Transcript by Kensho.

Lindsey Hall: Hi. I'm Lindsey Hall, Head of Thought Leadership at S&P Global Sustainable1.

Esther Whieldon: And I'm Esther Whieldon, a senior writer on the Sustainable1 Thought Leadership team.

Lindsey Hall: Welcome to ESG Insider, a podcast hosted by S&P Global, where we explore environmental, social and governance issues that are shaping investor activity and company strategy.

Esther Whieldon:  A lot of times when we talk about climate change, it can feel like this sort of far-off, abstract concept that will happen at some vague future point. The 2090s, the 2050s — even the year 2040 can feel distant, right? 

But then sometimes, something happens that brings into sharp relief exactly what a warming world with more frequent extreme weather events could look like.  

Lindsey Hall: Yes, and we got a taste of that the U.S. earlier in June when a series of wildfires across Quebec, Canada blanketed eastern North America in smoke.  

As of June 14, 2023, numerous forest fires were forcing thousands of evacuations in several regions of Québec and threatening essential infrastructure. The resulting smoke was also compromising the health of individuals, especially at-risk populations. That’s according to Natural Resources Canada, a department of the Canadian government. And the department said the number of fires is well above average for this time of year, and well above the average for area burned for this time of year.  

Esther Whieldon: And those effects were felt far and wide. The fires caused air quality to plummet across heavily populated areas such as Toronto, New York City and Washington, DC. [Something like: As I mentioned in last week’s episode, I was in NYC and had trouble breathing/or: I was in NYC and the smoke was so thick I couldn’t see the top of the Empire State Building.]  

Lindsey Hall: We felt the effects even as far south as Virginia, which is more than 800 miles to the south. You know the situation is serious when even my 8-year-old is talking about it.  

Child: "It went to like the school. And we were going to play ... a game I invented but because of the wildfires, we had to play inside... 

Lindsey Hall: How did that make you feel?

Child: I didn't like it

Lindsey Hall: This is the kind of thing that kids today all around the world are having to grapple with. Well in today’s episode, we’re going to be talking to 3 scientists about how climate change is exacerbating hazards like these wildfires, and how an event like this impacts health, business and the economy.  First up, let’s hear from a scientist from Natural Resources Canada, who has also been involved in many reports from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC.

Werner Kurz: I'm Werner Kurz, I'm a senior research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service of Natural Resources Canada. I live and work in Victoria, British Columbia. Our team does the calculation of the greenhouse gas inventories of cannabis forests and forest sector. Yes, I'm a forest ecologist by training. I've been working in this field for over 30 years.

Lindsey Hall: Okay. So you're well placed to comment on the topic of today's episode, which is these recent wildfires in Canada. Can you tell our listeners first off, a little bit about your personal experience and then also what you have been hearing from the science community since they've taken place?

Werner Kurz: Yes. So 2023 is really yet again, an unprecedented year. And what is so unusual about this year's wildfires is how early in the season they started. We are -- at the beginning of June, we had already area burned that we would normally not reach until the beginning of August. So in other words, we're a good 2 months ahead in terms of the area burned. And what's also unusual this year is that the wildfires occur across the country. It is not unusual to have severe wildfires in one or another part of the country. But this year, it's literally from the West Coast of Vancouver Island to Nova Scotia. The entire country has significant areas burned, and we have already reached areas burned in 2023 that exceed the area burned in the worst year on record in this century, which is 2021.

Lindsey Hall: Wow, okay. And so a lot of our audience today will have been reading the headlines or perhaps even experiencing some of the air quality issues that are knock on effect from the wildfires. And trying to understand the connection between these wildfires and climate chase, how would you explain in plain English, this link for our listeners?

Werner Kurz: Yes. So wildfires are increasing in frequency in intensity and area burned as a result of coming together of a number of different changes. With climate change, it has been getting warmer. It has been getting dryer, and it has been getting warmer earlier and later in the year. So as a consequence, not only do we have a longer fire season, we also have a more intense fire season. And on top of that, we know that climate warming also increases the number of lightning strikes, which are by far the biggest contributor to the area burned in Canada's forests.

