profound effect on forestry areas in Atlantic Canada, as well. A possibility of fire follows that kind of climate change.
Would you care to comment on that interaction in terms of the existing forests in Atlantic Canada? If you combine the stress from drought in agriculture with the stress on the forest regions from climate change or from fire, what kind of a picture do you draw in Atlantic Canada, or is that more of a Western Canada threat?
Mr. Stocks: Fire is more of a problem in west central Canada because the shield country, in particular, the boreal shield country, tends to have the most continental climate. We are seeing major increases in areas burned occurring more out there.
The maritime provinces periodically have a significant fire year, However, most of the time when looking at the areas burning around the country, they will most likely be from northwestern Ontario and northern Quebec up towards the Northwest Territories. Part of that is drought-related.
However, drought is overly credited as being of significance to fire. To have significant fires, all you need is a week or two without rain. If you miss one or two rain events in an area, it will be prime for a forest fire.
It concerns us when looking at the future models — not just the increase in temperature, but the fact that it will destabilize the atmosphere to the point that we will see more extreme events. We will see extreme droughts. In other areas, we may see extreme flooding. We may look at the precipitation record, and not that the precipitation is actually increasing on an annual basis in a certain area.
The regularity with which you get the precipitation is the critical factor in terms of forest fires. If you do not get it regularly, you are in trouble. We see in models that the extreme events will be more frequent.
From an agricultural standpoint, I can understand that drought is critical. Across most of the boreal forest area and most of the temperate forest area in Canada, it is a factor that we consider in setting the fire danger ratings, but it is not the most critical, highly reactive factor that we monitor on a daily basis.
That is one of the problems. When you are looking at climate change, you are looking at future climate. Climate is an average of weather over a period of time. Weather drives fire activity, not the climate.
These models give you broad climate, not future daily weather. There is no way that will happen any time soon. We are forced to interpolate from these broader models over longer time periods without the temporal resolution that we would like to have. We try to extrapolate that to daily fire activity. It is difficult.
We are trying to give to the policy makers some ideas about the major drivers of fire activity. Drought is one of them, but there are many others. We are trying to look at where those drivers will be 100 years from now to see if there will be an increase of 40 per cent or whatever, to give them ballpark estimates of what to expect.
The variability will be the critical issue. We are highly variable from year to year, currently. That variability is likely to increase with the changing climate, because everything that they are talking about predicts increases in extreme events.
Mr. Cox: I agree that variability is the key issue. Year to year, variability causes problems. If a species has evolved in a particular area to deal with certain limits on the type of conditions within which it lives, something outside that causes severe damage. A midwinter thaw removes the snow cover and freezes the roots. The snow is gone. In the spring, the system may be dry.
These kinds of events tend to mess up the expected conditions under which species evolve. These events that lie outside the normal tend to have stronger impacts on these species than just a change in mean conditions. Plants adapt to a certain arrangement of environment. If you throw in a few years where their environment is severely changed, it can cause major problems.
Die-back and decline in trees also leads to increased fuel quantities that feed into the fire cycle as well. Stressed trees are also open to insect attack. Many trees in the west are weakened by climatic events. The beetle tends to get into the stands.
Senator Fairbairn: On page 14 of your brief, you make a reference to the impacts of stresses and changes on the viability of forest-based communities. In your models, can you estimate any population shifts, even within a region, as a result of some of the science in which you are currently involved?
Mr. Cox: No, not at the moment. The only major impact on population that we can predict with accuracy is sea level rise. That causes problems in costal communities on how to deal with encroachment by the sea.
Marginally, some forests may be affected. It is difficult to say what the impact of decline would be on a community. We lost much wood in the 1930s birch decline. That was large yellow birch destined for the manufacture of plywood for the war effort.
At that particular time we lost a lot of valuable birch to that decline. It does threaten resources from time to time. The sugar-maple decline threatened closure of the Quebec sugar maple plantations.
The ice storm, another extreme event, closed down many of the sugar maple plantations. These extreme events do have impacts locally. However, they are at different times and different places, so it is hard to predict or adapt to that kind of scenario, except that people who are using the forests must be more flexible in terms of what they feel they should be doing. They should be willing to cooperate, to overcome some of the problems.
Senator Wiebe: I have all kinds of questions, but I do not think we have the answers. I think the answer we are looking for is: How in the world will we adapt? If the problem were just global warming, that will happen gradually. We can adapt to that. We can find new crops to grow, new areas to grow them in and this sort of thing. We do not have to worry about losing any moisture, because it has nowhere to go. It may fall in a different place. We could adapt to that, as well.
The thing that concerns me is how in the world will we adapt to the more frequent extreme events? That is a far greater problem in your comments. You talked about frost and winter-kill. This could affect large areas. In my community, for example, the forestry may not be able to bounce back. In the southern part of Ontario or Saskatchewan, where you worry about a crop for that particular year, you can re-seed that crop next year. In forestry, you cannot bounce back that quickly. We are trying to grapple with these things as a committee.
Mr. Cox: We have to be willing to collaborate a lot more within the forest industry to cope with these events and be more flexible in our approach to forestry management. There is not much we can do about events that might suddenly crop up, except that individuals involved in using the forest for recreation and production should be more flexible in terms of what they may expect and be able to collaborate to overcome some of the problems. They will not go away. They will increase in number, in terms of ice storms and blow-downs, because of the increased energy within the hydroelectric cycle. That is even of concern to some mariners. I sail a boat down the Eastern Seaboard and get concerned when I see hurricanes and tornados this time of year. It is a little early for such extreme events to occur. That is of concern to a lot of forestry operators.
Mr. Stocks: That is a good point.
One of the problems about adapting is that we realize that there may be nothing we can do about adapting right now, other than just being aware of the likelihood of this happening. When you look at the fire business, we are trying to give scenarios to provincial agencies, in terms of what is likely to happen down the road. We have tried to think through the whole process. If there is more fire, and spending more money on it is not effective, then where does it lead? It leads to carbon loss and the like. Eventually it leads to a reassessment of what values at risk you choose to protect.
If you can grow forest in an area 75 per cent of the time, and then you suddenly find out that the risk is 40 per cent that you can grow it to 80 years without having fire, insects or something destroy that forest, then the forest companies eventually will adapt and say, ``We cannot afford to grow trees here.'' We will grow trees in Guatemala or something like that. We are trying to think those things through. What we come up with in the fire business is scary, because if the climate changes in the way we anticipate, our ability to adapt will be fairly limited unless we are willing to change the status quo of what we consider lands for forest industry and things like that. We will have to reassess that constantly as we go along. It is an important issue.
