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The Tyee
February 2, 2025
By: Zoë Yunker 

Original article here.

A forest advisory council has recommended shifting B.C.’s forest regime towards more local decision-making.

The plan has received applause from forestry groups, the BC Greens and the head of the BC First Nations Forestry Council. But some experts warn the plan lacks teeth and risks putting fragile forest ecosystems at risk.

The advisory council was created last year as part of the BC Greens’ confidence agreement with the NDP, with a mandate to diagnose the turmoil in B.C.’s forests and pitch a new path forward. Its members include representatives from industry, labour and academia.

The release of the council’s report comes as more mills close across the province and ecosystems struggle from over a century of intensive old-growth logging.

“I think of this like the cod fishery,” said Garry Merkel, a forester and co-chair of the advisory council, at the report’s launch event Monday. Merkel likened B.C.’s crisis to the fishery collapse on Canada’s East Coast.

“That’s the kind of situation we face,” he said. A wholesale overhaul to forest management is long overdue, he added. “We cannot keep kicking this can down the road.”

The report calls on the government to scrap its longtime timber supply review process, which allocates timber quotas to licensees throughout the province but does not provide ecosystem-based forestry plans. In its place, the council is recommending a regional forest planning system that would consider industry and ecosystems together at the local level. Planning would happen under regional bodies, which Merkel likened to “school boards.”

The report recommends launching a provincewide forest inventory to make in-depth information on ecosystem health and old-growth stands publicly accessible. It also calls for the creation of a non-partisan oversight body, potentially like the BC Forest Practices Board, to oversee the transition to regional management and insulate the process from shifting political winds.

BC First Nations Forestry Council chief executive officer Lennard Joe told The Tyee he supports the report and its efforts to bring forest decision-making closer to people it affects.

“It’s about responsibility,” he said. “It’s about looking at where we are in the present and the decisions we make about the well-being of our future.”

Speaking at the report’s launch event at Victoria’s Hotel Grand Pacific on Monday, BC Green MLA Rob Botterell said he also supported the report’s conclusions. “I want to express my appreciation for calling a spade a spade.”

“This is where we’re at. We’ve got a path forward.”

The report’s conclusions also received a thumbs-up from the Truck Loggers Association. It issued a statement saying it “supports the overall direction of the report and its recommendations, including the shift from volume- to area-based management, adopting regional forest management areas, increased community engagement, First Nations co-management, and improved focus and alignment across the sector.”

But University of British Columbia forest management professor Peter Wood noted that the report made little mention of the province’s Old Growth Strategic Review, the still-unfinished initiative co-authored by Merkel, which called for a “paradigm shift” to prioritize ecosystem health over timber values. The province still has not implemented key components from the now-six-year-old strategy, including commitments to create laws on ecosystem health and biodiversity. Meanwhile, recent findings show industry continues to target the province’s highest-value and most ecologically threatened old-growth forests.

Without legal changes and immediate measures to keep old growth standing, Wood warns of another “talk and log” situation.

“I’ve got this image in my mind where we’re looking at the last slice of pie, and discussing how to allocate the remaining piece,” he said. “One person is eating the pie as you’re having the conversation.”

The case for place-based management

Currently, the heart of B.C.’s forest management system is the timber supply review, a structured process that tallies remaining trees in a given region and doles out logging quotas.

The timber review is based on narrow criteria: it’s tasked with maintaining enough trees on the landscape to keep industry running into the future. But the system comes with some major flaws.

Among them is a firewall between the review’s focus on timber supplies and efforts to steward ecosystems. The review doesn’t assess ecosystem health, nor does it tell companies how or where to log to keep ecosystems healthy.

Companies map out their own cutblocks, usually targeting the highest-value primary forests, which are often the most ecologically threatened.

The province has made various efforts over the years to maintain some forests on the landscape, like designating areas for old growth and caribou habitat. But the timber supply review doesn’t assess whether these tools are working or whether they’re being properly enforced. Meanwhile, laws governing these ecologically focused areas are frequently ridden with loopholes, including a category of “old-growth management areas” where, according to a recent report from the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, only a third actually contain old forest.

Even within its narrow mandate of doling out trees, the timber supply review appears to fall short. A report recently leaked to Business in Vancouver suggests that even when the government knows the timber supply is being depleted, it can toggle the dials to boost its timber projections. The process also relies on inaccurate and out-of-date information about B.C.’s existing forests.

“We don’t know what we have on the land base right now,” Merkel said Monday.

Merkel and the council recommended a wholesale overhaul of the timber supply review process in favour of a system that brings conversations around timber allocation and ecosystems into one room, governed by regional boards.

“Key here is management defined areas based on territories, based on ecology, based on the characteristics of that area,” Merkel said.

Under the new system, logging allocations would be mapped onto the landscape, making it easier to see whether they fit with the region’s other values for ecosystem health. The recommended data inventory system would better inform those involved in the process to make decisions about the forests they are managing.

That information “levels the playing field,” said Shannon Janzen, co-chair of the advisory council and a former chief forester of Western Forest Products. Currently, the in-depth forest information, including lidar technology, is held only by forest companies, which tend to keep it private.

In an interview with The Tyee, Merkel said the regional approach, informed by better data, is more likely to support a more iterative forest management regime.

“If you make the decision, you are [publicly] accountable for that,” he said. That accountability would incentivize regional boards to assess the impacts of their decisions and modify their approach as needed.

“You learn from it and grow and adapt over time,” he said.

With the new lidar data in hand, the council suggested B.C. conduct a “high-value” old-growth assessment to address data gaps in the province’s Old Growth Technical Advisory Panel report, which relied on a combination of data sources, including the province’s outdated inventory data.

It also calls for the province to support regional management trials to test different models and to make it easier to thin forests and use prescribed burns to address wildfire risks near communities.

B.C. has been experimenting with efforts to regionalize some parts of its existing forest bureaucracy, including by launching forest landscape plans in 2021. In January, Premier David Eby signalled his continued commitment to the process. But the council’s report highlighted shortcomings with the approach, adding that it “revealed the ongoing limitations of working within existing structures without foundational change.”

The balance of power

Rachel Holt, a conservation ecologist and member of the province’s Old Growth Technical Advisory Panel, worries that the council’s recommendations stop short of changes that are required to protect key ecosystems.

“I do think you could put in place the things that they’re talking about and still not have a paradigm shift in how the forests are managed,” she said.

Holt supports the report’s direction on greater regional controls and a more integrated regional process on timber and ecosystem management. But she noted that the Old Growth Strategic Review’s recommendation for new biodiversity legislation is noticeably absent from the council’s report. She said those legal tools are needed to ensure that financial incentives to log don’t continue to stack the deck.

“The balance of power still hasn’t changed, unless you have a law,” she said.

The report argues that its recommended structural changes, including more regional decision-making and improved forest data, will leave the province better equipped to usher in the changes advocated in the Old Growth Strategic Review.

But Sarah Korpan, government relations and campaign manager at Ecojustice, warned against losing sight of government accountability in the push to regionalize, particularly when communities may be faced with tough decisions between ecological protection and sustaining the forest industry.

“Where are the alternatives at the ready when a community is faced with that situation?” she asked.