Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Agriculture and Forestry
Issue 15 - Evidence - April 1, 2003
OTTAWA, Tuesday, April 1, 2003
The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met this day at 5:35 p.m. to examine the impact of climate change on Canada's agriculture, forests and rural communities and the potential adaptation options focusing on primary production, practices, technologies, ecosystems and other related areas.
Senator Donald H. Oliver (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Honourable senators, I am pleased to call to order the twenty-fourth meeting of this committee on the impact of climate change on Canada's agriculture, forests and rural communities and on the potential adaptation options.
[Translation]
Honourable senators, we continue our study on the effects of climate change. I would like to welcome Canadians who are tuning in to and viewing these proceedings via CPAC and the Internet.
[English]
Over the last few weeks, we have listened to various witnesses who have explained to us the science of climate change while focusing on adaptation issues.
We will hear today from Mr.JayMalcolm, from the Faculty of Forestry at the University of Toronto. Mr.Malcolm specializes in wildlife ecology, community ecology and landscape ecology. He has examined forest fragmentation and edge effects and the effects of global warming on natural ecosystems.
Welcome, and please proceed.
Mr. Jay R. Malcolm, Associate Professor, University of Toronto: Honourable senators, I will give a brief presentation on some aspects of climate change and sustainable forest management. When I say ``sustainable,'' I am talking about the three legs of sustainability, as we normally understand them: economic, ecological and social. I will focus on ecological aspects and, to some extent, talk a bit about economic issues as well.
Before I begin, I will provide some brief background on climate change. There is increasingly good evidence of the causal connection between increasing greenhouse gas concentrations and the recent warming we have observed. It is important to point out that the amount of warming we are talking about is highly significant from an ecological context.
This arrow shows the relatively slight warming we have had in the last over 100 years here. These are projections done by the IPCC, which is a group of scientists charged by the United Nations to investigate this problem. You will notice at the upper end of those projections, in the next hundred years, are about five degrees, which is about the same amount of climate change that we saw between the time when glaciers were at their maximum and today. We are talking about an amount of change that, from an ecological context, is really quite massive.
The bottom graph shows the reconstructed temperature during about the last thousand years from tree ring data and other sources of data like that. The red line to the far right shows the observed temperature data. You will notice that we are in the warmest period now in at least 1,000 years.
Recent studies published in the scientific journal Nature, one of the most high-profile journals, reported that there is now evidence that hundreds of species are showing responses to this warming. Using IPCC criteria, we now have very high confidence that this anthropogenic climate change is already affecting living systems.
I will talk about and make use of this approach of how we might project or have some understanding about what might happen in the future from an ecological viewpoint. One of the key tools to do that is to make use of scenarios and projections of future climate change that are created by super computer models. There are about 15 groups or so worldwide that create these models. A typical scenario would be to look at a model of the climate under current or recent CO2 concentrations, as well look at climate under a doubled CO2 concentration, which is expected to occur in somewhat less than 100 years. Then, you can give that climate data to a plant biogeographer, who can fairly reasonably tell you what kind of major ecosystem you expect there, whether it be as shown in this triangle, tropical rain forest, desert or boreal forest,et cetera. Just based on precipitation, temperature and seasonal variation, you will have a pretty good idea of what kind of major ecosystem will be there.
We can take these global climate models or general circulation models, climate data, and couple that with these plant biogeography models to look at how our ecological systems might change in the next hundred years or so. This is called an equilibrium approach; you calculate the climate change associated with the doubling of the CO2 and then look at the potential vegetation you would expect under that.
This particular climate data is from the Hadley Centre in the U.K. It is coupled with one of these plant biogeography models, in this case the MAPSS model. The top model is for Canada's major ecosystem types under current climate, and you will see the cold Arctic ecosystems to the north, and the dark green boreal forest, and then down into Southern Ontario where we are right now, the lighter green temperate forest. You can see the yellow of the Prairies and the taiga coming down from Yukon into northern B.C.
I draw your attention to the lower figure showing those major ecosystem types projected under a doubling of CO2 climate. You will notice that the temperate forest is now half-way up Ontario. You will notice that Ottawa is in the yellow Carolinian system. Carolinian forest would be our most southern type of Ontario ecosystem. If you look at the high Arctic, the mainland areas, you will see that lightest blue colour. Notice that it has pretty much disappeared from the mainland. It is much more restricted to the higher Arctic islands.
We can try to measure how much change we expect. We are not talking about trivial ecological change. A change from a boreal forest like the area around Timmins to what is around the Great Lakes or around here is a change to a substantially different type of forest that has many implications for the species that live in it as well as the type of forestry we might practice.
The Chairman: What is the time period between those two maps?
