WE CAN’T ALWAYS BUILD OUR WAY OUT OF RISKS
Farmer facing loss of planting season hoping government will buy land
On a day in early spring, when the air is warm but the wind still bites, Grown Here Farms in Cawston is unseasonably quiet.
Four months after the Similkameen River inundated her land, Krystine McInnes walks through bare fields caked in silt, each step raising a puff of dust.
“We won't be able to plant this year,” she says. “We've gone from rich, organic soil that you could bury your hands in to a desert.”
She's unsentimental about this now, but the realization in the days after Christmas was hard.
“Until then, I'd been saying we can repair and rebuild. Now my hope is just to find a pathway forward.”
McInnes wants the government to buy her land, using it to give the Similkameen room to rise and spread out during the extreme weather that is becoming more frequent as B.C's climate changes. Instead of crops, a wetland could help protect the nearby Lower Similkameen Indian Band reserve during high water, she says.
Moving homes and infrastructure out of a flood-prone area, or “managed retreat,” is often seen as a last resort — a costly and disruptive option that's considered when flood prevention or mitigation isn't possible or doesn't make financial sense.
But it's a tactic some experts believe should be used more frequently in B.C. as part of an approach that expands on the current reliance on hard infrastructure, like dikes and pumps, to include watershed-level planning and smarter development that works with B.C.'s climate and landscape.
The use of alternative flood and wildfire mitigation measures could become critical as the province confronts the colossal task and cost of hardening communities to climate change.
A four-month Postmedia investigation found government efforts have fallen short of what is needed to properly protect communities against the risk of increasingly severe and frequent floods and wildfires. The findings pegged the initial bill to prepare and protect communities at more than $13 billion.
McInnes, who bought her property in Cawston six years ago, has been evacuated four times in the past four years — twice due to wildfires on the rippled hills above her farm and twice due to flooding.
In the spring of 2018, a thick mountain snowpack melted rapidly, causing flooding in several communities in the B.C. Interior, including Cawston, Osoyoos and Grand Forks, where heavy rain further increased river levels. McInnes' fields were submerged by the freshet flooding, but she was able to replant, introducing fast-growing organic hemp in the most damaged areas.
But last time was different. In November, record rainfall caused by an atmospheric river melted early-season snow and caused the river that bends around the farm to rise from “ankle deep” to almost five metres over several hours. A “wall of water” blasted through a private dike built by the previous owner to protect the farm. The water washed away nutrient-rich topsoil, leaving sand, gravel and rock strewn across the fields. While the main farmhouse remained above water, the farm's packing house, crew housing and equipment were ruined.
“In the last four years, it feels like we haven't actually farmed. We've been continuously dealing with one emergency after another,” said McInnes, standing on the riverbank in late March. “I'm done. I give up. You win.”
`LIVING WITH WATER'
UBC professor Kees Lokman said B.C. needs to shift from trying to “build our way out” of the risks related to climate change to supporting solutions with benefits for both people and the environment.
Instead of raising dikes, set them back from the river, thus giving the water space to ebb and flow, he said. When a highway washes out, build a bridge to allow fish and sediment to pass through rather than installing a larger culvert. Develop natural water storage by restoring wetlands. Foster agriculture that can coexist with high water. Mitigate wildfires by removing fuel from forests.
While other countries have adopted centralized flood management strategies, B.C. has downloaded much of the responsibility for mitigation to local governments, which can only defend their own boundaries, typically by building higher dikes.
“There is no clarity on who takes the lead on this topic,” said Lokman, chair of UBC's landscape architecture department and an expert in sea level rise adaptation.
He provided a letter by a group of B.C. experts and organizations, including the Emergency Planning Secretariat that is developing a Coast Salish-led flood management strategy, calling for a provincial “framework” that prioritizes First Nations decision-making and ensures flood recovery funds target “fish-friendly infrastructure, nature-based approaches, models of resilience, placebased collaboration and consideration of multiple objectives including floodplain management.”
The letter cites a Dutch program that has become the new model for water management.
