Ontario’s Forest Fire Management Strategy
The Ministry of Natural Resources has lead responsibility for forest fire management in the province. MNR proposed its Forest Fire Management Strategy for Ontario in 2000, approving it four years later. Its intent is to establish measurable, attainable objectives for fire management that take into account the need for public safety, existing and planned infrastructure, plans for wood supply, protected areas, resource-based tourism, and wildlife habitat.
MNR’s fire strategy provides the management direction for 107 million hectares of Crown and private lands, essentially covering all the Crown land in the province outside southern Ontario. The Aviation and Forest Fire Management Branch in the ministry’s Forests Division has the primary responsibility for this program and strategy. This branch has an estimated budget of $96 million for the fiscal year 2004/2005.
Fire is a phenomenon that plays an instrumental role in shaping the ecology of entire landscapes. A few large fires that are spread over a handful of days in the fire season can consume most of the burned area in a region; in fact, approximately 3 per cent of all fires account for almost all of the area burned and most of the fire management expenditures.
Fires have burned approximately a quarter of a million hectares of forest each year in Ontario in recent decades, but the area burned varies dramatically from year to year. In contrast, almost three times this amount of forest burned prior to the introduction of forest fire suppression in the 1920s.
MNR states that recent initiatives, including the Ontario Forest Accord, have placed increased emphasis on the protection of wood supplies across the province (see Provincial Wood Supply Strategy ). The Ontario Forest Accord outlines a commitment to increasing the intensity of forest management in areas of the province designated for commercial forestry and calls for increasing the fire response priority in these areas to protect this investment from fire. At the same time, the Ministry of Natural Resources acknowledges that protecting wood supply through fire suppression may jeopardize the long-term productivity and ecological health of forests.
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Forest infestations
The ECO is concerned that there are serious inconsistencies in the Forest Fire Management Strategy, with landscape-level ecological implications. These inconsistencies are based on giving priority to short-term wood supply over the ecological role of fire in some areas. For example, Ontario has experienced repeated infestations of spruce budworm and forest tent caterpillar that have resulted in large tracts of dead or dying trees.
Fire suppression is recognized as one of the causes of such infestations due to changes in forest composition and age structure. MNR does recognize that “without fire protection, these forests would burn, renew themselves to healthy young forests, and return to productive forests more quickly.”
However, the fire strategy states that “forest harvesting is active throughout these areas and available wood supply must be protected from fire.” Clearly, the strategy is designed to protect short-term wood supply at the expense of the natural ecological and hazard-reducing role of fire on the landscape.
Forest species composition and age class imbalance
MNR also recognizes that forest harvesting and the subsequent absence of fire have altered the species composition of the forests and skewed the natural balance of tree age, resulting in forests where trees are either very young or very old. In the boreal forest, stands of softwood species such as spruce and jack pine, which thrive after fire, are being replaced with hardwoods such as trembling aspen and balsam poplar, which are intolerant of both shade and fire. Clearcutting, combined with inadequate regeneration efforts, is the main cause of this species conversion in Ontario’s boreal forest, according to many credible audits.
Prescribed burns
The ECO is concerned with the minimal role outlined in the strategy for the use of prescribed burns. Prescribed burns are carefully planned fires that are set to meet specific needs, such as burning dead and dying trees to reduce fire hazards or to regenerate a site. Catastrophic fires may occur, for example, when fires have been suppressed, because forest fuels have been allowed to accumulate that otherwise may have been consumed naturally by smaller fires. Catastrophic fires that are the result of suppression and excessive fuel loads do not mimic normally occurring forest fires, but burn with a much greater intensity and at a much larger scale.
MNR’s strategy does not contain any quantitative targets for prescribed burns, despite the use of targets for other components of the strategy. MNR states that 6,166 ha of Crown land had undergone prescribed burns in 1990/1991. A decade later, this number had dropped to only 711 ha. This trend also has been matched by a decrease in the number of prescribed burns in the area set aside for commercial forestry in Ontario, where for some years not even a single prescribed burn has been set. This reduction in the number and frequency of prescribed burns may be a direct consequence of other MNR policies: prescribed burns are now at the discretion of forestry companies, who must also bear the entire cost of planning and undertaking prescribed burns.
Fire suppression and forest-dwelling species
Fire is a landscape-level process that many of Ontario’s forest-dwelling species of flora and fauna have evolved to depend on for their survival. Shifts in species composition and age class imbalances of forests as a result of fire suppression will affect the behaviour, populations, and overall survival of many species. The ECO notes that fire is a chemical process that cannot be replaced through clearcutting and fire suppression.