Lindsey Hall: We'll come back to Werner a bit later in the episode to hear how the Quebec fires are impacting greenhouse gas emissions and also net zero goals. The first, I wanted to dig more into this question of the tie between climate change and physical hazards such as wildfires. So I turn to Terry Thompson, Chief Climate Scientist at the Climate Center of Excellence at S&P Global Sustainable1. I ask Terry, how we can translate wildfires like these for a business audience. How do we quantify the financial impact?

Terry Thompson: I'd like to address that in 2 segments, at 2 levels. First, there's the local, the hyperlocal effects, if you like, and then there are other regional effects. 

At a local level, any business that has an asset, I'll call it a shopping center, let's just say, that shopping center faces risk, obviously, from damage to the premises related to wildfire I would keep in mind for that business that damage to the asset itself is only one level of the impact. If the population in a given area has been evacuated or the large parts of the community have been devastated by the wildfire that even though the shopping center may not have been damaged in any way, there's not going to be any shopper or the number of shoppers will be very substantially reduced. So very simplistically, it simply think about both the physical impacts to owned or leased assets, but also think about the business impacts interruption of foot traffic. And the example I gave, interruption in the availability of staff. I suppose I'm a restaurant, and my staff has been evacuated. I'm not going to be doing any business or much reduced business, that sort of thing. 

Then thinking more regionally and the recent Canadian wildfire in the smoke generated by those wildfires is a good example. Think about those impacts on a different region entirely. As I think you've covered already, there were smoke impacts in New York City across the continent entirely from the Canadian wildfires, those smoke impacts were not trivial. They were very noticeable. They were at a minimum worrisome to people that I work with every day who happen to live in New York City at minimum worrisome and potentially actually could lead to health impacts related to the particulate matter that is transmitted in the smoke. 

Additionally, at a distance and speaking at kind of maximum distance globally, these wildfires are emitting CO2, greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. So we have a, if you like, climate effects, which are cascading the climate effects might have led to climate change effects might have led to increases in temperature, which might have led to an increased likelihood of a wildfire. And then that wildfire itself creates additional greenhouse gas, which goes into the atmosphere, which is a positive feedback loop, meaning an exacerbating feedback loop on the greenhouse gas that's leading to the climate change characteristics in the first place.

Lindsey Hall: Yes. I've certainly been wondering about how do you even start to quantify all of those impacts, the foot traffic that's lost. I'm curious, Terry, can you pull back the curtain for us a little bit? What's the chatter that you're hearing in your part of the world? What are climate scientists talking about? What are the discussions that this latest wildfire is bringing up for your community?

Terry Thompson: Again, I'll try to answer on 2 levels. First, within the part of the climate science community concerned with what we call extreme events or low probability, high-impact events. There's more interest in predicting very high temperatures. I'll leave it at temperature. It's broader than temperature, but in predicting very high temperatures. 

As you may know, Lytton, British Columbia experienced temperatures in July of 2021 above 48 degrees C, never before seen at least in the available historical record. And there are mathematical techniques to assist us in predicting probabilities of even these very, very, very rare events. And the important part from the climate change perspective is since the climate is changing, the probability of those very rare events is itself changing and what mathematics can we bring to bear to at least get a handle on approximation on the likelihood of those very rare events. 

And those very rare events are also very dangerous. It turns out that Lytton, British Columbia had a wildfire at least partially caused by the very high temperatures the very next day and burn to the ground -- the second aspect is even broader. 

Now thinking beyond wildfire coming back to the big picture on climate change, you asked this in terms of what our people in my community concerned about the scientific climate scientific community. A couple of key points here would be climate scientists themselves are very concerned that although they continue to improve their ability to model and therefore, predict this extremely complex land, ocean, atmosphere system that we live in, they still don't have a good way of predicting, modeling what we actually tend to call tipping points. 

And just think of that as a radical change in the behavior of a system. You're gradually -- if you're boiling pot of water, it's not boiling for the 95% of the time that you have the kettle being heated up. And then all of a sudden, it's boiling and that's actually a tipping point in that particular very simple system.

