XIV WORLD CONGRESS, Durban, South Africa, 7-11 September 2015

Forest Change — the Canadian 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, , Ottawa, Ontario, Canada 2 Canadian Forest Service, Natural Resources Canada, Canada

Abstract

Past climate change has affected Canada’s 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, 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 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 system was initially envisaged as a system for monitoring current trends and past changes, the scope was extended for some indicators to include future projections. Presenting future projections alongside tracking data provides a useful synthesis of knowledge, as long as the distinction between data and projections is clearly made. Nineteen indicators were selected to form the Forest Change initial tracking system (Table 1). Most of these indicators relate to the biophysical system, which highlights the difficulty in developing metrics that clearly capture the impact of climate change on human activities and can be geospatially reported across broad scales (Gauthier et al. 2014b). Of these 19 initial indicators, we have currently completed the documentation for 13; others are in various stages of completion.

Table 1: The 19 indicators of the Forest Change tracking system and their stage of development

System Dimension Indicator Stage of development Climate Drought Climate moisture Past trends and projections completed index Palmer drought Past trends and projections completed severity index Soil moisture index Past trends and projections completed Fire season Start of fire season Past trends and projections completed End of fire season Past trends and projections completed Length of fire season Past trends and projections completed Growth conditions Length of growing Past trends and projections completed season Forest Tree species Distribution of tree Baseline (2001) distribution for 112 forest species and distribution species projections of climate envelopes for thousands of plant species completed Fire regime Annual area burned Past trends and projections completed Number of large fires Past trends and projections completed Tree mortality Percent annual loss of Past trends since 2000 completed for some regions living tree biomass Pest incidence Pest species Past trends and projections of climatic suitability distribution completed for major past species Forest growth and Radial growth trends Past trends completed for Picea mariana (black productivity spruce, a common tree found in almost all regions of Canada); projections completed for six species including P. mariana Phenology Timing of budburst Under development Human Cost of fire Wildfire suppression Past trends completed protection expenditures Wildfire Number of Past trends completed evacuations evacuations, evacuees and home losses Evacuations locations Past trends completed Wildland urban Population at risk of Under development interface forest fire Transportation Freeze-thaw of winter Under development roads

The Adaptation Toolkit

Efforts to improve the availability, accessibility, and applicability of CFS science products to forest sector decision-makers resulted in gathering a number of existing or newly developed tools under the Forest Change adaptation toolkit. These tools include documented procedures to perform vulnerability assessments within the forest sector (developed by the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers; Williamson et al. 2012, Edwards et al. 2015), model-based maps of shifts in climatically suitable ranges of tree and plant species (McKenney et al. 2014, McKenney 2015a), information syntheses (e.g., Aubin et al. 2011, Beardmore and Winder 2011, Gauthier et al. 2014a, Pedlar et al. 2011, Pedlar et al. 2012, Price et al. 2013, Ste-Marie et al. 2011, Ste-Marie 2014), and decision- support tools for the movement of seed sources to areas where they may have better conditions for growth (McKenney 2015b). Maps of fire regime zones, of projected changes in fire regimes (Boulanger et al. 2013; 2014), and of projected drought indices were also produced. Several other tools are currently in preparation: analyses and maps of tree species and forest biomass at risk of disturbances (such as major forest pests) and extreme events (windstorms); evaluations of population dependence on forest-sector employment or exposure to health and safety issues related to forest fires; and maps of forest vulnerability, incorporating forest sensitivity using the functional trait approach as well as Canada-wide assessments of potential changes in tree growth under climate change. Work is also continuing to evaluate the impacts of cumulative disturbances on forest properties and their interactions (e.g., forest composition and fire frequency).

The Integrated Assessment

The integrated assessment provides Canada with analyses of the effects of climate change under different scenarios on Canada’s forests and forest sector, from the present to 2100. Projected impacts include those related to fire, pests and diseases, drought, windstorms, changes in forest composition and productivity, and resulting effects on timber supply. The integrated assessment helps identify specific regions where the risk or the opportunity of climate change effects for the forest industry could be particularly high under different climate change scenarios and for certain time periods. Potential impacts on timber supply and industry competitiveness, and other areas of potential vulnerability within the forest sector and communities, are being investigated. The integrated assessment also highlights the importance of proactive adaptation: even under the most optimistic scenario, climate change would require adaptive forest planning and management. The integration of multiple sources of information required significant standardization of assumptions and reporting protocols. Nevertheless, the integrated assessment helps describe, however coarsely, the potential biophysical and socioeconomic risks posed by climate change to Canada’s forest sector under different scenarios. This initial assessment succeeds as a scoping exercise. Future iterative analysis with additional information can build on the initial assessment, reducing uncertainty and refining results as part of an ongoing adaptive management approach. Several knowledge products will also be generated from the integrated assessment modelling efforts, and these products will be included in the adaptation toolkit.