Mr. Malcolm: People typically talk about 100 years for the climate associated with a doubling of CO2, although it could be quicker than that, it now appears.
This gets a bit technical, but I will try to keep it simple. This is one combination of climate model and plant model. In this analysis, we have taken 14 such combinations to try to get a robust result.
The next figure shows the change in major ecosystem type; the darker the red the more the models agree there will be a major ecosystem change. You will see that Canada, northern Asia and Europe are the black holes, with enormous amounts of ecological change on a global scale. This is not surprising given that the global climate model shows that you expect greater warming in northern or higher latitudes.
There is a little doubt that we are in for a lot of change. It is striking that, if you rank all the countries in the world, Canada is number 14, which is quite surprising given our huge size. You can see poor Finland is very high, but it is a little country compared to Canada. If you look at the land area of Canada where you expect major ecosystem change in that 100-year climate change, the figure is about 46 per cent of the area.
This simulation shows some work very similar to what I am talking about. The various colours represent different ecosystem types. They are using projections of climate data to try and understand how ecosystems might change. This simulation, prepared by Hall and Fagre, is for Glacier National Park.
The point I want to make is that we are not only talking about change, but if you think about cold-adapted ecosystems like the Arctic and the tops of mountains, we also are talking about the sheer reduction in the area of those ecosystems.
For example, in 1940, the white represents glaciers. Coming up to the year 2000, we see that the glaciers are largely disappearing. The grey colour is high-altitude alpine ecosystems. Notice the really strong reduction in the area of those high alpine ecosystems. You see a lot of white and grey; and as time goes on, the white disappears as the glaciers melt and the grey disappears.
This is a concern because the tundra plants and animals that use those high-altitude ecosystems will become extinct. We will have fewer species as these changes occur.
One of the tenets of modern ecology is that if you sample an increasingly large area you will find more and more species. There is a very strong empirical relationship between the numbers of species you find and the area you sample. It is referred to as the species area relationship. We can use that idea to try to investigate what the loss of ecosystems would mean for biodiversity in Canada.
On the left hand, you will see that green colour which represents, let us say, the amount of tundra in the current climate. On the right, we see it shifting to a new location. The red shows where it used to be, and areas B and C show where it will be in the future.
The comparison I am talking about here is contrasting area A plus area B's current area with the future area. In the mountain animation I showed the total grey area versus what the grey area will be in the future. Here I have shown them about the same size. As I mentioned, if we have a reduction of area A on the graph, we can read off the expected loss of numbers of species.
I have not done that for Canada; but I have done that globally, based on these 14 combinations of global climate and vegetation models. It is not a pretty picture for tundra ecosystems and what are called taiga-tundra, that edge of the tundra. You can see that under the warming that we expect or project for this 100-year period we lose about 10 per cent of tundra and tundra-taiga species. There is some evidence, as well, of losses of arid desert species.
Unless we reduce emissions and the rate of warming this will happen. There is nothing much we can do about it, because you cannot create large areas of tundra in a zoo or wherever.
It is difficult from an ecological viewpoint to talk about divorcing adaptation from mitigation. There are aspects of this problem that you cannot adapt to. You have to fight the problem; you cannot just live with it and do the best you can. If the temperature remains warmer than the norm there will be significant amounts of extinction.
Let us talk about forests. We have seen how the ecosystem can change. As I mentioned, spruce trees would come to dominate the boreal forests in Ontario. In a conifer situation like Algonquin Park you would have pines and maples and such. As you change the conditions, you change the major forest types. Certain forest types will disappear and move somewhere else.
We have not yet done detailed modeling of any of this for Canada. However, projections in the eastern United States show that over that time period there is the potential for the disappearance of spruce, maple, beach, and birch forests.
This means the shift of species' ranges because species live under certain climate conditions; as you shift those conditions, they move as well. This shift includes economic species. The U.S. study shows that economically important species such as sugar maple, balsam fir, trembling aspen and red pine would be reduced by more than 90 per cent.
When the climate becomes more of a southerly-type climate it creates stresses for the trees living there, and stressed trees are more susceptible to disease and pests.
In warmer conditions plants need more water, because water evaporates more rapidly in a warmer environment. If you do not provide more water more heat will lead to more drought conditions and the increased probability of fire. This is a significant issue as well.
I have been at climate change conferences where the Russians felt the climate change would be good for Russia in that it would enlarge the wheat belt.
Increased temperatures will mean that plants will need more water and if the water is not there severe drought conditions will be a strong possibility.