Senator Wiebe: It really is. You made the comment that the forest industry can pick up and adapt somewhere else. The concern is that the community is not so mobile. What do we do with that community when we decide to leave?
The same thing applies in my province. If Palliser is right and it happens to be a desert, what do you do with the entire grain infrastructure there? Where do you move it?
Let us look at the cod industry, for example. Look what happened there.
The Chairman: Look at a mining town when they run out of minerals.
Senator Wiebe: Maybe we, as policy makers, should be putting policies in place to look after the community in the event that something like that happens. We are looking for ideas. If you have a great one, then let us know, because we can sure use it.
Mr. Stocks: I think you are exactly right. The effect is going to be on the communities. The multinational companies will go somewhere else and find some other way to grow trees. If we have been a natural-resource-based economy for all this time, this is probably a little bit of a wakeup call that we need to plan for secondary uses of these communities.
It may well be that, right now, if you look at the fire cycle in northwestern Ontario, there is probably not a timber company that would choose to put a mill in up there. However, because mills have been there for 40 years, there is a political incentive to maintain the mills, because of the communities around them. Nevertheless, the business decision about building a new mill probably would not be made.
You are hamstrung, because you have a community that is dependent. The community cannot go somewhere else. It is a dilemma.
We do not mean to be alarmist, but sometimes when you sit and think about what the models are showing and what the impacts are likely to be, it is scary. How people will adapt is really hard to say, but it is something of which we have to make people and policy makers aware.
The Chairman: Are you saying that they would not build a new mill in northern Ontario because of increased likelihood of forest fires caused by lightning?
Mr. Stocks: Even before the climate change, in the last 30 years of fire records in northwestern Ontario, it is difficult, in terms of wood supply, to protect that forest and guarantee the wood supply. With climate change, it will be less likely that you can succeed at that. As a new business venture, they would go to the insurance people and say, ``No, we will not start something there. We do not mind continuing something if we are already into it.''
Senator Day: I have a follow-up on that question. There are mills there. There is a wood-supply issue. Is there not some work going on to help develop forest practices that would mitigate the damages from more frequent fires? Is somebody not doing some research in that regard, rather than saying, ``Well, it will mean more fires; bad luck, guys.''
Mr. Stocks: There are. That is part of the FireSmart and forest management that honourable senators heard about in Edmonton. You can go out, on the landscape scale. If you know that, as the climate changes over the next 50 years, we will harvest a good portion of the second growth, then you have ways to harvest that. However, the forest industry would have to be willing to do that differently and plant different trees as fuel breaks or whatever.
Things could be done at the landscape scale, but it may well turn out that the fire danger in the future is such that it overcomes even some of the things we were planning. It is hard to say. However, people need to get out and start doing some of that stuff. We have looked as it from a research standpoint, and it looks like it is do-able. Putting those trials on the landscape at a scale that will really matter is a big effort.
Senator Gustafson: Where does Canada stand in terms of size? In terms of the world situation, how large are our forests in comparison?
Mr. Cox: I think we have one-tenth of the forested land in the world.
Senator Gustafson: Are we first, second or third? Where are we?
Mr. Cox: We are pretty close to the top. As such, we are custodians of a significant potential mitigation effort, but we are faced with natural events that are beyond our control. What we can do is to at least arrange the plantations that we are putting in now in better ways. The harvesting can be arranged in better ways to prevent blow-down. There is often a tricky management issue in terms of how you harvest wood in such a way as to prevent intrusion by wind and create more blow-downs, or even to open up the forests to cause heat damage to plantations. The size of the cuts and the size of the plantations are always on the forest managers' mind.
Climate change has to be inserted in there, and how those practices will be affected by climate change in the future. We have programs that are selecting tree seedlings to survive in harsher conditions. We are trying different plantation sizes and strip cuts, regeneration, to try to fit what we have selected with the environment, not only now but how to modify that environment into the future. We have research programs that are looking at this.
Senator Gustafson: It seems to me that the procedure used — I get this from the studies that we did on the boreal forest, when we travelled to different areas in the north — is quite different in the Maritimes than it might be in northern Alberta or in Saskatchewan. In fact, some recommend that man's intervention in replanting and so on is a negative, because you may plant a certain kind of tree and lose other types of production that have been there for centuries. Where do you stand on that?
Mr. Cox: It is a balance between maintaining a forest for commercial benefit and maintaining a carbon sink. Hopefully we can combine both. We can put management practices into place, at least in our highly managed forests, which are sustainable and are capable of acting as good carbon sinks.
Many forests are unmanaged, and we have to study to determine whether it will be a sink or a source of carbon. It is important in terms of our responsibility to the global community to know what that forest is going to do, and potentially how we might want to get into some kind of management of that. We certainly need to know what the sink- source relationships are.
Mr. Stocks: Russia, obviously, has more forested area than we do, particularly in Siberia. Their problems are enormous when it comes to climate change, even in comparison to ours. They have a much more continental climate over a much larger land mass than we do, and their system is completely broken. Even under the Kyoto Protocol, they are not really being called to task in terms of meeting commitments, because they cannot.
When you talk about sink-source strength, and I realize this committee is not dealing with Kyoto and that is good, we have a large pool of carbon in the Canadian forest. When we went to Kyoto, people got confused about it, thinking we have all this carbon so we must have a sink. However, the source is the incremental change from year to year. In other words, are you sequestering more carbon in your forest each year than you are releasing to the atmosphere through fires, insects, harvesting, die-back or whatever. It is the change that we are talking about here.
If you are sequestering more carbon over this five-year period than you are losing, then you are a sink. If you are emitting more, you are a source. Many people think that because we have a lot of trees, we should be a sink, but really, our forest, long before man got here, had fires, insects and everything else, and it was in complete balance with the atmosphere and the oceans in terms of carbon cycling. Kyoto does not talk about whether you are a sink or a source based on history, but what you have done since 1990. That is the issue.
We have found that there is precious little from a forestry standpoint that you can do to increase the sequestration across the whole landscape. We have committees together because the energy industry would really like us to find a way for forest management to be a huge sink so they can burn more fossil fuel. We have had that argument with them in the past. We have not been able to find any capability. The big drivers are the disturbances, the fires and the insects. You cannot spray for insects because it is not environmentally friendly any more, and you cannot spend more money on effectively fighting fires. There is precious little wiggle room there when it comes to altering the sink strength.