 So now we have this big complex earth system, and there are tipping points in that -- there are several different types. I'll just mention one, which is the melting of the polar ice sheets, which can have quite huge effects on further temperature impacts on sea level rise impacts, or a cascade of events associated with that. So the community I'm trying to summarize here is -- or the concern of the community that I'm speaking about here is how well can we model those tipping points because those tipping points are exceedingly dangerous with regard to climate change because they may lead to just enormous shifts very rapidly. 

Gradual change in climate is hard enough to deal with, gradually increasing temperatures and so on. Now we have the possibility, ee know -- we've known for a while that we have the possibility of these rapid changes and what impacts would those have. 

The second level in current concerns in my community is how do we estimate these economic impacts from these sorts of things. Lindsey, you mentioned how would I quantify the change in foot traffic. That's one of the atoms of economic impacts. Now we're asking what's the -- when you have a whole bunch of those atoms? -- what's the overall impact on the economy. And there's very good work going on in the, what is called the econometrics portion of climate science, very work going on there, but it is not yet mature enough to handle some of these, for example, tipping points that we can see as significant, if you like, black swan events that we need to prepare humanity for. 

So both the physical side and the economic side have real challenges to help humanity gauge the gauge, the size of the impacts and therefore, plan for them in some graceful way. 

I would just wrap up by saying is this extremely dangerous to postpone thinking through how to deal with these things. and justifying the postponement by saying the science really isn't absolutely crystal clear or we need more data, we need more -- some extra decimal points on the estimates of the probability and so on and so forth. That is extremely dangerous. That's going to lead since the physics and the economics are so complex, that's going to lead to endless delay, and we really don't need that. We can see the directionality based on what we know today. So the planning for an adaptation and mitigation, that planning needs to go on at full speed.

Lindsey Hall: We just heard Terry mention that these wildfires are emitting CO2 into the atmosphere. I'm going to turn back to my conversation with Werner from the Canadian forest service for more explanation of the impacts of these fires on greenhouse gas emissions and future climate change.

Werner Kurz: Yes. So when forests grow, they remove carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas, they move carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They release oxygen in the process, and they bind the carbon from the carbon dioxide in organic matter, leaves, branches, stems, roots, et cetera. And they do so, as we all know, relatively slowly, it takes centuries for a really large tree to grow, it takes years to decades for small- to medium-sized trees to grow. 

But wildfires can release a lot of that carbon back into the atmosphere. So during the fire, the organic matter oxidizes the carbon from the wood combines with oxygen. This releases a lot of energy, and that carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere. It's one of several important greenhouse gases and in addition, there are other pollutants -- other greenhouse gases that are released by wildfires are methane and N2O and carbon monoxide and then, of course, also particulate matter. 

So the problem basically that we are observing right now is that the increase in area annually burned releases greenhouse gases back into the atmosphere in addition to the greenhouse gases that are being released due to human activities such as fossil fuel burning. 

Normally, forests are globally forests or carbon sinks. Cannabis for us have been carbon sinks in the 1990s and early 2000s. But with climate change, we have seen a number of feedback mechanisms from wildfires to insect disturbances. And collectively, these activities, along with harvesting tree harvesting have contributed to our forests transitioning from being greenhouse gas sinks to becoming greenhouse gas sources. 

So instead of being part of the solution, they have become part of the problem. Some people refer to this as a positive feedback. So the warming of the earth feeds further warming by releasing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases back into the atmosphere. 

When we are looking to forests to help us meet our net-zero emission targets in countries around the world. We need to begin to realize that it's not just deforestation or improved forest management such as fertilization nor species selection, that can help mitigate. It's really going to include an active management aimed at carbon and aimed at reducing wildfire risks. And if we fail to address the future wildfire risk in the change of climate warming, then I think we're going to find it very difficult to meet net zero targets around the world.

Lindsey Hall: Do you feel like that is currently widely understood?

Werner Kurz: No, unfortunately not. I think some people in the scientific community realize this, and it's just one example of major feedbacks. We don't have time to go into details, but permafrost-thawing is another one of those things where warming will cause future releases of greenhouse gases that are difficult to control and difficult to manage. And so yes, these -- we need to basically reduce fossil fuel emissions to limit global warming because the warmer it gets, the more we will find the Earth system creating feedbacks that will make it even more difficult for us to manage future warming.

