Ross Muirhead stood at the edge of a forestry cut blockfilled with stumps, rain pelting down as he watched water rushing over the barren ground.
Theenvironmental advocatewas storm watching during the atmospheric river disaster that swamped southwestern British Columbia in November 2021.
Now, Muirhead says he's worried about plans for additional logging on the slopes of Mount Elphinstone, about half an hour's drive north of his home. The agency reduced the potential area available for logging to a total of 13 hectares over two cut blocks following a watershed assessment last year, and says it has committed to harvesting only half of what the Mount Elphinstone area can"sustainably support." A public information bulletin says the method would be"partial cutting," with 500 trees left standing in addition to substantial patches set aside for wildlife and reserves.
The study did reveal infrastructure that was"potentially undersized in light of climate change projections," including crossings on"urban" roads, Aubin says in the letter dated Feb. 22.Aging or undersized infrastructure is part of the problem. But Muirhead and others suspect another challenge may be looming over B.C.'s watersheds — scientific methods that underestimate the role of industrial logging in elevating flood risk.
The study published in the journal Science of the Total Environment aims to guide the introduction of probability to forest hydrology in B.C., the authors say. Alila has been calling for a shift away from deterministic methods in forest hydrology for two decades, saying they represent"the science of convenience."By contrast, Alila says probabilistic modelling takes into account the random nature of the forces influencing flooding, a complex interplay he calls"the power of the forest," and produces projections about the likely severity and frequency.
The logging agency has described the existing study by Polar Geoscience as"one of the most comprehensive produced for the industry." In particular, he says the study employed"equivalent clearcut area," or ECA, a common measure that depicts the hydrological impact of forest disturbances such as logging or wildfire. For instance, logging with an ECA of 10 hectares would have the same impact as clear-cutting that amount of forest. ECA — which can also be expressed as a percentage of the originally logged area — can fall over time, as forests regrow and recover hydrological function.
Alila, meanwhile, says ECA's deterministic methodology ignores the broader power of the forest, instead taking data from smaller stands of trees and using it to draw conclusions about larger areas. The response from Polar Geoscience last November says many of the professor's criticisms are"unfounded and flawed or focus on the hypothetical."
"There is a discussion happening in the peer-reviewed literature now, between the two camps," he says, referring to deterministic and probabilistic approaches. "They like simple methods to manage. They don't want complicated methods, even though the system they're managing is complex," he says. Carver did not specifically review the Mount Elphinstone watershed assessment or Alila's review of the study before speaking with The Canadian Press.
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