Senator Gustafson: At least you are not blaming the farmers.
An Hon. Senator: There is an idea.
Senator Day: Mr. Cox, I have two or three questions of clarification.
On page 6 of your presentation, Current Impacts and Adaptation Research, Experimental Manipulation, you are manipulating ozone and CO2. I wonder if you can explain that entire page to me. I could not understand what conclusions we could draw from this.
Mr. Cox: This is a study in Wisconsin in which the Canadian Forest Service is a partner. This study is an open-air fumigation system where we actually expose different plant species — I think it is aspen, birch and maple — to different concentrations of carbon dioxide and ozone, either singularly or combined. We found that ozone may actually cancel out the benefits of CO2 fertilization. CO2 increases water efficiency and production, if you just increase the CO2.
Senator Day: You are increasing CO2 within the environment.
Mr. Cox: Within the ring, yes.
Senator Day: You are saying this might be a natural occurrence. You increase CO2, which is global warming.
Mr. Cox: We are trying to simulate times-two and times-three scenarios in terms of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.
Senator Day: CO2 is a fertilizer, so it helps the plants grow faster. That increases water efficiency because you have more roots in the ground. Is that the tie-in with water?
Mr. Cox: No, it is because the stomates do not have to be open, so plants can conserve water. It is a more efficient use of the water because the stomates do not have to be open for so long. CO2 tends to increase water use efficiency. Ozone, on the other hand, causes the stomates to stop operating, and therefore, the gains that you might get with CO2 are somewhat reduced. However, ozone also increases plant defence mechanisms and antioxidants, uses up carbohydrates in the leaves and robs carbohydrates from the roots.
It changes resource allocations within the plant. Plants produce fewer roots and, therefore, are more susceptible to nutrient and water deficiency.
The changed chemistry of the leaves changes plant-pest and plant-defoliator interactions. It could be positive or negative depending on the species involved. The ozone acting on these plants changes attractability and the digestibility of the foliage by increasing or decreasing the amounts of toxic chemicals, such as tannins, within the leaves.
You might expect some unexpected events. Suddenly, an insect becomes a problem where it was not a problem before. Some problems might go away. The study did actually look at the potential to alter insect community compositions within the rings.
We are cancelling out some of the increased carbon dioxide that may accrue due to greenhouse gas emissions of the ozone, which changes the chemistry of the plants and the ozone emission within the plants. Some of my research is involved with looking at that change in allocation. I am examining the reduction of roots as a predisposition to dieback.
If you are reducing root mass and root carbohydrates, you are decreasing the plant's ability to explore the soil for water in the spring and developing spring root pressure, which it uses to recover its embolized xylem. Hardwoods in Canadian conditions become air-filled in the winter. Birches, maples and ashes use root pressure in the spring to refill those xylem vessels, which is the water conduction system. If that system does not refill, the plants go into a dieback situation.
Senator Day: We understand the increased carbon dioxide. We have been looking at that as a contributing factor towards climate change. Is the ozone mimicking something that might happen in nature or are you saying, ``I will get a tank of ozone and go out and try to reduce the effects of CO2''?
I am trying to think of the practical outcome of your experiment, and how it will help the forester. While you were talking, I was trying to think what you learned that would help the forester?
The Chairman: Particularly in relation to the spruce one.
Senator Day: Exactly. The stress chambers, and so on.
Mr. Cox: With ozone you can predispose these plants to other stresses, which include water stress and nutrient stress.
Most pollution, be it acid rain, ozone or nitrogen deposition, actually decreases root mass. Under the climate change scenarios where you might get increased evapo-transpiration and a drier environment, a reduced root mass is fairly serious.
This leads to an additive effect on the decreased health of these trees. This effect is measurable after one or two years of experimentation. A tree lives for 100 years. These effects are cumulative.
In areas where there is high pollution deposition, these effects are hidden until such time as an extreme event harvests them. It might demonstrate itself as a major decline in birch or sugar maple. However, some climatic event usually pushes them over their adaptive limits into a decline situation.
This will happen during a transition of a standing crop to a changing climate. As the climate changes, these additive stresses will add up and cause changes and gaps within the forest to allow migration of more southerly and more adapted species into those gaps. In that process, we may suffer a reduction in forest productivity and a reduction in carbon sequestration.
Senator Day: Did you not say that climate change is going to be a lot of variations over a year, as opposed to a significant rise in temperature?
Mr. Cox: The temperature in the Maritimes will actually decrease in the summer but increase in the winter.
Senator Day: I am sorry to hear that.
Mr. Cox: The cold area off Newfoundland is due to the outflow from the North Atlantic ice.
Senator Day: Mr. Stocks, could you explain page No. 10? It flows from a question that was asked of you. I could not understand all of the lines here.
Mr. Stocks: I am sorry, but it probably is not as visible as it would be in colour.
If you look at the top left graph, you have lines for cut-over. That is the bottom line that you can see there. The red line represents fires.
Senator Day: We have no red.
Mr. Stocks: You cannot see that, yes. That is unfortunate.
Senator Day: Should I see you afterwards, and you can explain this to me?
Mr. Stocks: It means that we are accumulating what we think is the area burned and the area affected by insects each year from 1920 along with area harvested, which is relatively constant. Even though we do not know where that triangle is between 1920 and 1965 we know that we are missing data. We suspect that the line should be higher.
You can see that post 1970, the lines are quite a bit higher. Those are the major disturbances that are occurring. There is more area burned and more insect areas affected.
If you use the numbers from 1920 to 1965, you can see that we appear to be a sink for carbon at that stage. Starting in 1970 when these vastly increased numbers occur, they drive down the sink to the point where you are a modest sink or source.
Senator Day: I think that the chart on the right is not the same as yours. That is part of the problem. Perhaps we could get this sorted out so that we have record that is the same one. We have only a horizontal line and an arrow at 1965.
Mr. Stocks: It is not only that, but you seem to be missing the numbers on the left hand side.
Senator Day: I do not have anything above that.
Mr. Stocks: I will leave you a copy of this in colour.
Senator Ringuette: You talked earlier about the situation in northern Ontario for the forest and the communities. Others studying climate change told us that there would be increased temperature in the northern areas. I equate ``increased temperature in the northern area'' with an increased period of timber growth. Therefore, the fibre for the industry will be available sooner, and it will be more cost effective.
We have mentioned the negative side of climate change for the forest industry, but I also see a positive side in regards to the growth season.
