BC Agriculture & Food Climate Action Initiative

This project will gather, coordinate and share relevant resources about agricultural water management from BC and elsewhere to support increased adoption of water management best practices.

Warmer and drier summer conditions resulting from climate change will lead to increased rates of evapotranspiration and increased demand of agricultural water to maintain production. Changing precipitation patterns will also require producers to be prepared for variable conditions, including periods of more extreme precipitation.

This project will focus on knowledge transfer and informational resources about water conservation and efficiency measures that are straightforward and low cost to implement. It will also provide opportunities for producers to discuss their specific operation or water management challenges with subject matter experts.

This project will:

• identify existing resources about water management that have the most utility for the Bulkley-Nechako & Fraser Fort George region
• identify the best format for knowledge transfer and deliver knowledge transfer events across the regions
• create a resource to document what was learned/shared
• evaluate and report on the knowledge transfer delivered

This project will identify the most economical and adaptive approaches to fuel management for the interface between private agricultural land and forested Crown land, laying the groundwork for future pilot projects.

Longer, hotter and drier summers are contributing to larger and more intensive wildfires. This increasing risk is of particular concern for agricultural operations that are bordered or surrounded by forested Crown land (a fuel source for wildfires).

The fuel management options considered in this project will be examined for their feasibility and potential to mitigate current risk and will also be evaluated for their longer term sustainability and climate resiliency.

Earlier CAI work identified fuel management options that could be implemented through partnerships between producers, government agencies, First Nations and/or licensees (see the report Cariboo – Wildfire Preparedness & Mitigation Opportunities & Barriers as well as the Cariboo Adaptation Strategies Update).

This project will:

• summarize the extent of agricultural and forested Crown land interface risk across the Cariboo, Bulkley-Nechako & Fraser-Fort George regions, utilizing existing information
• evaluate the challenges and opportunities associated with a broad range of potential fuel management options
• identify a subset of three fuel management options and evaluate these options to assess their costs, benefits, economics, scalability and efficiency
• lay the groundwork for subsequent implementation of fuel management pilots