Policies work against the health of our forests
Victoria acting on poor data, Anthony Britneff writes.
Most people in Metro Vancouver and Victoria fail to appreciate the importance of our province’s vast forests. But those living in more rural settings see things differently.
Communities like Skidegate on Haida Gwaii, Fort Nelson in B.C.’s distant northeast, and Cranbrook in the east Kootenay may be separated by more than 1,000 kilometres, but their residents know the health of their communities rests in part on the health of their forests.
Unfortunately, there is disturbing evidence that fundamentally important decisions are being made by public servants in Victoria that work against the sound management of local forests, and that may be positioning rural communities for unnecessary hardship in the years ahead.
One of the most important of those decisions is the setting of logging rates called the allowable annual cut, also known as the AAC. In January 2014, B.C.’s then-chief forester, Dave Peterson, released a decision outlining his rationale for a new AAC in the Bulkley timber supply area, a vast stretch of land surrounding Smithers, Telkwa, Moricetown, Hazelton and other small communities. It’s a decision that newly appointed Forests Minister Doug Donaldson, the local MLA, should familiarize himself with.
Peterson’s decision cemented into place an AAC that will likely remain unchanged for 10 years and that is identical to the rate set way back in 2002, after accounting for the removal of a community forest.
Ten years is a significant chunk of time, but it is even more significant in light of the grim realities of climate change and the increasing insect and disease outbreaks plaguing our forests, including those in the Bulkley region.
In his decision, Peterson said a great deal of technical information was used to arrive at the new AAC, information he acknowledged was far from bulletproof.
“The analytical techniques used to assess timber supply necessarily are simplifications of the real world,” Peterson wrote at one point.
The quality of the information was worse than just simplified, it was wrong — and personnel with B.C.’s Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations knew so.
Ministry staff were not responsible for the critically important forest inventory mapping and predictive ecosystem mapping used in the AAC determination. Years earlier, the government had devolved those responsibilities to the very industry it regulated.
Worse, for the first time in the history of setting AACs, the government allowed the industry to combine the forest inventory and predictive ecosystem mapping into one process instead of two. It was an ambitious, untried and untested methodology. Although it had serious flaws, the results were used for the Bulkley AAC determination.
How do we know that? Peterson’s ministry hired independent specialists to evaluate the results before determining the most recent AAC. The specialists found the predictive ecosystem mapping failed the minimum ministry standard of 65 per cent accuracy, and the inventory mapping either had to be corrected or a complete re-inventory of the Bulkley area needed to be done.
Additionally, forest measurements indicated problems with the timber volumes assigned to the inventory. The ministry adjusted these timber volumes upward.
Finally, the ministry’s AAC rationale document points to an adjustment variable to timber volumes that accounts for forest health issues. The adjustment variable was never applied, meaning forest health issues are not accounted for in the Bulkley AAC.
Suspect information was thus used to set a rate of logging in the region that may be artificially high and that if left unchanged could undermine the social and economic fabric of local communities while impoverishing the forests around them.
More troubling, this is not a problem unique to Forests Minister Donaldson’s backyard. The recent setting of a new AAC in the Quesnel timber supply area prompted local mayor Bob Simpson to raise questions about the process.
Simpson said people in his community have pressed for years for a “real, long-term AAC that is a sustainable harvesting level for our community through the next 10 to 15 years.”
Rural British Columbians understand Victoria’s timber supply review process is seriously flawed and many AACs are fraudulently high. It is time their political masters in the urban south understand that too — and act.