The summer season probably will be longer, possibly with more extreme weather as a pitfall. I do see a longer growth season and, therefore, the timber should be available for cutting earlier than we have experienced in the past.
Mr. Stocks: When we first started talking about the climate change issue, that was something we looked at. One of the first things we looked at was, if the temperature is to change in the next 100 years in this area, what species will grow there? Will there be a migration northward of species, and so on? It did not look all bad at first, because it looked like we could get increased fibre production. So what if we grow chestnut trees in northern Ontario instead of black spruce? It is all fibre. That was the initial assumption; however, as the reality of climate change and the extremes and everything else started to come to light, we suddenly began to realize that it is not really just about a change in temperature. This year could turn out to be the warmest year on the globe. However, you would not know it if you were sitting in Ottawa or where I live. From year to year, you will not notice much of a change in temperature. Maybe over 20 years, the global temperature will change a bit. However, the fact is we think these extreme events that are coming along with this changed atmosphere and the changes that are occurring in the hydrological cycle will overcome a lot of this. That increased uncertainty will not necessarily allow you to achieve what you would like to achieve in terms of the warming trends.
We started off where you are coming from, but we have been given pause because of the large uncertainty around extreme events.
Senator Ringuette: I need an answer to my first question, which was to Dr. Cox. He is an extremely intelligent person, and I guess I did not ask the question properly. I will give it a second try here.
All things being equal, is hardwood or softwood a better sink? They are both on the same lot next to each other. They have been growing for the same period of time. Is hardwood or softwood the best, all things being equal?
The Chairman: It would depend on the species of hardwood or softwood and the soil.
Mr. Cox: I would love to answer your question directly.
If we look at the future, in the southern part of the softwood range, you might find that hardwoods would grow slightly better and replace the softwoods. Hardwoods would replace the softwoods from the south, because they would out-compete those in the south. However, I would not like to say that productivity of hardwoods would outstrip that of softwoods in the North, for instance. There is the scenario that pines might become more abundant in the middle part of the boreal forest due to warming. It is the transition from what we have now to a stable climate in the future that is the main problem in our lifetimes and for many generations. It is the transition to a warmer climate that is developing the problem with migration and effects within the standing crop that we have now, the standing crop seeded in 100 years ago with hardwoods. Because they are so long-lasting, if they are part of the climax vegetation, they become more unfit as climate changes, because they were recruited to their positions in old climate. The longer they live, the more unfit they are and the more unfit are their progeny. It is the transition that will cause problems. In the end, given an equilibrium situation, if we ever manage to produce a stable situation in terms of greenhouse gases, we may move to a more stable situation with higher productivity. In the meantime, over many more of our generations of humans, that instability will cause problems with production.
I am still waffling around your question, because I do not have a clear answer. It depends on habitat, species, age and so on.
Senator Ringuette: That is why I said, ``all things being equal.''
The Chairman: I know that someone must catch a plane and we have another witness. I thank you for an excellent presentation and I wish you could stay longer, because I have questions but there is no time. Your evidence will be very useful to our study.
Next, I would like to call upon Professor Bryant of the University of Montreal to make his presentation. Following that the senators will ask you questions.
Mr. Christopher Bryant, Professor and Chair, IGU Commission on the Sustainable Development of Rural Systems, University of Montreal: I am here representing a research group at the University of Montreal, but I will also talk briefly about the results of other research that I have been involved in.
First, I will present a practical but research-based perspective on adaptation to climate change, specifically in relation to agriculture. I want to make some comments about the basis of my remarks. I will not give you lots of statistical results and charts and things. You have already heard from some of my other colleagues in agriculture adaptation. I would prefer to make general comments and then, if you have specific questions, I will try to address them.
I would also like to make some comments about climatic change and the farmers' decision-making environment and about what we consider to be the important socio-economic dimensions or characteristics of adaptation. I want to talk to you as well about how farmers appear to see climatic change, because that is absolutely all-important. It does not matter what models tell us or suggest to us. What really matters is what farmers think and how they behave.
My remarks are based on research on climate change undertaken with a group of three of my colleagues at the University of Montreal. We have been working together on adaptation of agriculture to climate change for the last 10 years. I have also been involved in the last three to five years — three formally, five years informally — with a group or network of other researchers in a pan-Canadian or cross-Canada network, also looking at agricultural adaptation to climate change. In addition to that, I have spent the last 35 years of my life looking at agricultural adaptations to other forms of stress. Something that I also wish to underscore is that farmers do not just react to climate change; they react to a whole bundle of things, and most of time they think of those other things as being more important, right now in any case.
The Chairman: U.S. tariffs, for instance.
Mr. Bryant: Absolutely. You hit it right on the head.
I spent the last 20 years involved in research and also as a consultant to communities across the country, particularly rural communities, in planning their development. All of those things have helped contribute to my understanding, and our research group's understanding, of adaptation to climate change.
The information that my remarks will be based on firstly in the climate change area, is interviews with farmers. We have undertaken interviews with farmers in the Montreal region, the Quebec City region, northeastern U.S., and also eastern Ontario. It is also based on workshops that involve groups of farmers. During the course of those workshops, we presented real farmers with the results of scenarios of climate change from the physical scientists. We have asked them how do they react to those, what does it mean to them, is it important, and do they care. We have had some interesting responses. We have also run workshops with other groups of professionals who are interested and concerned with the possible impacts of climate change on agricultural structure and productivity, various government representatives, people representing crop insurance schemes, all those sorts of people. Another source of information more generally, not specifically on climate change, has to do with various consultations that I have conducted with communities over the last few years.
I would like to make some comments now on climate change and the decision-making environment. First, in a study of impacts and adaptations, oftentimes, unfortunately, when we include the word ``adaptations'' in the title of a study, we do not talk about adaptation; we just talk about impacts. There are some good and also unfortunate reasons for that. At any rate, the study of impacts and adaptations cannot be undertaken without taking account of the human factor and the individual as a decision-maker. This is absolutely crucial to understand in the case of farming. It is not just our governments and agri-business that have created the agriculture system that we have; it is also farmers and their families that have done this. They continue to maintain it, and sometimes they survive despite all odds and do quite well.
Another point that we cannot ignore — and I have already alluded to this a few minutes ago — is that we cannot study impacts and adaptation without understanding that adaptations to climate change take place in the context of a decision-making environment where farmers are faced with a whole myriad of different stresses and forces of change.
