Over the past year and a half, Tree Frog has periodically turned to political risk consultant Robert McKellar to help readers make sense of the forces reshaping the business environment for the North American forest sector. Most recently, in International Political Risk: Separating Noise From What Matters, Robert walked through how a political risk professional decides which of the world’s constant stream of headlines — tariffs, wars, trade disputes, sanctions — actually warrant a forest company’s attention, and which are just noise.

This time, Robert turns to a different, longer-running kind of risk — one that isn’t caused by any single event, but by a slow convergence of forces that can remake an entire industry over years, often without anyone recognizing it as it’s happening. Using two cases from the wood products sector — the rise of Chinese dominance in pulp and paper, and the decline of BC’s lumber industry — Robert shows how strategic risk hides in plain sight, and why it’s so often only clear in hindsight. The article closes on a practical question: if this kind of change is only clear in hindsight, how can companies improve their odds of catching it earlier? Robert’s answer is strategic risk management — less a set of day-to-day processes than a habit of thinking decades, not quarters, ahead.