Plants are a key user of carbon dioxide. They take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, fix it in their tissue, and respire it back out again when they breathe like we do. If you increase the amount of biomass of plants, you can suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. That process is called sequestration. There is an increased emphasis on forest as carbon sinks and an effort to keep carbon in forests. However, in the grand scheme of things that is a band-aid measure. The forests hold a relatively small amount of carbon in comparison to the amount we pump into the atmosphere.
I will talk a little bit about adaptation rather than vulnerability. There have been several economic analyses of the future of the forestry sector under these sorts of conditions. They often predict little net positive impacts in the timber sector.
That is largely because of the potential for increased growth under warming conditions. At the same time, it is clear that all of these models assume appropriate adaptation.
In one of their best-known studies Sohngen and Mendelsohn assume that forest management would quickly establish the appropriate species to the climate change. The conditions may change, but the idea is that the foresters would respond appropriately and quickly.
On low intensity lands where we rely on nature to take its course the study shows that there would only be a lag of 10 years to 30 years in terms of the appropriate species. The point is that these low impacts or even net positive impacts depend on people behaving appropriately.
In order to make appropriate responses we need to have some understanding of what trees are appropriate and what they will do under these conditions. Adaptation strategies include making sure the right tree species regenerate after the trees have been harvested.
The sooner you get the appropriate forest growing the sooner it starts sucking carbon out of the atmosphere and protecting the carbon in the soil that could potentially get burned in the atmosphere.
Genetically modified species or the right ecotypes need to be developed. This procedure involves developing a silvicultural system that ensures the vigour of the trees.
If we are going shift forests and ecosystems from one place to another the species must be able to physically get there. You could put them on a truck and move them, or you could rely on nature to get them up there. If you rely on nature, they have limits and can only move so fast. I will talk a little about this and this is perhaps where some of the greatest concern lies. The migration of the forest is a key aspect of adaptation.
One problem is that although foresters tend to be pretty upbeat about their capabilities for managing forests we are not always that successful. A good example is in Ontario boreal forests. This graph shows various forest types: hardwood, mixed wood and spruce. The bottom line is that we have cut conifers and they have come back as hardwoods such as trembling aspen and birch.
As an example, between 1970-85 415,000 hectares of black spruce were planted and by 1990 15 per cent of that area was black spruce; the rest had died or been overtaken by the aggressive hardwoods.
That is one potential issue. This sort of engineering view of nature gets more problematic the more complex a system is. Agriculture is a relatively simple system, where we are dealing with one or two crops, whereas with forests we are talking about a much more complicated situation. In this case, we are not putting enough resources into it.
One model shows that if migration does not keep up with the rate of warming certain species will be lost. You will lose the amount of wood and biomass in forests. The clearest example may be the use of a global vegetation model to look at the potential for carbon sequestration.
If you allow the ecosystems to keep up with the climate change we will see a 7 per cent to 11 per cent increase in the amount of carbon in the forests. If you take the contrasting scenario and not allow the ecosystems to move at all then you would get a 3 per cent to 4 per cent decrease in the amount of carbon on the planet. That shows how important this sort of migration idea is.
If you are treating trees as agricultural crops then this is less of an issue because you can change species, do the genetics, et cetera. In Canada we do not do that. We rely on natural forest regeneration or we do not worry about it. Then, this migration problem becomes more critical because you are relying on nature to play its role.
When we try to manage forests not just for timber or carbon but also for the other variety of species that live in forests we realize that physical migration is impossible. We cannot put hundreds of insect species or thousands of plant species on a truck and move them. The artificial migration of the natural forest is not an option. This migration problem then becomes particularly critical when thinking about forest management in its broadest sustainability aspect.
Let us now compare the amount of grey that we saw in that map before and after. We could use our species area relationship to figure out how many species would be lost; however, let us now think about the boreal forest shifting north. We can compare its current area with its future area and look at the potential for species loss, but let us also say things cannot migrate.
We will look at the area of boreal forest where it overlaps in the future with where it does right now and do that species area relationship. We are now saying migration will not happen, so let us look at the number of species in the boreal forest that would occur in the future forest, only in the overlap between current and ``two times CO2'' conditions. If we look at that thing on the right, instead of comparing A+B with B+C, I will compare A+B with B only. It is just the overlap with no migration in this scenario. It does not really change things much for tundra, because tundra does not go anywhere, it just gets encroached upon. It is already at the top of the planet. It cannot go anywhere; it just reduces in area. You will notice that, in the boreal forest, there is a potential for 8 per cent loss of species. For tropical broad leaf forests, there is a potential for 1 per cent loss of species, which does not sound like much, but it could potentially involve hundreds of thousands of species.
This begs the question: Is the amount of migration we are asking of species a problem? How fast can species go anyway? It turns out that we do not know, which surprised me.