It is important not to make false distinctions, particularly in agriculture, between ``mitigation'' and ``adaptation.'' Any type of mitigation measure also involves adaptations. Some people like to see the two things as being separate, but in fact the separating line is extremely fuzzy.
I have had the opportunity of working with a colleague who is also a physical scientist. He is very open. He also has a degree in management sciences, so he is a very human type of physical scientist. One of the conclusions we and other people working in adaptation have come to is that if we study only the biophysical environment and its dynamic, we must conclude that that is totally inadequate for understanding adaptation. This is, curiously, where we place most of our research money. We put little research money or effort into understanding how individual farmers and their families adapt and into learning what they know, and they do know an awful lot. The same goes for our rural communities. That is just one little beef that we have.
I have a few comments on significant socio-economic dimensions. It is absolutely critical to understand that farmers and their families are decision-makers, and it does not matter how real they think climatic change is. What is important is whether they think it is important. You can have everyone agreeing that something is happening, and it is real, but gee whiz, there are interest rates, market changes, changing comparative advantages, changing technology and all sorts of other things that we have to contend with as well. Sometimes we can observe that farmers will perceive an issue or stress as being real, but they do not react to it necessarily because they have so many other things on their plates that are immediate and more pressing.
If we look at the adaptability of farmers in agricultural systems, one of the sets of conclusions that we have come to is that understanding this requires an understanding of the personal circumstances of individual farmers and their families. It requires an understanding of the circumstances of the individual farm unit, its structure and also its biophysical environment. It also means that we need to identify the generic stresses, the common stresses that affect most farm systems, as well as trying to understand the different stresses that affect different farm production systems and different broad regions of the country. What happens in Quebec is not what we see happening in parts of the southern prairies in terms of the recent stresses, frequency of drought conditions and that sort of thing. This makes a big difference in terms of how people perceive whether something is important or not.
Is climate change considered important by farmers? I am looking mainly at our focus groups and sessions with farmers and professionals in Quebec, and also to a certain extent in eastern Ontario. One thing that converges with what we heard in thefirst two presentations, albeit on a different topic, is that farmers are not particularly interested in changing average conditions. One of the senators earlier made that same point about global warming. It is not a big deal.
When we present most farmers with scenarios of changes in 1 or 2 degrees over X number of years, they say, ``That is interesting. I have to manage greater variations from year to year in any case, so I am sure we can manage that sort of change.'' If you start talking to them about variability in terms of the frequency of extreme events, intense periods of precipitation and drought, depending on when they occur in the growing season, they can get quite exercised about that. Then they say, ``Tell us about it.'' We cannot tell them much because my understanding of the physical modeling exercises from the physical science and natural science base is that they do not help a great deal in generating parameters that are important to farmers as decision-makers. It is difficult for them to grab hold of.
Often, they will put things like climate change on a back burner simply because there are other things that they consider more pressing. Sometimes we think they are reacting to things from a shorter-term perspective rather than a longer-term perspective. There may be some of that. However, you cannot deny the fact that competition, price, cost changes — all of those sorts of things — are real. They affect the bottom line on a year-to-year basis, as do severe droughts and intense precipitation.
All the comments I have made here could be made about rural communities. In the last three years, everyone has heard about climate change. Everyone says, ``Okay, this is really interesting. Boy, it could be catastrophic, but we have to look after the kitchen. We have to deal with what happens every day.''
In relation to this fairly complex picture that happens when you talk to farmers about their decision-making environment, something that a number of people have concluded is that, perhaps, our focus in research should be more in terms of vulnerability.
We know that farmers face multiple stresses. We know that they have to take tactical and strategic decisions on a regular basis. When they take decisions, they really take decisions, unless it is to keep the bank manager away, in relation to one factor or one source of stress. It might be the family. It might be that the kids do not want to stay on the farm any more. It might be interest rates. It might be all sorts of things.
In fact, what becomes more important is to look at our farms and the way they have evolved and to ask questions about how vulnerable they are. Are they getting more vulnerable? Are they getting less vulnerable? Are they becoming more resilient in terms of their ability to maintain incomes and satisfactory standards of living? At the same time, are they getting more resilient in terms of their ability to stand up to climate change?
If we look at the vulnerability issue — the capacity to deal with change, wherever it is coming from — in both farming and the rural communities, their adaptation to climate change is a secondary consequence of the management of risk because farmers are in the business of managing risk, in terms of their product structure, their farm practices and even the ways in which they manage their families. They are managing risk, change and uncertainties all the time.
I would like to draw some concluding points.
In looking at adaptation it is extremely important to take a holistic perspective. Assuming that this climatic change phenomenon will be with us for a while, we have to recognize that the way people react, adapt, or do not react or adapt, probably is going to make the difference between whether or not the final impacts are okay or really bad.
At the moment, we are increasingly interested in focusing on vulnerability. The group of researchers with whom I am working are talking to Ouranos, a group of people from Montreal, mostly physical scientists, together with some people who are concerned with financing and crop insurance for farming. We are looking at developing a climate change adaptation study. Many people are interested in it. However, the focus is not just on adaptation. The focus is really on the vulnerability of farm systems to change, including climatic change.
That means we have to understand and reinforce the capacity of farmers, other rural activities, and the various actors that play out their lives in rural areas to adapt and to become more resilient. Only by doing that can we honestly claim that, through adaptation, they will, perhaps, be able to maintain their contribution to their rural communities and their economies.
The Chairman: Thank you very much. I deeply regret that Senator LaPierre is not here today because he has a special interest in rural communities. He called shortly before the meeting tonight to say he is not feeling well. Once he reads the testimony, I am sure he will regret not having heard your comments, in particular those on rural communities.
Senator Wiebe: Professor, your presentation probably presented us with more questions than answers.
Mr. Bryant: That is the nature of research.
Senator Wiebe: We are struggling to find answers. I think you hit the nail on the head with the statement about being careful not to make false distinctions between mitigation and adaptation. You also said that it is important that policy makers react to what farmers think.
At least in my understanding from the farmers I have talked to, they still have not made the distinction between mitigation and adaptation. Some of them think that if they burn a more environmentally friendly fuel in their tractor, that will help solve the problem and that we can address it by adopting the Kyoto accord. Even if Kyoto is adopted 100 per cent by every country, the damage will have been done. That is something that is long term.
How do we get the message out that we have to start looking at adaptation practices? We do not know what they are, and I do not think the farmer knows what those practices are. He will be able to adapt to what the climate presents.
