Climate change and recreation: Impacts to recreation infrastructure
BC Parks photo
This is the second in a series of articles exploring the connection between climate change and recreation. Through conversations with scientists, advocates, land managers, recreationalists, and more, we’ll look at how a warming world and more extreme weather is impacting the activities we love. But more than glum news, we’re interested in how the recreation industry is already hard at work preparing for change, reducing the impacts, and actively trying to slow global warming.
Garnet Mierau won’t say the Logan Lake Community Forest saved the town, but it sure appears that way.
In August 2021, northerly winds pushed the Tremont Creek forest fire to the edge of Logan Lake, a town 40 minutes southwest of Kamloops. It was burning so hot it left nothing but ashes in its wake. Yet firefighters were able to stop it in the community forest before it could scorch any of the houses or businesses.
“The community forest worked just as we’d intended it to,” says Mierau, the manager of the community forest.
He says it’s natural to fixate on the damage climate change-related disasters have and will continue to have, on recreation infrastructure: the bridges washed away by floods, campgrounds burned by wildfires, trails closed by fire danger and rivers dried up by droughts. But the Tremont fire in Logan Lake shows that recreation infrastructure is not just at risk from climate change – it can also help mitigate the impacts.
There’s no doubt more extreme weather will be costly. A 2018 report for Parks Canada found the agency needs to invest up to $3.3-billion to prepare its parks and infrastructure to prepare for climate change. One storm in 2019 knocked down 80 percent of the trees in a campground in Prince Edward Island National Park and damaged 97 kilometres of backcountry trails in Kejikujik National Park in Nova Scotia. For its part, BC Parks says that over the last five years, it has spent an average of $ 3 million per year responding to and recovering from severe weather.
“This includes small-scale impact, like trail erosion and damage to picnic tables, to significant impacts, like critical damage to bridges and buildings burning down,” says Danika Medinski, BC Parks’s capital investment facilities engineer.
She says the agency is working on a Green Plan. The internal process will push staff to consider climate change in every decision, from reducing greenhouse gas emissions in its operations to planning infrastructure projects.
“More than ever, thoughtful planning and appropriate design is important when building resilient trails and other park infrastructure,” says Medinski.
In the past, trail builders would design a bridge to withstand a 100-year flood event and never expect to see it, says Ted Morton, a trails technologist with McElhanney's Outdoor Recreation Infrastructure team based in Kamloops. Now they might double the standard "because we can expect to see a record event within our life,” he says. "Adding additional resiliency in design has become the normal way of thinking due to the anticipated complexity of climate change-related weather events."
The challenge is money. The cost of building trails and related infrastructure to a higher standard can easily double the cost of a project, says Morton. On the flip side, the cost of not may mean rebuilding the infrastructure every few years, a scenario some trail organizations are already wrestling with. And done right, recreation infrastructure can also work as a tool in adapting to extreme weather. This takes expertise beyond what a club or group of enthusiasts likely have. It’s becoming increasingly important to use professionals to help design and manage trail upgrades and development, says Morton.
This, too, costs more money, but it often results in co-benefits.
The city of Calgary is considering renovating a park alongside the Bow River. It will do a better job of holding back floodwaters from inundating low-lying neighbourhoods without impacting existing park space. After the November 2021 floods that swamped the Fraser Valley, there are calls to replace some of the existing dykes and other flood control infrastructure with more natural solutions that will also allow fish migration.
And several towns in B.C. are doing like Logan Lake and using their community forests to reduce their risk from forest fires and provide a place for recreation.
Community Forests are a provincially designated area that cities and towns manage for the benefit of residents rather than a focus on profits. They balance sustainable timber harvesting with other values, like biodiversity, drinking water protection, and recreation. Many trail networks across the province are within community forests, including in Logan Lake.
After the mountain pine beetle decimated its community forest in the early 2000s, the town recognized the forest fire danger. Over the last 15 years, Mierau led efforts to harvest the dead wood, clean up the forest floor and limb the remaining trees.
All that proactive work in the town’s trail network set firefighters up for success. The open ground made it easy for bulldozers to plough a fire break. With no deadfall, firefighters could safely burn the ground cover, robbing the oncoming fire of fuel. And when airplanes dropped fire retardant, it landed on the ground, not in a thick forest canopy. Combined with a shift in the wind, cooler temperatures and the active fire suppression, the town emerged from the inferno unscathed.
It may not have been the trails that saved the town, but recreation played a part, showing it has a role to play in climate change resiliency across the province.
Ryan Stuart started writing about his adventures as a way to get paid to play. Twenty years later he’s still at it. Look for his name in magazines like Outside, Men’s Journal, Ski Canada, online at Hakai and The Narwhal. When he’s not typing at his home office in Vancouver Island’s Comox Valley, you can find him skiing, hiking, mountain biking, surfing, paddling or fishing somewhere nearby.