I would have thought that we would know how fast trees are able to migrate. It turns out we do not really know at all. In fact, we have had a hard time figuring out how the trees could possibly have moved as quickly when they followed the retreating glacier.
Fortunately, though, we have good data on that, because as ecosystems moved they left their fingerprints in the bottom of lakes. We can core down into the bottom of a look at the pollen, and reconstruct what happened on the shores of that lake over time. We have very good information on how fast plants moved when they followed the glaciers.
It turns out that plant population people have a very hard time figuring out how plants could possibly have moved as fast as they did. However, now I will ask how fast we are asking them to move compared to those fast rates? The way we can do that is very simple. If we think about that little tree in the new range up there at the end of that arrow had to get there somehow. The simplest assumption is that it came from the nearest possible place where it occurs right now, somewhere in A. That is the nearest possible source. We have a distance from where it was in A to where that little tree is now. We divide that distance by the time period, which in this case is 100 years, and we have a migration rate. We can calculate the required migration rates of global warming with this migration rate record we have following the glaciers.
It turns out that it is not a very pretty picture, because usually rates observed following the glaciers were in the order of about 200 meters per year. That is how fast trees moved on average to follow the glaciers. There is great stuff on the web where you can see the pollen data, and people actually plotted it spatially so you can watch. They show the glaciers, and you can watch black spruce follow the glacier as it shows up in the pollen record.
Average rates are 100 metres to 200 meters per year. Faster than 1,000 meters per year is very rare in the glacier record. About 15 per cent of the globe is at rates at about 1,000 meters a year.
The Chairman: Let us say you have a tree that is 70 feet high and the seeds are at the top of the tree. Let us assume that you have prevailing westerly winds that will blow those seeds miles away. That is the way much of our natural seeding is done now. How do you calculate that in your model? The seeds from those spruce trees can be carried for miles by the prevailing westerly winds.
Mr. Malcolm: This is the dilemma. It is called Reid's paradox. You can put out fruit traps and measure the seed fall and put them whatever distances away and establish how long it takes for a seed to grow up and create its own seeds. That kind of migration is not fast enough to follow the glaciers. Reid pointed this out back in 1800s. He thought, how on earth could they have moved that quickly. If you think about 100 meters or 200 meters a year, that is actually pretty darn quick, because these things take so long to grow up and produce their own seeds.
You raised the critical issue. If you think about that dispersal function, it turns out that you can get tree populations to move as fast as we saw them following the glaciers if you allow for very long distance but very rare dispersal events. People actually put an infinite tail on that dispersal function. They use an exponential function. They allow for long distances and very rare things, then they can get trees to move fast enough. The problem is that is empirically, you are asking for data on an extremely rare event, so you just do not get the data because it is so rare. That is the problem in a nutshell. That is the state of the art of why we do not know how fast trees can move. We want data on something that is so extremely rare.
This shows rates above 1,000 meters a year, and I am using 1,000 meters a year as something that is rare. It is a metric of a potential ``problem.'' This shows the percentage of those 14 models that show this above 1,000 meters a year. Again, poor old Finland is hard hit again and large parts of the Russia. Canada is in eighth place with 33 per cent of our land area showing these high migration rates.
This slide shows just the boreal zone to be a Canadian and Russian phenomenon. The colour black shows the observed post-glacial rates for spruce. These are the rates we saw as it followed the glacier. Notice I said the mean was down around 100 meters to 200 meters a year. That first class is zero to 325 meters a year. The black histogram bar is very small. The greys show what global warming would require for the boreal zone. You can see for that a large portion of the boreal zone global warming the trees would have to achieve a rate higher than 1,000 meters per year.
I thought that those two sets of information are not close at all. However, you must consider the 100-year divisor. It was of interest to us to see what kind of time scale it would take to get global warming to be at the same time rate as the glaciers were moving. I allowed the time period to go from 100 years, 200 years, 300 years, 400 years, and 500 years, until I could get those two sets of data in agreement. If you allow it to get big enough, you can get very good agreement. This shows the lack of agreement as a function of the time period. Notice that you only get good agreement when the curve is at a minimum at 1,000 years.
The Chairman: How can you get it to speed up?
Mr. Malcolm: I am trying to get them to slow down. Let us imagine I am the dictator of the planet and can say that instead of doubling CO2 concentrations in 100 years I will double them in 200 years. The question is how much would we have to slow it down in order to get post-glacial type rates? The answer is 1,000 years.
We would have to decrease the rate of warming by an order of magnitude 10 times in order to approximate glacial rates. This is a very complicated way of saying a very simple thing. We are asking species to move an order of magnitude faster than they did following the glaciers.
Senator Day: Are you referring to the Kyoto Protocol when you are talking about terms of slowing down?