Let me give you an example. When we had our hearings in Edmonton, we had a presentation there by a rancher who had been farming for about 17 years. He never had drought and never had to worry about having enough hay on hand. In my part of the country, we are used to drought all the time. My grandfather told me that if you want to go into livestock, make sure you have a deep well and three years of hay on hand. If I had told that to that farmer two years ago, he would have said I was nuts. Had he done what I had told him, he would have been able to survive the climate change. How do we get the message across in a way that they will understand and believe what we are saying? That is what we are searching for.
Mr. Bryant: One point I would like to make is that many farmers are already in the process of integrating different strategies into their farm practices, not just in relation to climate change, but more often in relation to the last two or three years of damaging droughts or rains and that sort of thing. However, within the farm community, an incredible amount of innovation exists. A lot of that innovation tends to be small-scale measures that often do not cost a lot of money. Farmers are doing things and being quite successful in building more resilient systems, but governments do not seem to know about them. A lot of researchers do not seem to know about them. You basically have to reach out into the community and listen to farmers. Listen to their experiences. One of the first things to do is share their experiences.
I attended a conference in Winnipeg a couple of months ago with Barry Smith and other people in this field. One of the things organized was an afternoon of presentations by farmers in terms of how they were coping with difficult situations.
Many ways in which they were dealing with difficult situations were low-key but innovative, and they were being successful. They were making the difference between being able to survive and maybe do well and not being able to survive at all. One of the things is being able to communicate more effectively what is actually happening in the farm community.
Farmers do not take things lying down. Some may, but many farmers do not take things lying down. They get out there and they undertake proactive strategies. It is one form of adaptation. They anticipate change, and they develop some form of proactive strategy.
We need to know who those people are and what they are doing and to share much more effectively what they are doing with the rest of the agricultural community and with the people who manage our economy generally.
Senator Wiebe: Who should do the communication? You will have many farmers say that if the government tells them to do this, they will do the opposite because that works out the best. They have a tendency, sometimes, not to listen to that kind of advice.
What would be the vehicle to provide this kind of discussion?
Mr. Bryant: In different parts of the country, there are different professional groupings of farmers. For instance, there are environmental clubs in Quebec. These represent one vehicle by which one can communicate reasonably effectively with groups of farmers, and I think it is quite a successful set of organizations.
One can communicate quite successfully with these farmers. They are certainly more interested in understanding what is happening in climate change, what it means and what other people are doing.
In other parts of the country, it might be soil conservation groups. Even if it is not directly related to climatic change, they represent ways of getting into the agricultural community. I do not think one could create a monolithic policy framework for communicating effectively, but you could create a framework within which different groups of farmers would be able to communicate more effectively with each other about what is happening. I know that people will say, well, we are talking about 10 or 15 people at a time, and that is peanuts. We should try to get people together in large conferences or maybe use newsletters. However, that is not how people communicate. They communicate in small groups much more effectively. You can put in place a strategy where the actors would be the different types of groups in different parts of the country and pursue it on a systematic basis. Probably, within two to three years, you would cover a good part of the agricultural community.
Senator Wiebe: Besides the government or the policy makers providing more research dollars for adaptation, is the new agricultural policy framework something that should be made available with some changes in which they concentrate on crop insurance? Regarding the risk management under the Net Income Stabilization Account, NISA, is that the direction that policy makers should go to provide the cushion or the bumper while these adaptations are taking place?
Mr. Bryant: Money is always useful, but money is not the absolute key. I will try to answer your question from a different perspective.
We presented some profiles of farmers and their changing profiles to a set of professionals in crop insurance and financing agencies in farming, and we asked them to tell us which farm operations they thought were the most resilient and the most capable of adapting to change of any type. Then, basically, what was the difference? What made the difference between farmers that were capable of changing and adapting proactively and those who were not? The initial response was money, their financial capability to withstand shocks. Then, after reflection, the answer was, well, what is probably more important is simply the ability of individuals, working within their family to be critical of their own way of doing things, se remettre en question, as they would say in French. That has to do with education. It is not just education in any formal sense. One could even talk about cultures in different areas where change is regarded as okay. This is something we think about and we are prepared to question ourselves.
Part of the answer lies in providing some guidance to various professional organizations. That may mean sensitizing them to the importance of climatic change, but also to the importance of getting farmers to undertake a strategic planning process that builds in, as the name suggests, dealing with uncertainty and change. That is perhaps something that many farmers do not do currently.
Senator Gustafson: Thank you for being a very refreshing witness. Just by example, I talked to a lady who was coming from Saskatchewan and going to Montreal. She represented the milk producers. I asked how things were going. She said, ``Very well.'' Thanks to the marketing boards, she is doing very well. However, if I talk to a grain farmer, even in Ontario or Alberta, they will say they cannot get their inputs back. What you say is right on line.
That suggests another question for you. The international scenario that farmers face is important. I am referring to subsidies. This committee travelled to Europe. The Europeans have done something very positive. They combined agricultural, rural development and environment in one package. They basically said that the farmers cannot support this alone. It has to be the responsibility of all society. That brings me to the question of where the urban community comes down on this. Where does the government come down on this? The Americans are moving closer to that system. They have other problems. They have acres and acres going under cement. They are trying to deal with those environmental questions.
You have covered it well. We cannot just isolate it. On the prairies now, the grain farmer is saying that continuous cropping is the answer; do not summerfallow. Other farmers say, ``I cannot come out with a continuous crop so I may have to go back with a summerfallow.''
Mr. Bryant: If I can respond to part of that very broad question, in some parts of this country farmers are also required to produce plans that have to do with the environment, for certain types of things such as hog farms in Quebec. That is a particularly difficult situation.
Senator Gustafson: It is a different world.
Mr. Bryant: It is a different world, right. The Europeans came into this whole business quite tardily. For a long time they had a Disney World, I guess you could call it, built on farm subsidies. It took a long time, but they realized that that situation was not sustainable. The particular model of agricultural production that they had favoured was creating many negative impacts for the environment and also for rural communities, not to mention the fact that they were overproducing in relation to effective markets. It was similar to the model that we had favoured, although ours was perhaps less intensive. That is when they came in with the set-aside program. Later on they came in with agri- environmental plans. They are a good idea. There is something similar in Quebec, but it is not quite the same.
What has been developed in France is a particularly good idea. It is voluntary, and to help things along, there is a little bit of money, but not much. Farmers build up a sort of contract with the state, or its agency in the particular region, to modify their practices in particular ways to take account of specific environmental issues. Potentially, that approach could include anything. It could be broadened to include any type of change.
