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Forestry in Saskatchewan: Dealing with a Changing Climate
What are some climate change impacts that are expected for forestry?
- Longer growing seasons and higher temperatures could mean improved tree growth, if water and other conditions are not limiting.
- More frequent and extreme droughts mean increased risk of stress on trees; higher frequency and intensity of forest fires with a longer fire season.
- Decreased severity and length of winters mean less time for winter operations and risk of thawing damage to trees during winter warm spells.
- Increased risk of insects and diseases could mean more damage, losses, and management challenges.
- Shifts in suitable climate zones mean shifts in species distributions. Conditions may be more suitable to different types of trees and require the use of different or new species in regeneration.
How can producers adapt to decrease the negative effects of climate change and increase the positive effects? Ideas include:
- Find out what climate changes are occurring now and estimate current vulnerability to these effects.
- Find out more about future climate change trends (link with the climate change section) and their possible effects.
- Estimate how sensitive your operations and plans are to these changes.
- Evaluate your options to determine which management practices work the best in a changing climate.
- Use water, energy, and soil conservation practices.
- Use improved safety procedures to deal with effects of extreme weather events such as destructive wind storms, heat waves, intense rain storms and floods.
- Enhance the capability to deal with modified fire, drought, insect and pest regimes.
- Investigate FIRESMART techniques for decreasing vulnerability to extreme fire events.
- Maintain forest health and biodiversity with improved sustainable forest management.
- Work towards building a flexible and resilient forest management system that will be able to cope with change and surprise.
Where can I find out more?
- Adaptation to climate change in forest management, by Dave Spittlehouse and Bob Stewart; BC Journal of Ecosystems and Management, Volume 4, Number 1, 2003.
- Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation: A Canadian Perspective (Forestry Chapter)
- FIRESMART planning manuals from Canadian Forestry Service and provincial fire management agencies
- Forestry C-CIARN
- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability Report
- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Synthesis Report
- Prairie Adaptation Research Collaborative
- SaskAdapt
