According to the Media, climate change (CC) has become the primary explanation for the growing severity of environmental disasters (eg., landslides, flooding, forest fires).  At the national and international level, the focus has been to reduce or mitigate GHG emissions. This has created a situation where local and regional governments see themselves as 'off the hook', or simply incapable of preventing these costly disasters.  But is this the whole story? Much of Coastal B.C.'s Coastal Douglas-fir Bioregion has experienced over 100 years of logging, fire suppression, wetland drainage and other changes to watershed hydrology which are shifting local ecologies from fire tolerant and resistant systems, toward more fragile and fire-prone systems. The combined effects of multi-year drought, extreme heat and heavy rainfall, brought on by climate change, are acting on already stressed systems. This has serious implications for rural Gulf Island communities; for example, fire was identified as one of the top vulnerabilities in Salt Spring Island’s Climate Action Plan (Transition Salt Spring 2020).  Our Climate Adaptation Research Lab (CARL) has chosen an important watershed on Salt Spring Island to look at the impact of land management post colonization and to ask the following questions: What makes these watersheds vulnerable to cc, and what can we do to reduce these vulnerabilities?   

This colloquium is co-sponsored with the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions. 

The Natural Resources & Environmental Studies Institute (NRESi) at UNBC hosts a weekly lecture series at the Prince George campus. Anyone from the university or wider community with interest in the topic area is welcome to attend. Presentations are also made available to remote participants through Zoom Webinar. Go to http://www.unbc.ca/nres-institute/colloquium-webcasts to view the presentation remotely.

Past NRESi colloquium presentations and special lectures can be viewed on our video archive, available here.