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 developed a methodology for identifying the agricultural-wildland interface – an area of high wildfire threat and high consequence to the agriculture sector — a zone that was previously undefined.

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. Clarifying the geography of this agricultural-wildland interface helps make visible the risk to agricultural operations and highlights the importance of mitigation actions.

Key project accomplishments included:

• defining and showing the extent of land base that is considered agricultural-wildland interface in the Cariboo and Bulkley-Nechako & Fraser-Fort George regions
• determining economic and adaptive approaches to fuel management for high-risk agricultural-wildland interface across the two regions
• developing criteria for selecting, planning and initiating collaborative fuel management pilot projects
• selecting sites and completing high-level planning and costing for three pilot projects that will demonstrate cost-effective approaches to fuel reduction

Project Results

• Cariboo, Bulkley-Nechako & Fraser-Fort George — Fuel Management Pilot Business Case for High-Risk Interface Areas (2020 project summary) (17 MB pdf)