Forest Change — the Canadian Forest Service Program On

XIV WORLD FORESTRY CONGRESS, Durban, South Africa, 7-11 September 2015 Forest Change — the Canadian Forest Service program on adaptation to climate change Catherine Ste-Marie1, Pierre Bernier2, Brian Eddy2, Jason Edwards2, Sylvie Gauthier2, Anne-Hélène Mathey2, Dan McKenney2, Richard Parfett2, John Pedlar2, David Price2, Graham Stinson2 [email protected], Canadian Forest Service, Natural Resources Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada 2 Canadian Forest Service, Natural Resources Canada, Canada Abstract Past climate change has affected Canada’s forests and forest sector, and more impacts are projected in the future. Because of their northern location, Canada’s forests are being exposed to more severe changes in climate than the global average. As well, Canada’s forests grow slowly, and those regenerating today will experience a very different climate as they mature, particularly in 60 to 100 years. Thus, forest management decisions taken today have long-term consequences. Monitoring and reporting on climate change impacts is especially challenging in Canada, given the extent and remoteness of its forest landscape. Forest Change, a Government of Canada program run by the Canadian Forest Service of Natural Resources Canada, is designed to provide integrated information that can be incorporated into operational, strategic, and policy decision-making for climate change adaptation. Forest Change delivers information on past trends and future projections of climate change impacts on the forest and the forest sector. Multidisciplinary knowledge on future forest conditions (disturbance regimes, productivity, and composition) is also being generated within an integrated framework to assess and communicate the biophysical, socioeconomic, and policy implications of climate change. This paper presents the approach and the key knowledge products of Forest Change as well as the specific challenges and lessons learned through the delivery of the program. Keywords: climate change, adaptation, forest management, Canada, climate change impacts, indicators, integrated assessment, forests Introduction, scope and main objectives Past climate change has affected Canada’s forests, and future changes are projected to have significant biophysical and socioeconomic consequences (Price et al. 2013, Gauthier et al. 2014a). Because of their northern location, Canada’s forests are being exposed to more severe changes in climate than the global average. As well, Canada’s forests grow slowly, and those regenerating today will experience a very different climate as they mature, particularly in 60 to 100 years. Thus, forest management decisions taken today have long-term consequences. For several decades, the Canadian Forest Service (CFS) of Natural Resources Canada has conducted a broad range of biophysical science and socioeconomic research on climate change impacts. In 2011, a program called Forest Change was initiated when the CFS was allocated funding over five years to contribute to the Government of Canada’s efforts to help Canadians adapt to a changing climate. A number of key features of Canadian forests influenced the development of Forest Change: 1) Canada’s 348 million ha forest area is challenging to monitor because of its size and remoteness from human habitation or road access. While remote sensing technologies have become increasingly useful for forest monitoring over large landscapes, some indicators of forest change cannot be easily monitored remotely. Monitoring properties and reporting impacts over such a large forest area in a timely manner and at an adequate scale for decision-making can be challenging and expensive. 2) Most of Canada’s forests are on publicly owned lands. Canada’s 10 provinces and three territories have the constitutional responsibility for management of 90% of Canada’s forest area. To support adaptation effectively, relevant information needs to be mainstreamed into forest management decision-making at all levels, from operational to strategic to policy. These decisions are made by a diversity of players outside of Canadian federal government departments. 3) Climate change impacts are determined by the level of exposure to change and the sensitivity of forest ecosystems and the forest sector to these changes (Johnston et al. 2010). Both exposure and sensitivity will vary across the country. Understanding the implications of climate change for the forest sector requires knowledge from many biophysical and socioeconomic disciplines, the cross-disciplinary integration of information from various sources, and the translation of this information into terms relevant to policy. Forest Change was developed to build upon existing CFS capacity and expertise; it has three major components: 1) a tracking system to inform and raise awareness about the ongoing and upcoming changes; 2) an adaptation toolkit to support implementation of climate change adaptation; and 3) an integrated assessment to understand potential climate change impacts and vulnerabilities within the Canadian forest sector. This paper presents the approach used to develop these three components, the main accomplishments to date, and lessons learned. Methodology/approach The Tracking System The Forest Change tracking system is an online portal designed to present information that is relevant to strategic forest management decision-making and policy formulation in Canada. We conducted a broad consultation with researchers across all five regional CFS centres and a workshop with forest sector stakeholders. From this consultation, we identified 141 potential climate change indicators that fell within three broad systems: climate (e.g., drought indices), forest (e.g., annual forest fire statistics), and human (e.g., community evacuations). We also carried out a scan of emerging or existing climate change indicator initiatives relevant to forestry at the national and international levels. Using this information, we selected the first indicators for the tracking system based on their potential value in raising awareness of ongoing changes, on the feasibility of their development, and on the demand by stakeholders for this information (see Gauthier et al. [2014b] for further details). Given the size and diversity of Canada’s forest domain, selected indicators have to be relevant across broad geographic scales. Indicators also need to be reported at a spatial resolution useful for decision- making. To this end, several indicators of changes in the forest system were developed using forest properties monitored by satellite (e.g., Guindon et al. 2014) and by national-scale monitoring programs such as Canada’s National Forest Inventory (see also Beaudoin et al. 2014). The Adaptation Toolkit The adaptation toolkit is intended to deliver information that can be easily incorporated into forest management planning and decision-making. To develop a useful toolkit, efforts are being invested in “knowledge exchange” — a two-way process by which an organization communicates its capacity and identifies what end-users need in order to include climate considerations into decision-making. Knowledge exchange between the developers of knowledge products and the potential end-users helps identify information gaps (availability), how to best deliver knowledge products to end-users (accessibility), and how to format the information to optimize its incorporation into decisions (applicability). As part of toolkit development, resources are being allocated to accelerate ongoing projects within CFS and deliver usable information such as maps, decision-support systems, and knowledge syntheses. The Integrated Assessment This component brings together biophysical and socioeconomic scientific information into an integrated framework to assess potential implications for Canada’s forests and forest sector. The assessment focuses on certain areas, defined in consultation with CFS senior management and policy analysts in the early phase of the program. A workshop with CFS managers, scientists, economists, and policy analysts was conducted to identify the key questions around which the assessment would be structured: 1. How will the climate change in Canada? 2. What are the projected effects of climate change on disturbance regimes? 3. How will forest productivity and composition change as a result of climate change? 4. How will climate change affect timber supply? 5. What effects will climate change have on the industry supply chain? 6. What impacts will there be on communities? 7. What impacts should specific regions be concerned about? Research teams addressed each specific question through research and modelling using common baseline (1981–2010) and projected climate data (Representative Concentration Pathways [RCPs] 2.6, 4.5, and 8.5 from the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) over standard 30-year time periods (2011–2040, 2041–2070, and 2070–2100).The sequence of questions follows a general progression of cumulative impacts, so that the research and modelling results for one question contribute input to subsequent questions. Model outputs were analysed at regional and national scales. Key findings are being summarized based on the significance of the impact, the likelihood of occurrence, the relevance to CFS mandate, and the current priorities of the federal government. Integration into science policy was guided by a framework using an information ecology approach, detailed by Eddy et al. (2014). Results The Tracking System Although the tracking

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