Climate change affecting Christmas tree farms across Canada, expert say

The festive trees take eight to 12 years to reach the size most people look for, and young seedlings are particularly vulnerable to climate risks, said Richard Hamelin, head of the forest conservation sciences department at the University of B.C.Sign up to receive daily headline news from Ottawa Citizen, a division of Postmedia Network Inc.By clicking on the sign up button you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc.

Record-breaking atmospheric rivers of rain caused extensive flooding throughout southwestern B.C. in November 2021, but Shirley Brennan, the executive director of the Canadian Christmas Trees Association, said farmers in the province reported their seedlings mostly appeared fine and the extreme heat had been much harder on the trees.“Right now the seedlings look OK, but it’s whether or not the root system is strong enough to grow into that tree, and that’s what we don’t know,” Brennan said.

The difference, Brennan said, is the extreme, unseasonable nature of recent droughts and other climate-related events, including intense late-spring frosts in Nova Scotia in 2018 followed by eastern Ontario and western Quebec in 2020. “Just like humans, when we are stressed or when we’re more tired, we’re more susceptible to diseases. Well, trees are the same way,” he said. “All this added stress from all this heat and flooding make the trees more susceptible to pests and pathogens.”

The closures have continued since then. Data from Statistics Canada shows the total area of Christmas tree farms shrunk by nearly 20,000 acres between 2011 and 2021. He pointed to some options that could help Christmas tree farmers weather the effects of climate change, including genetically selecting and breeding the strongest trees among classic Canadian speciesor importing different species from parts of the world where fir trees are better adapted to sweltering heat, such as Turkey.

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