While the Netherlands, onethird of which is below sea level, is known for its vast network of dikes and history of claiming land from the sea, climate change has led the country to move from complete reliance on hard infrastructure to a “living with the water approach,” said Shana Udvardy, a climate resilience analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Massachusetts-based non-profit that looks for solutions to environmental issues.
The Room for the River program began after floods in 1993 and 1995 caused the evacuation of more than 200,000 people across the Netherlands. Between 2006 and 2015, dikes were moved back from rivers, channels dug deeper and floodplains restored. The government provided a buyout to about 250 households.
There were several keys to the program's success, which has been adapted for use around the world, including in the United States after hurricane Sandy, said Udvardy.
Dutch water boards, which have been around for centuries and have their own taxation authority, co-ordinated with higher levels of government to move forward on the same policy. The program was well-funded at the national level and sought buy-in from the public through continuing consultation.
“This is a program that protected a quarter of the country's population,” Hans Brouwer, senior manager with the Room for the River program, told Postmedia from his home in the Netherlands. “But for anybody who had to move it was dramatic, so I don't want to minimize that.”
At the start of the program, there was protest, but after several years, many have become proud of it, he said.
“They forget they were opposed. It's at that point that I know if we succeeded or not.”
Brouwer said the Dutch are preparing another program to address new challenges related to climate change. In a country where there has always been “too much water,” drought and low river levels are creating problems for ships and agriculture. “We are not used to this in the Netherlands, but we will work to find solutions.”
TOWARD A NEW PARADIGM
Not unlike some of the work being undertaken in the Netherlands to mitigate flooding through better water management across various levels of government, Washington state is working to restore natural resilience to forests that are burning in increasingly frequent, large and intense wildfires.
In 2016, the state adopted a 20-year forest health plan that included a goal to restore fire resilience to 5,000 square kilometres of forested land in eastern Washington by 2037. Along with the U.S. government, Native American tribes and private landowners, the state is thinning forests, reducing fuel on the forest floor and doing prescribed burns, which are intentionally set fires to burn up fuel in the understory.
Derek Churchill, a forest health scientist with the state Department of Natural Resources, said major wildfire years in 2014 and 2015 galvanized the state government to take action.
“You are going to pay the piper one way or another,” he said. “So, the more you can do it up front and be proactive, it's cheaper, and you have better outcomes when you have wildfires. You have less damage to homes and property and forests.”
The need to rebuild forest resiliency emerged after a century of putting out forest fires and preventing First Nations from practising traditional prescribed burning.
In the past, B.C. forests had open grassland spaces interspersed with patches of trees of various ages, as well as much less underbrush. There were also more hardwoods, which have been eliminated through forestry practices that favour needle-bearing softwood trees, said Paul Hessburg, a senior research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service. Now, a thick carpet of largely mature, even-aged conifer trees with a large amount of fuel in the understory and on the forest floor is increasing the risk of bad fires.
“Fire will return to the landscape,” he said. “It's inevitable. And in fact, the best years for fire in western North America are already in the rear-view mirror. They get worse from here.”
In the case of both fire and flood, the cost of doing nothing may be greater than acting.
Hessburg predicted inaction would lead to more large and severe fires, less forested area and a significant loss of productivity in the B.C.'s wood products sector, as well as damage to municipal watersheds and human health.
CLIMATE AND LANDSCAPE `IN HARMONY'
As spring comes to a small ravine in the Little Campbell Watershed in Surrey, farmers and biologists are beginning to see the results of a partnership to restore a natural wetland that increases flood resiliency.
As a startled blue heron takes flight, farmer Dave Zehnder pointed to recently planted native trees and shrubs that help prevent erosion of the riverbank at A Rocha Farm. No longer a pasture filled with invasive reed canary grass for grazing cattle, the wetland acts like a natural sponge during high water, slowing the water flow and allowing the land to handle some flooding.
“From a business perspective, many farms can't justify the cost of this work,” he said. “We help them go above and beyond and realize what more their land can do.”