Mr. Malcolm: Exactly. There is an upside to this. Notice the shape of the curve, which you expect from an inverse function. It means that a slight decrease in the rate at which we are throwing up emissions will have a big effect in decreasing migration rates.
The Chairman: Over what period of time?
Mr. Malcolm: You get a big bang for your bucks if you increase it from 100 years to 200 years. You get a big bang because of the shape. Notice that the decrease goes like this. The next 100, you get this much, and then that much. You get a really good marginal return on that first thing. That is a positive message. Any little bit will help a lot, is what it is saying.
If you are going to look for the answer at the end of all of this, I hate to tell you that it gets worse.
The problem is that we are not talking about a situation like we had when the glaciers were retreating. Nowadays we have Highway 401; we have Southwest Ontario; we have agricultural areas that destroy connectivity in natural ecosystems.
When I was doing these migration-rate calculations, I used ``crow-fly distances.'' My calculations began with determining where the growth should be in the future and observing where it had occurred in the past. I drew a straight line between those two points to reach my conclusion.
We can do similar calculations but recognize the barriers of agricultural areas. Instead of doing a crow-fly, we can draw along the ground around the barriers. Those are called ``terrestrial path calculations.'' Engineers see that work as a big pain, computationally speaking, but there are solutions to those problems.
The U.S. Geological Service was madly classifying the whole planet a few years ago based on weather-satellite data. I am using it like land-sat data. They have this classification that is largely agriculturally based. The medium-grey colour you see is largely agricultural area.
We factored out the migration here based on some modeling, some theoretical data, but not empirical ideas. If you take a homogeneous landscape and remove big chunks so that species cannot move easily, the removal becomes a problem when 50 per cent or the area is blocked.
You will see a big fall-off in species movement at that point. If your break the data into one-kilometre pixels, then when 55 per cent of the pixels show blockage, no effective movement of species will be made through the area.
The red area represents areas where an additional 1000 metres per year is required. First I said that 1,000 metres per year was bad, and but here yet another additional 1,000 metres is needed.
I will focus now on two areas. One is the northern Prairies. Second is poor old Finland. Finland always gets a hard time. The squiggly, diagonal lines are agricultural development as classified from satellite data. I have graded the areas. Black areas require an additional 1,000 metres per year, so species have to move more than 2,000 metres per year because of the loss of natural habitats.
Depending on the success of our grant applications we will try to do some more work for Ontario. This work comes from a group in the United States and they present a rather sobering look at climate change. The thick black line shows the current distribution of southern red oak in the eastern United States. The red and yellow areas show potential future distribution of that plant under two-times-CO2 climate. The oak is expected to be more widely distributed and to move quite a bit north.
The yellow area shows at least a 20 per cent probability of colonization based on a model that takes into account fragmentation or loss of natural habitats. The tree can get through but it can only move at post-glacial rates. Notice the tiny area that is actually colonized by the species in this model compared to the area where it should be growing. The potential problem is that these trees will achieve a fraction of what we expect from them. It turns out that same finding is true of the four species I examined.
We have a problem of unprecedented migration rates. I have mentioned the potential for less vigorous, low- biomass, weedy forests. We are talking about conditions that favour quick-moving plants; basically weeds. The slower, late-successional species are lost.
I made the point about reducing emissions. It is not clear that adaptation is viable over the long-term; clearly it is not viable in the Arctic. There are greater economic impacts where natural regeneration is required and where adaptive responses are more limited. This is a problem in Canada more so than the United States. There are lower economic impacts in the United States because only 11 per cent of their wood comes from naturally managed systems. More and more wood is coming from highly managed, plantation-type systems.
We must let nature achieve as much as it can by maintaining connectivity in our landscapes and restoring it wherever we can. For example, there is an interesting logging plan for central Labrador that will use clear-cut logging in the boreal forest. The lighter green area shows management units; the darker green area shows protected areas. There is a highly interconnected, protected-area network in the first three areas; in the fourth area there are cut blocks. You can see how an enormous amount of connectivity can be maintained in the system even though they are harvesting wood. The sacrifice is the total amount of wood that is be taken out of the forest management area.
We are starting to look at methods that optimize migration potential and identify critical areas. The next slide shows where maple grows now, where it may grow in the future, and which areas are disproportionately important in facilitating migration. This is an interesting conservation aspect.
The Carolinian systems are in danger in southern Ontario. Some people are not concerned with these systems because they are common down south. They believe that it is not our job to preserve these northern outposts. However, these plant population models show that those outposts very much speed up the rate of migration. In facilitating migration, those outposts become disproportionately important. That is something that people are starting to look at.
