How Can You Help Fight Wildfires and Build a Better Future?
“Woah, look at those biiiig trees,” hollered my three-year-old, gaping at the logging truck lumbering through the intersection of our small town. “What are they doing with all those logs?”
In toddler English, I explained the lifecycle of trees destined for lumber, from forest to mill to brand new house for some other boy or girl. For the rest of the drive to the trailhead, he peppered me with building questions I didn’t know the answers to.
Once we arrived in the forest, we hiked beneath a needled canopy. My son ran from tree to tree, patting the rough trunks rising with kinnikinnick dappled with the orange sunlight of wildfire season. The mountains were shrouded with a brownish haze today: somewhere upwind, the lifecycle of a million trees were abruptly ending as smoke in our nostrils.
It seems part of the Canadian road trip experience to drive behind a logging truck. And, unfortunately, sniffing wildfire smoke in the summer is now a coast-to-coast reality. So, too, are housing affordability conversations that raise heartrates faster than a steep uphill.
No wonder. Right now, according to Statistics Canada, there are eight million Canadians searching for an affordable place to live, translating to six million new homes that need to exist by 2030.
That’s a lot of biiig trees. Luckily, over 40 per cent of Canada is covered with the perfect, renewable building material: wood. As a world leader in sustainable management of forests, the Canadian forestry industry can play a huge role in getting walls up and wildfire risk down.
Construction pace needs to triple to reach the 2030 target, and that doesn’t factor in losses of homes and their building material to wildfires. The forest sector can help, says Forestry For The Future, a site by the Forest Products Association of Canada that is dedicated to informing and advocating for sustainable forestry.
How? Put Canadian wood at the heart of the national housing strategy and foresters on wildfire defence.
Frames
To keep pace with demand for new affordable homes, the construction industry needs to be able to scale output. Current building pace translates to reaching only a third of the six million homes target in the next five years. This is partially thanks to the approvals and permit processes, which can take months. However, actual construction timelines can stretch across the seasons as well.
Creating a national building code that includes nationally certified prefabricated wood systems—such as mass timber construction—can streamline and speed up projects.
Mass timber, which envelopes engineered wood products—such as cross-laminated timber panels, glulam beams and plywood sheathing used for building roofs to floors—are created by binding smaller bits of wood together. The result is a strong, durable, fire-resistant product that is very sustainable compared to concrete or steel. In fact, using mass timber can lower a building’s upfront carbon by 25 per cent. As long as the building stands, that carbon is neatly and functionally stored away.
By prioritizing Canadian made mass-timber and other domestically sourced wood-based solutions, well-built, quick built and affordable homes aren’t beyond the average Canadian’s dreams. Many mass-timber products are already manufactured in communities spanning the country. Plus, wood-first incentives will keep Canadian mill jobs secure while keeping costs and onsite waste low. Win-win!
Wood is the world’s most renewable resource, and sustainable forestry means healthy forests can provide value to both humans and wildlife far into the future. When you look at all the benefits of building with wood—insulation value, tensile strength, limited processing time and green advantage, to name a few—it’s obvious that a focus on Canadian wood and wood products can help us get ahead of the housing crisis. But as wildfires burn hotter and more frequently, turning wood and homes alike to ash, we need to get ahead of the fires too. Luckily, healthy managed forests can also withstand wildfire pressure.
Flames
As boots on the kinnikinnick carpeted ground, Canada’s forest sector can contribute to active forest management to keep forests healthy and resistant to wildfires. Dead or dying wood and debris are a tinder bundle, just waiting for a spark to land. Many of our forests have high fuel loads thanks to insect damage and aging trees, increasing the intensity of and susceptibility to the resulting flames.
Foresters employ modern harvesting methods that mimic natural growth cycles and natural disturbance via targeted thinning. If local communities can do their own risk mapping, foresters can prioritize thinning local high risk and high fuel areas and harvest those tinder boxes—older, dead or debris carpeted stands. Once harvested and replanted with trees adapted to projected climate conditions, these regenerated stands will be less susceptible to fires in the future.
Often, the wood harvested in these high-risk areas is considered low grade. Some mass timber products can be made from low-grade wood, but unlike the logs on the back of the truck my son admired, much of it isn’t suitable for building. Most debris, fire-damaged trees and slash piles can be turned into clean heat, electricity and bioproducts useful in making a new house a home. Not only does this create bioeconomic value out of wood that would otherwise litter the ground and fuel the next smoky fire, but it can also support rural and northern jobs and cut carbon emissions.
Besides addressing the gas canister that is many of our forests, fighting fire with fire in the form of cultural burns has been an effective strategy for millennia. Indigenous-led fire stewardship can inform prescribed burns today, slashing fire risks while magnifying biodiversity.
Flames don’t pause for red tape, so Forestry For The Future advocates for federal policies surrounding forest management plans to be viewed through a wildfire lens to reduce delays in all these locally assessed preventative actions. Their overarching goal is to protect habitat, fire fighters and precious homes.
Affordable housing and wildfire prevention are unavoidable issues standing in the way of Canadians and Canadian wildlife today, and it only makes sense the hardworking forest sector can contribute to the solutions.
Your part is easy: Visit Forestry For The Future to take action and email your MP with these ideas on how the Canadian forestry sector can help with the housing crisis and wildfires.
This article is sponsored by Forestry For The Future
Canada is home to some of the world’s largest and most diverse forests, covering over 361 million hectares of land. These forests can be a considerable climate change assets — whether serving as a critical carbon sink or providing the sustainably-sourced, renewable products we need to reduce our carbon footprint, our forests have a critical role to play in our collective fight against climate change.
But how we manage them matters.
