Last year, a forest fire consumed nearly 2,000 hectares near
Porters Lake. Last week, a fire burned 800 hectares near Spryfield,
destroying eight homes. Stephen King looks at those fires and sees
climate change.
Before retiring last year, King was manager of HRM’s climate change
department, and won wide acclaim. One of King’s many accomplishments
was the development of the Climate Change Risk Management Strategy;
published in December 2007, that document is an exhaustive look at how
Halifax will be impacted by climate change, and what the city can do
about it.
King contacted me after I wrote a short blog post suggesting that
warmer and drier April weather was a contributing factor in the
Spryfield fire. (See thecoast.ca/bites.)
“You’re right,” says King. “Climate change doesn’t cause these
things, but it sure contributes—the risk is getting higher.”
The CCRMS directly tells the city to “anticipate [an] increase [in]
incidents and range of forest fires due to changes in temperature and
precipitation bringing about extended hot dry conditions,” and says the
city planning department should prepare for that risk.
“It is important to not let these critical pieces of work wither on
the vine until it’s too late,” says King. “The sustainability plans and
strategies—clean air, land, water and energy—I developed for HRM
were mostly from a pragmatic operational perspective. Each prioritizes
the actions, who is responsible and performance measures.”
King fears his work is being discarded and ignored, just as the
realities of climate change hit home.
The evidence for climate change is irrefutable and abundant, says
King, pointing at an increase in extended dry periods and the
appearance of new pests, diseases and invasive species that are
migrating further north. He says the city’s lake monitoring program has
discovered an alarming trend—the high bacteria counts that used to
come in July are starting to appear in April. And summertime smog
inversion layers, once a rare occurrence, are happening a few times
every year.
“These things are happening,” says King. “I don’t give a shit what
you call it, they’re happening, and we’ve got to do some things—and
one of the things we have the most control over is land use.”
In terms of forest fires, planners can guide development into less
risky areas and away from fire-prone areas, and can insist on setbacks
between developments and woodland, and the use of fire-retarding
building materials. In retrospect, the relatively new houses destroyed
by fire last week seem almost designed for the catastrophe—they were
on large wooded lots along Fortress and Aaron Roads, streets that wind
back into the forest with no setbacks from the wildlands.
“You’ve got to keep banging away at that stuff. And with our
development regulations have to be part of it.”
HRM planning director Austin French did not return repeated phone
calls and an email requesting an interview for this article. The
silence doesn’t surprise King.
“At the first stages of the regional plan, six or seven years ago, I
remember that Planning, and Austin in particular, were very, very
reluctant to talk about climate change,” says King. “Their rationale,
for what it’s worth, was that the more we knew about something, it
brought a greater [legal] risk upon us.
“The planners will argue, ‘The building code we don’t have a lot of
jurisdiction over, it’s provincial,'” continues King. “Well, that’s
kind of bull, because you can lobby hard, and if it’s something that
impacts human health and safety, then that does fall under municipal
jurisdiction.”
Another example of planning department indifference to climate
change, says King, arose when HRM By Design, the downtown planning
initiative now being debated at City Hall, was being designed. King was
pushing for the inclusion of tough energy efficiency standards for new
construction.
“Our building and planning people, behind the scenes, they were
getting a little ticked—‘It’s not our jurisdiction, who’s this
environmental crusader, eco-terrorist?’ And they really fought hard.
They pushed back hard on it, and it didn’t get in.”
Still, King says it’s not too late for the bureaucracy to adopt a
“sustainability filter.”
Related Stories
How the Spryfield fire started
Climate change and the Spryfield fire
This article appears in May 7-13, 2009.
yeah,a fire can be a real life horror story.just like the other king,he is absolutely right there.having survived a house fire in the 90’s,i can tell you first hand,you will never be the same later on.you lose stuff that can be replaced,but pets and people cannot be.we had a boarding hoe for cats and dogs while the local animal shelter was having troubles,in bridgewater,and lost 16 pets/friends that were on their last chance at life.these were all rescued animals,but we also lost our own pet/friends too.there was no difference in whether they were ours or someone else’s.they died and my wife at the time,and i still feel terrible for the tradgedy that unfolded that day.count yourselves lucky people of spryfield,and anywhere else,it could have been a whole lot worse.
Are you kidding me???????? A forest fire is not evidence of climate change. If that were so, Climate change is not man made. I can assure you, as long as their have been forests, their have been fires. Typically a forest fire gets out of hand because of the amount of debris on the forest floor. smaller periodic forest fires tend to burn only this debris. However when we put out every fire that comes along in a certain area, eventually there is enough fuel laying around to makle matters worse. In western canada forest fires are periodically intentionally set, in a controlled manner to burn off this debris, thus protecting the forest from a major burn.
To say that a forest fire is evidence of climate change is ridiculos. A forest fire is evidence of increased human interferance in the ecology of the forest. (IE kids playing with matches, debris build up.) But I can assure you, There have been fires every year for the past 500 million years.
This is the most stupid article I have ever read. Forest Fires are part of nature… yes this one happened in april which is unusual but, shit happens. The fire in Porters Lake last year happened in June, so that disputes a trend.
I just heard on the CBC radio someone saying that you should make a 10 meter zone around your home with no vegetation and then another 20 meters around that with treated forest cover meaning “remove all forest litter” The man speaking knew the difference between conifer and deciduous trees, but clearly doesn’t understand how plants grow. They need food, which just so happens to be forest litter.
So to sum this whole thing up,: forest fires are natural, and by removing forest litter you create an unhealthy forest. And I remember that Point Pleasent Park used to do this until Juan. So just hope the trees in your “Safety Zone” are less than 10 meters tall or they are going to fall on your house.
Oh and The Coast…
Stop publishing stupid BULLSHIT stories that are a crock of shit.
Andrew, are you related to that other curmudgeonly poster, Keith? Maybe you are his son?
Mr King is a low level bureaucrat obviously blinded by green ideology. His assertion that the NS is getting drier is just plain wrong. There is a brochure published by the Canadian Council of Environment Ministers that outlines climate changes in Canada and the data presented in this paper shows that in the last 50 years maritime Canada has been getting colder and wetter. Check it out for yourselves.
http://www.ccme.ca/assets/pdf/cc_ind_full_…
It’d be nice to for once read an article about “climate change” by someone who’s heard of something called the scientific method.
Tim, I already told you to FORGET CLIMATE CHANGE! Your making stupid assertions here.