It is innovative, although if you talk to many of the researchers in the agricultural field in France, it works well in some areas and not so well in others. In some areas they do not need it because they are doing well, but they get involved because it is another way of getting a few more bucks. In areas that need it, it is not necessarily easy to integrate that type of approach.
It is promising. It requires an awful lot of work on the ground, not just by researchers but by the equivalent of extension workers and the farm associations.
Senator Gustafson: It seems to me that the approach that Canadians will take — the government, people in the urban centres, and the rural population — will be important in the future. The larger percentage of our population lives in the urban centres now and the trend seems to be that way, non-stop.
As a result, every farmer is a custodian of the land and there will be great responsibility falling into the farmer's hands, as there will be for the oil companies and so on.
Mr. Bryant: Sometimes it is interesting from a policy point of view to look at some of the things that many people see as being marginal, to see where things are changing. Organic farming is not marginal any more, but it was viewed as marginal for a long time. Some who are not certified organic farmers are going in that direction, even if they do not want to become certified. Part of that is linked to the urban marketplace and the urban consumer.
Another interesting trend is the explicit linkages between groups of urban consumers and farmers, to guarantee they will purchase part of the farmer's produce for the season, a basket-of-vegetables-every-week sort of thing. They commit themselves to a price ahead of time. The linkages are more than experiments because they are real and they are growing. We have one in particular in Montreal that is substantial. There is a whole network of farms and urban consumers that are involved in it.
The Chairman: Are they organic?
Mr. Bryant: They are not only organic, but one of the ideas is that, in some cases, the urban consumers that are involved also get involved in the farm. One of the conditions for purchasing the pattern of baskets throughout the production season is that they become interested in how the farmer produces, not just what the farmer produces. Again, while climatic change is not currently a big deal in that, all of the other environmental issues are.
Senator Gustafson: That is a good point. An example in our community involves the Hutterites, who bring their produce into a market every Saturday. They are sold out by nine o'clock. It does not matter how much they bring. People want that fresh food.
They are not supposed to sell meat, but they do. That happens before 8 o'clock, before the other stores open.
Senator Fairbairn: Absolutely!
Senator Gustafson: People want that kind of food.
Mr. Bryant: You can be an environmentalist and a capitalist.
Senator Fairbairn: They trust them, too.
The Chairman: Does it have the Government of Canada stamp on it?
Senator Gustafson: People trust their food. They know it is grown in a regular way.
Senator Fairbairn: Thank you very much for your presentation. I think we needed to hear this. You are a patient man. You have given us a message on one of the critical issues with which we must deal before we can get near questions like adaptation. People carrying the message must believe that it is real. People have been adapting through generations. This is not particularly a new issue. It is an extension of their culture and experience.
Heaven knows that we are keen to listen sometimes. The manner in which we address the issue or even the context of where we are addressing it can cause people to react with some impatience and hostility. There is the sense that whatever ``it'' is, you will not do it.
That is one of the problems of government. They are pronouncing what ``it'' is.
This is a difficulty in communications. It is a huge country. There are a lot of farmers. They do different things in different places. We bring in technology as part of our presentation and the way to do it. As you have almost indicated, perhaps we overdo it that way, and we lose the audience.
We hear the word ``communication'' around this table constantly, and we have heard it tonight. Who is communicating with the farmers is sometimes just as important as the message, to be successful. That leads me to the observation that it is a pity we cannot clone you, and send many Christopher R. Bryants across the country.
It has been one thing to talk about climate change in terms of Kyoto when you are dealing with hard industry and all sorts of people who have used flow charts and high-tech all their lives. In agriculture, we are trying to bring it down to the ground. We struggle to understand it. We want to be able to engage our listeners to share an enthusiasm in paying attention to the issue. That is a challenge.
You are doing it. We have run into some other scientists who have been taking the trouble to get into little groups and talk with the farmers, not at them.
How would you advise, not just us, but the government, on how to take an issue like this and engage the people who will ensure that the consumers will be okay in the future? They must be okay first.
Mr. Bryant: You are speaking in terms of how you engage the farm community. This is coming off the top of my head.
One needs to work through the various agricultural professional organizations. That is important because they do have networks. If the people that are the points of entry into those networks in the associations are sold on the idea — so you have to spend time selling them on the idea — it is then relatively easy for them to communicate with a broad, large proportion of the farm population. Work through the various farm organizations, not just the producer organizations, but also environmental clubs in Quebec, for example. They have a particularly interesting and innovative approach to change.
At the same time as one sensitizes professional organizations at various levels, one should encourage them to communicate with their members. You also must sell them on the idea that they have to reach out further than the active core of their membership.
Many farmers, even if they are part of professional associations, do not really feel part of it. They are formally members, but they do not necessarily like it because they do not necessarily see that there is anything in it for them, or they do not think that the association necessarily shares their preoccupations.
Some professional organizations are more focused on some sectors of the agriculture economy than others. You get entire whole wads of farmers who feel left out even though they have to pay their annual dues to the association.
Find ways of partly using the associations, but also, use other points of entry into farm networks to build up the capacity for looking at and planning for change. It can vary substantially from province to province.
In Quebec, many of the county municipalities have a rural development officer. Some of those rural development officers actually have a good background in farming. They have gone through training that involves environment. Some of them are agronomists by training. There is an enormous wealth of resources on the ground that we could use to communicate more effectively with the farming community.
It may require, either provincially or, more likely, below the provincial level, finding some form of framework that would help seed a process by which people work in the community, interact with farmers and pull them together into small groups. We have had lots of experience in that, in some parts of the country in other fields. It is not a formal professional association, but it is also important in terms of getting out there.
I am not sure whether that is much help. However, if you took a particular province and a region within the province and developed a good understanding of the various networks within the farming community, it would not be that difficult to put together that process that would start on a small scale, but which would diffuse rapidly within the agricultural community to get people thinking and talking about it.
Senator Fairbairn: I am glad it is on the record, because what you have said is true. Some colleagues will remember, even within this committee, occasions where there have been striking issues that have needed to be addressed quickly and involving a mighty amount of money and structure. I am thinking of, over the last few years, our concentration on emergency safety net provisions and things like that.