Not much has been done in Canada. Unfortunately we do not have the data sets. We have to put data together from square one. We do not have good regional climate data. We need high-resolution projections and high-resolution current data. We need comprehensive information on species distribution. We need to take a variety of approaches.
Another problem is getting forestry people to pay attention. In this country we do not worry so much about intensive management in the forestry sector. We are still pretty much geared toward harvesting primary, first-cut forests.
Senator Day: Mr.Malcolm, I agree that the United States practices a much more intense forest management policy. I believe the trend in Canada is towards forest management.
What I would like to talk about the dichotomy that I see in the migration issue and trying to adapt the forests as they are cut in different areas. Natural regeneration does not always happen. Even if you could tell a forester what tree to plant in a particular area that tree will not always grow.
There are pressures from good-intentioned, non-government organizations that believe that we have to protect the existing ecosystem. They do not want to make any changes or plant trees that were different from what was cut down. Government programs are based on that philosophy. Many of the new trends in forest management, certification of good forest practices, are also based on that same concept of protecting existing ecosystems.
You are telling us that, to adapt, we have to look ahead. Are we some how not going to have to start thinking in terms of the climate change in global warming in the Canadian forest industry much more than we are up to now?
Mr. Malcolm: Yes, I agree. Those are both very good points that I agree with completely.
Your point about the movement towards intensive forest management is correct. The reality is that to ignore it is a luxury we do not have. As you cut the timber, you rely on the secondary force that is coming up. The shear amount of wood decreases. In Ontario, people talk about 2030 or so for the big crunch and there will no longer be any wood. Some units are experiencing this problem already.
We really do not have an alternative. You must go there because you can only go so far north. There is no doubt about that. At the same time, there is talk, but not a significant amount of action. People are at least thinking about it, however, and that is good.
The problem between the fundamental mandate to protect and keep as is versus actively managing for change is a huge issue. For example, Parks Canada's mandate is to keep things as they are. We are now talking about managing for change. People do not know what to do and are only really starting to think about it.
This whole idea is only making forays into the conservation or environmentalist world. You are correct that it is a fundamental change in thinking.
The solution, and where you would get agreement with the NGO world as well, is the connectivity issue. People recognize a park as an island. However, if the park is too small, you start to lose things. This is the species area ratio that is well established. Smaller parks have fewer species.
The solution to that is to connect the islands so that they can be rescued. There is common ground on that issue. The NGO world was very quick to pick up on the connectivity issue.
Senator Day: Are you referring to the corridors?
Mr. Malcolm: Exactly. It comes down to a similar sort of problem. It is an incredible challenge especially if you start to think that we may be asking too much of the systems. You are really dealing with a situation where you have the potential to lose a lot. It is a significant issue.
The Chairman: Dr.Malcolm, the Sierra Club was here and one of the things they suggested is that we need large north-south corridors to allow the migration of some of these trees and ecosystems. Do you agree with north-south corridors?
Mr. Malcolm: Absolutely. The central Labrador plan I showed was similar although taken to a management scale. This is an actual forest management plan. The appendices are full of the cut blocks. They are actually doing it on the ground.
In terms of maximizing the inherently limited areas of species, it is hard to see what else we can do.
The Chairman: Do we have to open up a border?
Mr. Malcolm: To connect natural systems, yes.
Senator Gustafson: We heard from two scientists from the United States who were very optimistic about the Canadian advantage of global warming. Are you optimistic?
Mr. Malcolm: No.
Senator Gustafson: I gathered that from the Russian experience that you mentioned.
Mr. Malcolm: The fundamental problem is that there is a huge amount of uncertainty. I have not been very optimistic because this unprecedented migration gets back to the issue: How fast can species go? The big answer from the people who best know is: ``We do not know.''
There is good evidence that trees were not maxed out when they followed the glaciers. We have a problem imagining how they could go that fast, but there is good data to indicate that they can go that fast. We however, do not know how much faster they can go. That is a fundamental problem. Maybe they will go fast enough. The people who do this kind of work cannot imagine how that would happen, but that is the situation in a nutshell.
Another problem is that we have a lack of understanding about a given forest. We do not know how long and how it will respond to warming. A large problem has arisen in the last five years in the modeling literature involving assuming that a tree's growth function is parabolic as a function of temperature: A given species does poorly at some temperatures, great at mid-temperatures and poorly at high temperatures. Naturally, if you start to increase the temperature and get over that hump, that species will show much lower growth. The mortality functions are usually linked to growth. If a tree is not growing well it is more likely to die. Some of these models will predict die-out of forests. There is some evidence in Alaskan white spruce will die off.