For example, the forest-dwelling boreal population of woodland caribou depends upon fire as an ecological process to renew their habitat. It is not known how this policy choice – to replace naturally occurring fires with forest harvesting – will affect this species at risk.
ECO Comment
The ECO recognizes that governments face a challenging task in designing fire strategies, since they must incorporate a broad spectrum of objectives – everything from protecting public safety and infrastructure from fire to that of realizing fire’s ecological role in fire-driven landscapes. However, the ECO has significant concerns with MNR’s Forest Fire Management Strategy, which has failed to place sufficient emphasis on the rejuvenating role of fire in forest ecosystems and the management of fire risk.
There are two distinct directions that forest fire strategies may take. The first approach focuses heavily on fire suppression in order to prioritize certain objectives, such as protecting human communities and the commercial wood supply. This approach measures its success based on targets such as areas burned and the initial attack success rate – how quickly fires are contained. This approach is narrow in its view of management, since it generally concentrates resources on fires that have already ignited or will soon ignite. As such, this approach has a relatively short-term time horizon for fire management planning. What this approach gains in short-term benefits, such as a steady commercial wood supply, it sacrifices at the expense of long-term effects such as poor forest regeneration, increased fuel load, and the risk of future catastrophic fires. MNR’s strategy is modeled on this short-term perspective.
Alternatively, a second approach is to focus on managing the risk of forest fires, rather than primarily focusing resources on fires once they have already ignited. It places significant emphasis on fuels management, attempting to address the causal factors that contribute to catastrophic forest fires. This approach requires that resource planners in both government and the forest industry actively plan up front for fires – decades before they may occur. In doing so, fuel loads are managed and future fires that do occur will burn in a more controlled fashion, and at the same time, in a way that recognizes their ecological role. The protection of communities and infrastructure remains a priority of paramount importance, but the risk of fires endangering public safety is actively planned for through the use of prescribed burning and ecologically sensible thinning operations to reduce fuel loads. This proactive approach also costs far less.
In contrast to MNR, the U.S Forest Service has recently rejected the suppression-oriented approach and has re-focused its strategy on managing fire risk at a landscape level. Despite the fact that the U.S Forest Service had reached a 99 per cent initial attack success rate – higher than MNR’s own targets in the Forest Fire Management Strategy – the Forest Service had been incurring record-setting costs, losses, and damages in fire areas where severe, catastrophic fire should have been rare. The U.S. Forest Service realized that devastating fires were continuing to occur because they had been attempting to manage the landscape to protect everything from the commercial wood supply to human communities, but not in ways that were consistent with the ecological dynamics of fire-driven landscapes.
The ECO is concerned that the MNR’s Forest Fire Management Strategy contains little discussion of the methods that could be used to reduce fuel loads. For example, while the fire strategy does contain targets for suppression activities, it does not contain any targets for prescribed burning. In contrast, British Colombia has reviewed its fire strategies and is shifting toward a risk-based approach to fire and land management. Some of B.C’s key recommendations for reducing fuel buildup include fuel treatment projects and assessments near urban areas, on-site burning of slash to reduce the risk of fire, and training more professionals.
The approach of both the U.S. Forest Service and B.C.’s fire program strongly emphasizes the role of public education and awareness. While MNR does include these goals under one of its objectives, the ministry’s fire strategy does not contain any measurable targets in this regard. This is a significant weakness, as fire management can be a very controversial undertaking. U.S. Forest Service targets related to education include the number of communities that have adopted forest fire safety practices. In contrast, the B.C. fire program review also recommended strategies for fireproofing at-risk communities, mandating zoning and building code changes to reduce risks, and pilot projects that would enhance safety and economic benefits.
The ECO notes that the goal of a progressive fire strategy should not be to eradicate fire, but rather to allow for naturally occurring fires that are within acceptable limits and that do not threaten public safety. The goal of such strategies should be the long-term ecological health of forests. These strategies should allow, as well as reintroduce, the right kind of fire in terms of burning intensity, duration, and time of year. The ECO also believes that MNR should develop policies that require forestry companies to conduct prescribed burns, while outlining a direct and supporting role for the ministry in the process.
(For a detailed review of Ontario’s Forest Fire Management Strategy, see the Supplement to this report, pages 198-208.)
| Recommendation 6:
The ECO recommends that MNR require forestry companies to utilize prescribed burns where appropriate, while outlining a direct and supporting role for the ministry in the process. |
| This is an article from the 2004/05 Annual Report to the Legislature from the Environmental Commissioner of Ontario. |
Citing This Article:
Environmental Commissioner of Ontario. 2005. ""Ontario's Forest Fire Management Strategy." Planning our Landscape, ECO Annual Report, 2004-05. Toronto, ON : Environmental Commissioner of Ontario. 75-79.