On a couple of occasions, indeed, professional associations and provinces were listened to. However, it did not work well because it was at too high a level. It also was not a level that was taking into consideration that not just provinces are different, but some parts of provinces are different. We went through a painful exercise across Western Canada three or four years ago when we, with all the best will in the world and billions of dollars, had a negative result from it. We need the ability to get below those certain levels. There is nothing wrong with them. However, if they are not reaching into the daily reality of whatever section of Canada we are working in, then we will come up short; and when we come up short, impatience, frustration and hostility make the issue worse. I am sure Senator Wiebe has something to say about that.
Mr. Bryant: I agree.
Senator Wiebe: To follow up on that, Senator Fairbairn is correct. In the past, we have attempted, as politicians, to solve a problem by throwing money at it. It follows along with the answer that you gave to my last question, when I asked about crop insurance and NISA. You said that money is nice, but not really the key.
I go back to what we called the New Zealand experiment. They made the decision 10 years ago that they would no longer pay out any subsidies to agriculture. They offered a one-time cash payment and said; ``You make the decision about whether you want to stay in farming or use that money to get out.''
I had the good fortune last March of spending some time in New Zealand. I was excited to go down there to talk to some of the people and see how agriculture worked. I found agriculture in New Zealand to be vibrant, successful and prosperous, and they are not paying any subsidies. However, for us to take that kind of approach here in Canada, politically, we would be killed.
What is your reaction to the New Zealand experience and the comments of Senator Fairbairn?
Mr. Bryant: When I said money is not the issue, it is always good to have money. However, you need to know what you want it for. It does not matter what area of the economy you are talking about. Giving money for the sake of giving money sometimes acts as a stopgap, but can also be an expensive way of dealing with a problem. We have been good at throwing money around to try to keep people happy, at least in the short term. It is much more difficult to build capacity to deal with things, however. It can always use a bit of money but, more importantly, it requires a particular set of attitudes on the part of people that deal with the farming community: the bureaucrats, the research scientists and the politicians.
To come back to the question about the subsidy issue, it is a difficult tightrope act. People need help to cope with some things, like catastrophes, difficult situations and things that we believe that people have been flung into through no fault of their own. We need to come to their aid. We might decide to not necessarily subsidize, but to pay people to do certain things, because it provides us with a different type of good. They have talked a lot in Western Europe about decoupling subsidies for farm production from farm production, that is, providing money to farmers to do certain things in certain ways.
The Chairman: Or not to do them.
Mr. Bryant: Or not to do them, for instance, adopting certain conservation practices in areas of outstanding natural beauty, particular scientific interest, particular cultural heritage and this sort of thing. We are not subsidizing them, then. We are saying, ``We want you to produce this and we will pay you.''
On the other hand, simply giving out money as a stopgap measure — and sometimes that stopgap measure becomes almost permanent — create dependency. Dependency is the last thing you can think of as comprising capacity to adapt and change.
When NAFTA came in a few years back, we were running workshops with farmers in the Montreal region, market gardeners and milk producers, looking at NAFTA and how they react to it.
The people who were the most upset were the milk producers. They were upset because they saw ultimately that the protected market system, the quota system, would probably go out the window. Talk to the market gardeners about NAFTA and it is not a big deal. They have dealt with and competed in the U.S. market for years, and they are not regulated. They are not protected. The only thing that the market gardeners were worried about was that they thought some of their milk-producing colleagues would get out of milk production and get into market gardening.
The Chairman: I, too, deeply appreciated the evidence you have given us tonight.
A number of farmers, as you have already said, are innovative and resilient. They are able to bounce back to these changes that they can somehow see coming by using new seeds, different crops and zero till, doing different types of marketing, and so on. A number of farmers, as you mentioned, are going into organic farming. You told Senator Gustafson about these explicit linkages between consumers and farmers. I wanted to know how far you were going to take that or how far it is being taken now. You indicated the explicit arrangements that some of these people have where they actually look to make sure that there are not pesticides and insecticides being used so that they know what they are buying in their basket of food each day. You also indicated that they work on the farm. If there were a major climatic change or a major hailstorm, would these people go and help with the effect of climate change on the farm? How far will this be taken?
Mr. Bryant: The climate change issue does not have a big profile in their thinking right now, but for the people that are interested, that have become involved in it, one of the reasons for becoming involved is that they are concerned with having healthy produce. They are interested in the process by which the produce comes to their table. Others are interested because they are concerned about the impact of modern, productive farming on the environment. They are also looking at it from a broader point of view. We have done interviews with organic farmers in Quebec, trying to find out why they become organic farmers. We find health reasons, personally and for the community generally, and also preoccupations for the environment are important. While not related directly to climate change, the preoccupation for a healthy environment means it is easier for those same groups to talk about climatic change to farmers and get farmers to talk to them about how climate change fits into their calculus, into their decision-making environment.
The Chairman: Senator Gustafson was asking about the difference between rural and urban communities. He said most people live in the urban areas. In these explicit relationships that you talk about between the consumer and the farmer, are some of those relationships between people in urban and rural areas? In other words, are they leaving the cities and coming out and forming those relationships? You indicated as well, as I heard your evidence, that some of them are actually working and helping out on the farm.
Mr. Bryant: Sometimes when they work on the farms, it is basically to get an experience. They are not necessarily paid for it.
The Chairman: I see.
Mr. Bryant: Apart from what I said, there are other relationships in agriculture, even in urban type environments. We have a few examples of that in Canada, but there are many more in other parts of the world where farm activities are used as a means of integrating people who have moved into an urban area from rural areas. They cannot integrate into the workforce, or they are used to integrate people who are hard-core unemployed, people who have had difficulty getting into the workforce in the first place. Some agricultural projects can be and have been used as a means of providing a work opportunity for these people. It is almost like not just training them to be farmers or farm workers, but training them in a much broader sense, getting back their self-respect and this sort of thing. However, that is a different kettle of fish.
There are examples also of land trusts that have been created where land is owned by a group of consumers.
The Chairman: Are they working the land?
Mr. Bryant: They will hire the former farmer, for instance, to farm the land for them, and they, in exchange, are a management board. In a sense, we are only restricted by lack of imagination and creativity.
The Chairman: But there are programs like that?
Mr. Bryant: They are projects, not so much programs.
The Chairman: That is fascinating.
You have touched some wonderful nerves that go right to the root of the thing that many of us are interested in, in terms of rural communities, climate change, adaptation and so on. Your evidence has been incredibly useful and helpful. Thank you very much. I apologize for the lateness of the hour, but we wanted to keep you because we had so many things to ask, to explore your many suggestions.
The committee adjourned.