Other people have recognized that if you look at providence trials where you plant a species out of context, that growth function actually might look more like an arc. If the temperature warm things up the tree will grow just fine. Black spruce in Florida may be a bit of a stretch, but it is that sort of idea. If you assume that model, the effects are much less radical for a given stand.
There are fundamental uncertainties there.
Senator Gustafson: I am accused of reducing everything to my farm, but we have poplar trees that grow around the slews. The old timers have told me that poplars never grew there because of the Prairie fires. Now there are poplar trees. If you do not keep cultivating under, they will keep moving out and will do so quickly. It would be nothing for them to move out 10 feet or 20 feet a year.
Mr. Malcolm: Poplar is a really weedy species. I am not too worried about poplars in the future. They are taking over the world already. In that case, you are talking about effectively suppressing fires. One of the ways you keep trees out of grass ecosystems is by burning, because they cannot compete with grasses.
Senator Gustafson: Some naturalists argue that is the best way to do it. They do not agree with replanting either.
Mr. Malcolm: The converse problem in the boreal forest is the potential for increased frequency of fires that you may want to keep under control. The fire people tell me that is a battle you would not win because the more money you throw at it, the less you get in return, and that raises an important issue: the additional uncertainty that many of the change in forests are driven by disturbances, such as fire.
The slow rates at which certain species are moving could change a great deal depending on how you are disturbing the ecosystems and what is happening therein.
Senator Fairbairn: You showed us a slide of Glacier National Park, which is in my area of Alberta. When this committee travelled through that area, we had a presentation from a gentleman from the University of Lethbridge who gave a disturbing account of the speed with which the glaciers are melting. This is not a disputable issue because it is happening now. You are now talking about how the trees are migrating with the glacier.
Mr. Malcolm: Yes.
Senator Fairbairn: That means that the trees are migrating to different levels of elevation, which may result in a change in the species of trees that would end up in an area. They would not be the same as the primary species.
Mr. Malcolm: Where your house is situated, your current landscape will not be your future landscape.
Senator Fairbairn: Exactly. You also mentioned wildlife, which I wanted to ask you more about. Wildlife is a tremendous part of the ecosystem in those river and mountain valleys. What happens to the deer, elk, mountain sheep, moose, bears and birds?
Mr. Malcolm: To a large extent, you can take the vegetation as a proxy for the habitats that they need. Usually, animals will be more mobile; the animals respond to the vegetation change. If the vegetation is modified significantly the plant and animal communities will change dramatically. You can think of it that way.
There have been attempts through the IPCC to compile the glacier data for the world. That information is dramatic. Everywhere, glaciers are down across the planet.
We do not really want to go here because the atmosphere is our bread and butter. We depend on the atmosphere on this planet. Why would we fool with that through an uncontrolled experiment? That is not a good idea.
Wildlife is mediated through vegetation and some wildlife, such as polar bears, would become extinct. We would not have polar bears because they depend on Arctic sea ice. If there were no sea ice, there would be no polar bears. I think most Canadians would be appalled if polar bears become extinct.
Senator Fairbairn: There is so much evidence to that effect up in Churchill, Manitoba.
Mr. Malcolm: There is some truly elegant work on birds that shows the dis-equilibrium that wildlife faces. On the one hand, climate is changing, potentially quite rapidly, but the vegetation and the climate will lag. The wildlife is faced with the question of whether to follow the climate or not. There is some information from Arizona using altitudinal gradients as a proxy for that idea. The distribution of birds along that gradient follows their latitudinal distribution.
In a drought year, the birds that like dryer conditions higher up are faced with the dilemma of going to lower elevations to maintain the right climate but where they will face a different vegetation, or staying in the right vegetation and in the wrong climate. It turns out that birds follow the climate, but end up with the wrong vegetation and incur greater nesting mortality and do not forage as well. They are between a rock and a hard place. They make the decision to do one thing but it does not work out well for them. That is one of the concerns about a future world: the wrong vegetation for the climate.
The Chairman: Do you mean that they are not able to adapt?
Mr. Malcolm: That is correct. They cannot figure out what to do. They have never dealt with that kind of situation in the past.
Senator Fairbairn: If there were this movement and these difficulties with the forests and with the animals, then we will not be far behind. Is that correct?
Mr. Malcolm: We rely on the natural world much more than we think. Here we are in Ottawa and we feel buffered from the natural world. It is a joke to see people trying to put an economic value on the natural world because of all the intangibles such as clean water, air, pollution removal services, et cetera.
Everyone complained when the Clean Water Act was proposed. Everyone complained that it would cost too much money and that it could not be done. They did a retroactive study to figure out how much it would cost after the fact. It turned out that it made about $3 trillion because it increased land value and decreased expenditures for purifying water,et cetera.
