Study promotes beneficial fire

Fighting fire with fire is the focus of Beneficial Fire in BC, a report released this month by the Polis Group at the University of Victoria.

“The idea of beneficial fire means that there is some fire on the landscape that has positive effects on ecosystems and helps pull us away from catastrophic fire,” explains Andrea Barnett, a Savona-area rancher and policy analyst and one of the authors of the report. “This is super-relevant to agriculture, particularly ranching, as we rely so heavily on the landscape.”

Barnett says she believes that any discussion that moves the province towards wildfire resilience is good for all sectors and communities.

“Ranching in particular, we are a sector that has probably stood to lose the most when you consider what fire suppression has done for grass resources in southern BC,” she notes. “Fire plays a critical role particularly in the dry forest in maintaining ecosystems, and a lot of our ecosystems have suffered because of lack of fire and that has had an economic impact.”

The report discusses the use of cultural fires, prescribed fires and managed wildfires as “beneficial fires.”

Cultural fires were traditionally practiced by Indigenous peoples as a tool for land stewardship. Prescribed fires are those that are carefully planned and intentionally set to meet a specific management objective. A managed fire is a wildfire that can be left to burn if it is away from communities, not an economic hazard and can have ecological benefits.

A key to promoting beneficial fire lies in community acceptance, Barnett explains, something she hopes the report will support.

“The community has to feel safe. We have to talk about what beneficial fire looks like on a particular landscape; what is the risk reward?” she says. “We may consider a managed fire response for a particular area, but in another locality we may need to go for full suppression.”