Erin Radford, Prescott C. Ensign (p)

Jafar Jafarov

Wildfires pose a threat across Canada as fire and resulting smoke impact tourism, natural resources, rural communities, and downwind urbanites. Due to budget cuts, scarce equipment/infrastructure, and reactive systems, Canada is poorly positioned to withstand wildfires. Indigenous communities looking to support fire management are reintroducing cultural burning, an age-old practice to clear forest/brushlands of potential fuel and stimulate regrowth. To appreciate how Indigenous theory and praxis maintains, even improves ecological resilience, the public is challenged to accept fire as part of the solution, not just the problem.

Canada’s pre-colonial peoples recognize that fire suppression by the Canadian government was not always the best course of action. The impact of wildfires on Indigenous communities is disproportionate. Current fire management processes use prescribed burning, highly regulated and supported by western science, yet there is an appetite to listen and learn. This paper describes challenges of decision makers and considers the perspectives of Canadian federal/provincial/territorial governments and Indigenous communities.

For the Tsilhqot’in, the word fire means “lightening the load off the land.” Amy Cardinal Christianson, from Treaty 8 Metis territory in Alberta:
Settlers brought a vision of removing fire from the landscape to Canada. Indigenous people have been removed from conversations about fire management. We want to be able to steward the land and use fire on our territories. Canada has faced some bad fire seasons, so the public is looking for new solutions. But if we, as a society, have decided that we want fire back on the land, it just makes sense, and it’s a matter of justice, for Indigenous people to be leading that process.

Cultural burns are often of low intensity, known to First Nations Fire Keepers as “fires we can walk beside.” BC Wildfire Service works with Nlaka’pamux Nation and Skeetchestn Indian Band Fire Keepers on burning methods rooted in deep cultural meaning to people and place. History and connection to land on which they reside impact perspective on fire management. Indigenous leaders’ voices reflect the regions they are from. The milieu of hereditary knowledge, cultural connection to land, history, interrupted and continuous, shape stewardship of natural resources.

This paper recounts the historical evidence and regional narratives for an array of constituents as well as the present and evolving approaches across Canada’s provinces and territories. The paper layers in evidence from other regions of the world, primarily in-land and northern Australia as well as the western U.S.

Leonie Ratzke (p), Melanie Krause

Prescott C. Ensign

We examine the nexus between extreme weather events, urbanization and tree cover loss in a global data set of regions from 2001-2018. Droughts or floods might induce migration into cities. On the other hand, expansion of urban areas is one factor behind deforestation, which can make the damages of extreme weather events more severe. We explicitly capture the inherent interrelation in a simultaneous equations model with four equations. We find evidence of a vicious cycle of tree cover loss, increasing drought damages and urban expansion at the global scale. The results for other links and feedback mechanisms are more heterogeneous.

Jafar Jafarov (p), Tejendra Pratap Singh, Soham Sahoo

Leonie Ratzke

We investigate how air pollution impacts outdoor activity avoidance, leveraging changes in local wind direction in an instrumental variable setup for causal identification. Our findings reveal a substantial reduction in time spent outdoors during polluted days, mainly driven by decreased engagement in employment-related activities. This effect varies significantly across age, education level, usual principal activity status, consumption expenditure, and residential location. Moreover, reduced outdoor time due to air pollution can potentially promote a more equitable allocation of unpaid caregiving responsibilities within households via increased male involvement. Our results remain robust under various sensitivity tests.