Esther Whieldon: So we've heard today about the business impacts of the wildfires and how that's even impacting net zero. And Lindsay, earlier you mentioned you'd also talk about health. What did you learn about that?

Lindsey Hall: Yes. So this is obviously a really important topic. And to learn more, I turn to Sarah Henderson. She is the Scientific Director of Environmental Health Services at Canada’s British Columbia Centre for Disease Control, and at the National Collaborating Centre for Environmental Health. She's also an associate professor in the University of British Columbia School of Population and Public Health. Here's Sarah, talking about the health impacts of climate change broadly and wildfires specifically.

Sarah Henderson: Climate change is the biggest threat to human health that we have ever faced. But -- it's also the biggest threat to human survival that we have ever faced, and we just don't treat it that way. 

If we look at the COVID-19 pandemic, and the amount of money that we spent to protect human health during that pandemic and we compare the actual risks of COVID with the actual risks of the changing climate. These 2 things are on totally different scales. We need to start thinking about resourcing this question of climate change, individual health and public health in a way that is commensurate with the risk.

 So I've been studying the health effects of wild virus Mok for almost 20 years now since the 2003 firestorm in British Columbia, which at the time was the most catastrophic wildfires in the province had ever seen. Now we've had several more catastrophic seasons, unfortunately, and we're well into another very rough season this year. 

Wildfire smoke is a form of air pollution. And we know from decades of research and tens of thousands of studies that air pollution is not good for human health. Wildfire smoke is a different type of air pollution for a few reasons. First of all, the types of fuels that are burning in -- for other pollution, it's often fossil fuels when we're talking about wildfire smoke we're talking about while land fuels forests and sometimes interface fires, where there's this burning of anthropogenic material. 

The air pollution from wildfires is highly episodic as we've learned across North America in the past couple of weeks. We can go weeks and years without episodes of wildfire smoke and then we have these really big episodes where the magnitude of the exposures far exceed the magnitude the exposure to air pollution from other sources such as traffic and industry. 

So the type of air pollution is a little bit different and the way that we're exposed is quite different. It's also highly dynamic in space and time, which we've also seen over the past few weeks. It comes, it goes. It comes in really thick and another couple of days it clears. There's just no other type of air pollution that behaves that way. 

But when we get back to the fundamentals that wildfire smoke is a type of air pollution, we then need to consider that there's 2 elements to that air pollution. There's fine particulate matter, and there's gases. Fine particulate matter is particles that measure less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter. And in many cases when we're talking about wildfire smoke, we're talking about particles that are even smaller, often in the ultrafine fraction or less than 0.1 microns in diameter. 

And the smaller the particles are, the deeper they can enter into your body. So when we have these small particles and you inhale them, they can penetrate deep into the human lung right into the alveolar oxygen exchange region. 

And there's a couple of things that happen there. First, they cause irritation. Your body doesn't want them to be there. 

Second, because your body perceives them to be a foreign invader, it mounts an immunological response against them. The same way as it would do for a virus or a bacterium in your lungs, and it tries to annihilate these particles. But because there's so many of them and because they're not biological, that immunological response can go a bit haywire, and that leads to inflammation that can affect the entire body. 

And then finally, those very small particles, the ultrafine particles can actually translocate across the lung and into the bloodstream and circulate through the whole body and have impacts on other organ systems of particular interest is the brain. 

And so those particles are small enough to cross that all-important blood-brain barrier. So when we have smoky conditions, what's happening is a really whole body response to the smoke. 

The canaries in the coal mine of this exposure are anybody with asthma or COPD, those types of obstructive respiratory diseases where your airways want to close up sometimes. 

Folks who have those conditions are very sensitive to smoke and that may be because of the particles or it may be because of those gases that I mentioned earlier that can also irritate the lungs.

