Province fails to assess health of our forests

Information needed to manage the resource, Ben Parfitt writes.

When it comes to understanding the risks that B.C.’s forests and forest-dependent communities face, you’d be hard-pressed to find two more qualified individuals than Anthony Britneff and Martin Watts.

Between them, the two have worked a combined 70 years in forestry, Britneff serving four decades in senior positions with the provincial forests ministry and Watts a respected consultant specializing in tree growth and yield.

So when these men say something is wrong, perhaps seriously so, with how our government assesses the health of our forests, we ought to pay attention.

In briefs filed with three different provincial bodies, the duo raised troubling questions about the quality of information the government relies on to make key decisions, the most important being how much forest it is ecologically sound to log.

Unfortunately, these questions come at the most challenging of times. Anyone paying the slightest attention has known for years that thanks to the mountain pine beetle outbreak and other insect infestations, a host of wildfires and years of unsustainable logging, a day of reckoning was at hand.

We’re now poised to see just how bad that day may be. In the massive Prince George forest district (the largest such administrative unit in B.C.), the provincial government estimates today’s logging rates may have to decline by more than half in just four years. But here’s the rub: according to Britneff and Watts, even that dire prediction may understate what lies ahead.

With hard work, we may be able to soften the social and economic blows associated with lower logging rates by manufacturing higher-value forest products, something B.C. does far too little of. Just one job is generated for every 1,020 cubic metres of wood processed in B.C., while in Ontario only 221 cubic metres of wood is needed to achieve the same result.

Moving up the value chain will require significant investments in new B.C. mills, and such investments are unlikely in the face of uncertainty. In other words, we need to know what’s going on in our forests now more than ever.

Throughout B.C., the evidence is in: For more than two decades, climate change has drastically altered our forests. Tree species have become increasingly stressed due to warmer winters and hotter, drier summers. And for years in response to those changes, the logging industry has cut down forests at faster rates, something everyone ought to have known could not be sustained.

This disquieting reality led mayors from across the province to recently pass a resolution at the annual Union of B.C. Municipalities convention calling on the provincial government to re-evaluate how logging rates are calculated to protect not only jobs, but also the environment.

As the mayors voted in favour of that resolution, briefs filed by Watts and Britneff sat before senior staff at the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations, B.C.’s Forest Practices Board and the auditor general.

According to Watts and Britneff, the government uses “an unvalidated computer model based on out-of-date, incorrectly compiled and corrupted data” to predict natural tree growth. Worse, the model used to predict future growth of planted forests is “not properly validated against actual tree growth,” even though the government has re-measured the growth of plantations for four decades at a cost of millions of dollars, they say.

And, worse still, the government does “not incorporate the effects of climate change into these growth models, particularly in the area of forest health,” they say.

In short, the B.C. government is failing to deal with serious deficiencies in the information it uses to make key forest management decisions.

With the provincial government close to making major decisions on future logging rates in regions like Prince George, the time has come for both the auditor general’s office and the Forest Practices Board to formally investigate the information brought before them by Watts and Britneff. The health of our forests and forest industry is at a critical juncture, and it’s time to stop keeping people in the dark.

We need to know what’s going on in our forests now more than ever.