1. The Challenge
Here in British Columbia and globally, growing human populations and demand for natural resources place increasing stress on available land. Climate change is a further stress on natural ecosystems, ultimately putting the well-being of both human communities and wildlife at risk.
In British Columbia, we have a strong legacy of regional land-use planning, but we have yet to address climate change. Nature is already responding: wildlife, plants and trees are already trying to adapt to changes in temperature, precipitation, and other variables. The mountain pine beetle epidemic illustrates how devastating these changes can be.
To the extent our ecosystems are fragmented, degraded, or stressed by human activities, they will be much less resilient to climate change than intact, functional, natural ecosystems - less able to cope with severe weather, insects and fires, and changing conditions. By contrast, healthy, productive forests and ecosystems can even help in the fight against climate change by storing carbon in their leaves, trunks, roots and soils. Presently, however, large amounts of that stored carbon is being released into the atmosphere with logging, slashburning and clearing forests under BC’s outdated forest tenure system and management practices. It is an example of how our laws and policies around resource extraction were not designed to manage the combined stresses of climate change and multiple human activities.