Discussion

A fundamental step to support adaptation is the adequate tracking and reporting of climate change impacts. The approach taken to develop the tracking system was to focus on a limited number of the most relevant indicators, building on existing capacity and using remote sensing data to produce national maps of climate change impacts on Canada’s vast forests. Greater emphasis was placed on developing indicators related to the climate and forest domains because CFS’ expertise is concentrated in the biophysical sciences. We are currently developing a better understanding of the spatial distribution and socioeconomic aspects of populations within the forest domain. This improved understanding has promising applications in developing information on the vulnerability of the human system to climate change. The tracking system provides a framework that can incorporate additional indicators developed internally or by partner organizations. Furthermore, there is interest in adding more detailed indicators that exist at regional scales within Canada but are not available nationally. Adaptation requires the incorporation of climate change considerations into forest management decisions. By investing efforts in improving the availability, accessibility, and applicability of CFS science, a number of knowledge products were developed, some of which are already being used by decision-makers outside CFS. Knowledge exchange is a key principle of the program and has focused on enhancing the dialogue between the CFS, as a federal research and policy organization, and other forest-sector stakeholders. Challenges associated with identifying the target audiences within the many institutions, organizations, and individuals that make up the forest sector have been identified. Fortunately, the CFS has a history of collaboration with provinces and territories through the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers, a body involving federal, provincial, and territorial governments, which identified climate change as a top priority for Canada’s forest sector in 2008. Ongoing dialogue among provincial and federal scientists, as well as products and information generated by these scientists, has created a common understanding of the adaptation issue. Institutions such as provincial government agencies and industry associations provide a ready-made avenue for establishing, maintaining, and enhancing knowledge exchange, but the forest sector includes many other players. Municipalities, insurance and financial institutions, and health and safety boards may also be involved in or influenced by the forest sector. Knowledge exchange with this broader group may not only provide them with necessary climate-change-related information to support their decision-making, but would also benefit Forest Change through improving our understanding of the needs for climate change information. The integrated assessment provides a framework to integrate a range of scientific and socioeconomic information in order to address policy questions. Conducting an assessment of this type presented a number of challenges. There were challenges associated with the use of common data standards and formats, with data exchange among teams, as well as with communicating across disciplines. We have observed that scientists and policy analysts have different views of confidence levels and uncertainties. Climate change uncertainties are dependent on time (e.g., longer-term projections are less certain than shorter-term ones), space (e.g., data coverage may not be complete for all areas or at multiple scales), and subject area (e.g., changes in fire regimes are better documented than those in forest diseases). When policy analysts translated these uncertainties from models into impacts on industry competitiveness, the uncertainties were magnified. This was the first experience for both the scientific and policy teams at CFS to work together on an integrated assessment of this type and scope.

Conclusions/outlook

In the first four years of Forest Change, the CFS established its three foundational components — the tracking system, the adaptation toolkit, and the integrated assessment — to support Canada’s adaptation to climate change. Dedicated resources (staff and funds), clear priorities and timelines, as well as governance structures that included both scientists and management, contributed to the focus and coordination of the CFS research agenda on climate change adaptation.

Although the program has had notable achievements, substantial progress remains to be made on several fronts. First, scientific uncertainty remains high and continued research is needed to reduce uncertainties and improve the accounting for and communication of uncertainty of climate change information. Second, additional indicators need to be developed to more fully meet decision-makers’ needs. Third, the Forest Change integration framework needs to be enhanced to enable more nimble and responsive interoperability and collaboration. These challenges call for an integrated systems approach to science across disciplines and between science and policy. While the focus of the Forest Change program has been supporting adaptation to climate change for , much of the program could be relevant beyond Canada’s forests.

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the contribution of more than approximately 70 CFS staff across Canada and the advice of CFS managers, in particular Mike Fullerton, Kelvin Hirsch, and Vincent Roy, in all the phases of development of Forest Change. We also recognize the contribution and collaborative work of our colleagues and collaborators from academia and other government agencies, both in Canada and abroad. Funding for this project has been provided through the federal multi-agency Clean Air Agenda program. The views expressed in this information product are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of FAO.

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