But then we also see that there's increases in extreme cardiovascular events when it's smoky such as heart attacks and out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. We see the individuals who have diabetes have a difficult time getting their insulin balanced. And more and more, we're seeing these outcomes related to cognitive health and mental health. So we do see small decrements to cognitive function and performance when it's smoky outside.

Lindsey Hall: So there's the obvious devastating human toll of these wildfires. I wonder when it comes to understanding health and economic impacts, is that something that you look at in your work at all, just sort of this question of quantifying what are the health costs associated with the recent wildfires that we've seen starting in Quebec?

Sarah Henderson: So I'm not a health economist, but I have worked with health economists on these questions in the past. And we did an analysis of this in Canada some years ago now, but it did include the extreme 2017 and 2018 wildfire seasons in Western North America. And the costs are in the billions of dollars, not necessarily the direct health care costs of more visits and more hospital admissions, but there is a significant burden of mortality and premature mortality associated with these widespread events. When we're talking about wildfire smoke and the risks -- the risks are relatively small for any given individual, but every single person is breathing that air. And when you multiply those small risks out across millions or hundreds of millions of people, they do add up to a significant burden of mortality. And that's really what drives the economic analysis.

Lindsey Hall: Sarah noted that wildfire smoke can also have serious long-term consequences.

Sarah Henderson: We know from, again, decades of research, exposure to air pollution is associated with the development of chronic diseases. If you live in a more polluted city, you're more likely to have chronic diseases and your life expectancy is shorter than if you live in a clean city, all other things being equal. And again, the kind of episodic nature of wildfire smoke makes it difficult to study these longer-term impacts of the exposures, but we are starting to see evidence that exposure to wildfire smoke is no different really from exposure to other types of air pollution when it comes to these longer-term health effects. So again, there's that kind of simple message of reduced smoke exposure exposure, reduce smoke exposure. And that's going to protect people not only in the short term when it's smoky, but also in the longer term. The more you can reduce your smoke exposure, the more you protect your health overall. The other thing I'd like to say, there is the real potential for wildfire smoke exposure to affect the health of unborn infants and babies throughout the rest of their lives. So we're certainly seeing that smoke exposures for people who are pregnant do have impacts on the developing fetus. And we know from a really cool series of studies in California monkeys, the exposure in the first months of life really does significant damage or can do significant damage to the lungs. -- our lungs are incredibly sensitive when you're first born and they grow very quickly. So an insult from smoke can damage them and then affect your health through the rest of your life. So there's a real nexus of concern there for infant and child health when we're talking about these exposures because those lungs are still developing and they're sensitive, and that means that something you experience when you're 6 months old could still be affecting your health when you're 80 years old.

Lindsey Hall: Given everything we've heard today about the wildfires and their impacts on greenhouse gas emissions, health, the economy, I wanted to understand what are the solutions. For this, let's turn one last time to Werner from the Canadian Forest Service.

Werner Kurz: First of all, it's very important to understand that there is no silver bullet. There's nothing that we can do sort of in the near term that will solve this problem. But we can look at the reasons, some of the reasons for these changes. 

So the things that we can do also differ by ecosystem type. We have a wide range of ecosystems from the Pacific Coast rain forest to the interior dry forests of British Columbia to the Boreal forest across all of Northern Canada.

What we can do differs. But let me focus on the areas in the West where we are actively working on some of these issues. And one of the things that has happened over the last century or so is that European forest management and European settlement colonization has brought a timber focus to forest management. And as a result, we have valued coniferous tree species. Their wood is of greater value than that of broadleaf species like Aspen and Berkshire maple. We valued Conifer species over hardwood species. And as a result, we tried to manage our forests so that we have more of these coniferous species, which are more vulnerable to fire. 

So as a result of forest management changes, we have tried to suppress fires successfully over the last century. And United States Smoky the Bear was a very successful campaign with regard to reducing the area burn. We have reduced or eliminated cultural burning by First Nations. And all of these things have contributed to changes in the landscape characteristics. We have more contiguous forests. We have fewer open spaces. We have older forests in general, and they contain more carbon -- in other words, we have stored more wood than biomass in our landscapes, and this is now coming to haunt us as climate change makes it more and more difficult to defend these landscapes against wildfires, and that's why we start to see these catastrophic mega fires that we have observed in recent years. 