We are connected with the natural world in a way that is not always obvious.
Senator Carney: You said earlier that connectivity is important for plant species and forests. I live on an island. In B.C. and in parts of Alberta there are many areas that have been set aside. One argument in favour of these islands or protected areas is for the migration of species. Is that more important now?
That policy was not introduced earlier because of climate change but because of the habitat. If you maintain enough habitats, the wolves and the grizzly bears will inhabit. ``In the path of the grizzly bears'' is the slogan used in Waterton Lakes National Parks.
Will that be more important in the future, as human populations encroach on some of those areas?
Mr. Malcolm: Yes, that is correct. If migration is a problem, and indications from modeling efforts show that it is, then it will only worsen if you start to break the natural connections.
This is one of the big take-home messages about the responses of nature to global warming. We must allow it to do what it does to achieve its potential.
If you think about natural species following the glacier, versus putting all these barriers into place then things cannot percolate through the landscape. You have exacerbated the problem. The more connectivity that you can create, the better off you are.
The Chairman: Professor Malcolm, one of the things in which we are interested is making recommendations to the government. We are interested in developing public policy.
The main thing we are discussing in this particular study is the concept of adaptation. Can you give us some key characteristics of well-designed public adaptation measures that we might want to have the government consider in terms of protecting the ecological system as you have defined it today?
Mr. Malcolm: This is an area of active research. We talk about representative protected areas. We talk about representative connectivity, focusing not on only on representation but also on connectivity.
We need a change in mindset that will start to filter into the conservation community. That is a key area.
I understand that there is logic for divorcing adaptation from mitigation, but it only makes so much sense. I will make that point again. If you are a polar bear, it does not make a whole lot of sense. You must address the problem. The best way to attack is to not have to adapt.
In a forestry context, and as well in an ecological context, the idea of trying to make sure that we maximize potential in nature is important. We should protect those outposts and outlying populations. That is a take home message.
In the forestry sector especially, we have not done baseline, basic types of analyses of some of the stuff I showed that is being done in the United States.
The Chairman: The oak is starting to move northward along the East Coast of the United States.
Mr. Malcolm: Yes, we need to do similar studies for Canadian species.
The Chairman: Why have not you done it in Canada?
Mr. Malcolm: There are numerous problems. The Canadian government tends to not make data as freely available as it is in the United States.
I spent 10 years in Florida and the government biologists there are employed to make sure that people get the data.
In some cases getting data is more difficult to obtain from the provinces than the federal government. That is an issue.
There are 100,000 permanent plots in eastern United States where they go back periodically and measure tree growth and yield. We have tiny networks in Ontario, if you can even get the data, which you cannot unless you get to know the people and get to be a part of the old boys' club.
Environment Canada is a pretty big player in global modeling. They are making efforts to downscale those models and make that data available, which is great. They are doing a good job. They recently called for climate impacts and adaptation proposals in the forestry sector and put up $500,000. They have 54 proposals for which they have accepted letters of intent. That is a pretty small pool. Five hundred thousand dollars does not go very far with 54 proposals.
It is frustrating to see that there is a huge emphasis on carbon. BIOCAP has a lot of money available for research but it is available for carbon only.
We have taken a long time to move from a pure timber perspective in forests to a broader ecosystem perspective and social perspective. Now we are moving back to a dominant product. We have moved from timber to diverse resource, and now we are moving back to carbon. It is a move backwards in my view.
The Chairman: Some professors have told us that we should be moving more to hydrogen.
Mr. Malcolm: I am talking about focusing on forests as a carbon storing entity and thinking about managing forests merely to store carbon.
The Chairman: There are many trees that do not store carbon well, certain pine trees for instance.
Mr. Malcolm: If we put back on the earth's surface all the trees that were there originally, that would cover 10 years of emissions. We are talking about a band-aid. It is not the solution to the problem.
The Chairman: Dr. Malcolm, this has been absolutely fascinating. We have thoroughly enjoyed it and would like to go on for another hour, but we cannot.
Your presentation was excellent, and we will consider it certainly when preparing to write our final report and make our recommendations. On behalf of the committee thank you very much.
Mr. Malcolm: I would like to apologize for not having the presentation ready and, perhaps, in as timely a manner as I might have, but I will send a copy to the clerk.
Senator Fairbairn: I find it the comments about the lack of access to data very troubling. If you have any particular examples of that, would you send them to the clerk so that we can have a better understanding of that? It is certainly something that we should, as senators, be trying to make as a point.
Mr. Malcolm: I did most of my graduate work in the Amazon. As I get better connected, I get to know people. I get access to data more easily that way. However, I certainly will provide some examples.
The committee adjourned.