Forest road resources are predicted to vulnerable to climate change.
Climate change is expected to significantly affect the Canadian Forestry Industry. FPInnovations have recently compiled a report that details how to manage roads to allow adaption to climate change. Forestry roads are considered particularly vulnerable to the immediate and short-term impacts of climate change. Adaptation strategies for resource roads and infrastructure must be developed and implementation initiated to ensure that the road infrastructure required for forest access is maintained and made resilient to climatic impacts. The report presents the risks and vulnerabilities of resource roads to climate change and suggested adaptation methods and practices.
A major challenge with adapting Canadian resource roads to climate change is associated with changes to precipitation conditions and patterns and resulting impacts to runoff and streamflows. But unlike temperature regimes, long-term precipitation and resulting runoff and stream flow patterns are much more challenging to accurately forecast. Forest road managers will need to identify current and forecasted changes in temperature, precipitation and implications to resource road infrastructure and management, in order to be able to determine adaptation methods to create climate change resilient resource roads.
FPInnovations have identified the following key elements that must be considered in these adaptation strategies:
- Understand what adaptation is
- Know the climate changes to which you are adapting
- Develop an understanding of adaptation tools and practices
- Recognize that adaptation needs to happen at a local level
- Be aware that adaptation strategies are evolving
The report was published as Technical report no. 61 - December 2017. The compilers were M Partington, A Bradley, M Durand-Jézéquel and A Forrester. Source