So the discussion now is around how do we change forest management. Can we encourage more broadleaf species? Can we reduce the density of biomass? Can we thin our forests? Can we reduce some of the latter fuels. These are small trees and medium-sized trees that carry flames from the ground into the canopy. And all of these things are being looked at as well as more prescribed burning, reintroduction of cultural burning and other activities to bring the landscape into a more fire-resilient condition. 

This also means an opportunity. There are huge amounts of low-grade biomass in these stands that could be thinned, could be extracted, and we can use this biomass to also help us fight global warming by using it as a source for long-lived wood products or as a source for bioenergy or other products. 

And so we extract the carbon and the biomass that's in the landscape. We use it. Some of it will be released back into the atmosphere, and some of it will be used instead of emissions-intensive materials. Whether or not and the extent to which this is mitigating climate change is always a very complex question. And our team and others are doing many quantitative analyses of the options that are available and which one of these are more climate effective than the others.

I want to be clear, though, that I think some smoke is going to be unavoidable because the risk reduction, the future management of the landscapes, fire will play a role. Even if it's managed firers, low-intensity fires, prescribed burning, cultural burning all these activities, obviously, the solution space needs to include extracting biomass rather than burning it and capturing the energy or turning it into products and using the value. 

But fire and therefore, some level of smoke in the future is in all of our lives. We will have to learn to live with it. But the goal is to do these prescribed by burnings and other activities in such a way that smoke production is minimized. It cannot be completely eliminated, and we will never completely eliminate wildfires.

Lindsey Hall: Okay. I have a couple of follow-up questions for you here, but I'll start with the definitions. For any listeners who aren't familiar, when you're talking about biomass, what does that mean in plain English?

Werner Kurz: Yes. In plain English, biomass is living organic matter. So it's basically the trees, the trunks, the foliage of trees, shrubs, any organic matter.

Lindsey Hall: Okay. Great. And when you talk about cultural burning, what does that refer to?

Werner Kurz: So the term cultural burning has been used in recent years to describe the activities that First Nations regularly did to maintain and enhance the landscape surrounding their communities. These are practices that would deliberately use fire to manipulate the landscape to steer succession, so to remove forest tree seedlings that are encroaching in grasslands, to encourage the production of berries and shrubs and perhaps medicinal plants and others. So it's, fire was in Western North America, like it is in other countries like Australia, was a tool of the First Nations that was used to increase the resilience of the landscape and have desired outcomes in terms of the vegetation composition, Habitat for ungulates that were easier to hunt in the proximity of their villages, et cetera.

Lindsey Hall: Great. That's very helpful. And you described some of the solution that might happen. I'm wondering where do you see that solution coming from? Is it policy? Is it private sector? Is it some combination of the 2? A lot of our audience is from the business community. So I think they're probably going to be interested to know what is the role of private sector in addressing some of these challenges.

Werner Kurz: I think it has to be an effort that literally involves all elements of society. We see some of this starting to happen in the United States and in Oregon, in Washington, California. There are growing investments usually involving collaboration between federal agencies, state agencies and -- but also municipalities and communities counties to basically take actions that reduce the wildfire risk. 

They could be geographically very narrowly focused on what in Canada we call the Wildland urban interface. So this is the area surrounding communities where wildfire threatens the community and human life or it could be larger landscape level designs where we really try to reduce the fire risks throughout the landscape.

Lindsey Hall: So as we've heard from our 3 guests today, these wildfires have had serious impacts for business, health and the economy. And we also heard this call to action the need to urgently address these risks and the importance of mitigation and adaptation. 

Esther Whieldon: Please stay tuned as we continue tracking how the sustainability world is facing these challenges. And by the way, I'll be in Boston next week covering GreenBiz's GreenFin conference for an upcoming episode of this podcast. So if any of our listeners are going, I hope to see you there.

Lindsey Hall: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of ESG Insider and a special thanks to our producer, Kyle Cangialosi. Please be sure to subscribe to our podcast and sign up for our weekly newsletter, ESG Insider. See you next time.

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