Pressure mounts for province to do more fuel mitigation on crown land

An Okanagan community is leading the charge to pressure the B.C. Government to do more to reduce the threat of wildfires.

The City of Vernon has put forth a resolution at this year’s Union of B.C. Municipalities calling on the province to change the way it mitigates against forest fires.

The resolution argues that B.C.’s current wildfire management strategy is overly reliant on FireSmart, putting too much of the burden for wildfire protection on homeowners while much of the land requiring treatment is government controlled.

It wants the government to invest more money to clean up the forests on crown land.

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But the minister responsible argued programs are in place to deal with both, the land within municipalities and outside of them

“The community resilience investment program is up to $150,000 per community and they can apply year after year and that funding can be used by the municipalities to do a whole range of activities” said Doug Donaldson, Minister of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations. “So that’s one thing. The other initiative we have is under Forest Enhancement side and that’s on the land outside of the municipalities and that’s a real focus of ours as well ,so we have two funds and one is outside of municipalities and I have seen some amazing work in the Okanagan.”

A UBC-Okanagan associate professor in the Earth, Environmental and Geographic Sciences Department said fuel mitigation is critical to reducing the threat of wildfire.

David Scott added there’s not nearly enough of it.

“We have a big backlog at the moment, there’s a lot of fuel out there so there will be a large initial outlay to get things under control but after that I think…the maintenance is quite realistic and affordable,” he said.

More affordable he said than the massive costs of fighting raging wildfires.

“We have something like 95 per cent of the province is crown land so we are not talking about managing the fuel all over the province. We need to be targeting those high risk areas.” Scott said.