Administered by the Investment Agriculture Foundation, the Farmland Advantage program helps B.C. farmers and ranchers enhance ecosystems on their land. It can provide several benefits, reducing the effects of floods and wildfires, and enhancing salmon and wildlife habitat, said Natalie Janssens, program director. Farmers receive modest financial compensation.
Farmland Advantage is among those calling on the B.C. government to use some of the money earmarked for rebuilding flood defences on solutions that work with the natural environment.
“Pump the brakes a second,” said Zehnder. “If you invest only in dikes, alternative measures won't get the money, and we've tried dikes already. There should be some discussion on how to be most effective, rather than the same old, same old approaches.”
The effectiveness of “old approaches” may also be diminishing with climate change, as B.C.'s landscape undergoes changes.
There is an elegance to the way climate and landscape have historically mitigated floods and fires, said a University of B.C. forestry professor, Younes Alila. “They worked in harmony.”
For centuries, B.C.'s forests have been a flood management system of sorts, with a large portion of the province's precipitation falling as snow, which takes several months to melt, compared to rain that falls all at once. Snow at different elevations melted at different rates over the course of a slowly-warming spring,
There should be some discussion on how to be most effective, rather than the same old, same old approaches.”
while trees did their part by pumping water from the soil to the air through evapotranspiration.
But climate change is threatening that model, causing more severe and frequent storms in fall and winter and high heat and drought that dries out forests and makes wildfires more likely in summer, stripping the hillsides of trees and increasing run-off.
“Healthy forests are one of our best flood mitigation
strategies,” said Alila, an expert in watershed management.
He believes B.C. needs to change its forest practices to recognize the role trees play in flood and fire mitigation, setting limits on logging in watersheds on a case-by-case basis through the implementation of a mandatory watershed assessment process before any harvest.
BUILDING BACK BETTER
B.C. was updating its provincial flood strategy, with a discussion paper in the consultation stage, when November's flood emergency hit, said Andrew Giles, manager of river forecast and flood safety for the B.C. government.
The strategy, which is intended to set the vision and determine “priority actions” for flood management in B.C., “will help shift us away from just flood protection and needing to harden and engineer solutions” toward a broader framework that involves building back better, risk reduction and accommodation, said Giles.
“It's intended to set up the vision, principles and some of those priorities of things we can do to help support resilience for communities.”
The strategy should be released this year, but flood recovery and the upcoming freshet could slow the work. A plan and implementation could require more consultation, with responsibility for mitigation resting largely on local governments, rather than the province.
It's also unclear if the funding model will be improved beyond the current piecemeal approach that has local governments competing for the same limited grant money from the province to shore up their own defences.
The provincial government has also made commitments on the wildfire front. The B.C. budget includes $145 million over three years to be used, in part, to move the B.C. Wildfire Service from its current model of reacting to fires to one that involves more planning and prevention.
Another $98 million over three years will help fund the maintenance of forest service roads and prevention work, while more than $26 million will be spent to upgrade the agency's facilities.
“We know, all of us, that climate change is real and it contributes to drier and hotter summers and that's extended the wildfire seasons dramatically. It's clear that is going to continue,” B.C.'s minister of Indigenous relations and reconciliation, Murray Rankin, said at a news conference in April. “Our government is making significant investments to transform the B.C. Wildfire Service into a year-round service, not the seasonal service of the past, and to go from a reactive to a proactive agency.”
Cawston farmer McInnes said she hopes the province understands the challenges posed by climate change and the need for innovative solutions.
With freshet a few weeks away, the “clock is ticking.” Her farm remains vulnerable to a potential “tidal wave” of melting snow given its broken flood defences.
She said a B.C. Ministry of Agriculture working group is examining the idea of managed retreat and what relocation might look like for her and a handful of other farmers who don't want to fight the river any more.
As she walked through a small orchard with a Postmedia reporter in March, she spotted a scrap of burlap, buried in silt.
“It probably didn't survive,” she said, pushing aside the protective covering to reveal a wilted pomegranate tree.
“It's done, too.”