Woke up at 5, pulled on the boots. Mud from last Tuesday still stuck to the roots. Drove 3 hours down a logging track. Phones got no signal. GPS won’t come back. Someone at the barbecue asked what I do. I said I manage forests. They said, “Oh, that’s cool.” So you just hug trees and watch them grow. Man, I’ve been pruning since before you’d know. We’re out in the bush while you’re stuck in town. Counting every tree ring, measuring the crown. [Our thanks to Andrew Dunn for sending this in!]
OTTAWA — The Canada Border Services Agency has launched a probe to determine if plywood is being subsidized or sold at unfair prices in Canada. A news release from the agency says the investigation began on April 10 and focuses on imports from producers operating in or exporting from China. It says the practices can harm Canadian industries by undercutting Canadian prices and undermining fair competition. The investigation comes after a complaint was filed by Columbia Forest Products and the Canadian Hardwood Plywood and Veneer Association, which say they’ve faced lost sales, poor financial results and reduced employment. The CBSA and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal are both involved in investigations of Chinese plywood. The tribunal will issue its decision by June 9, while the CBSA’s probe into unfair prices will reach a preliminary decision by July 9.
SALMON ARM, British Columbia — Forsite Consultants Ltd. today announced the launch of 
Mercer International’s bonds slumped after it sought to ditch rules requiring equal treatment for all creditors — a move that would give the struggling pulp producer the power to pick and choose which lenders to favor in a restructuring. The company asked owners of its bonds due in 2028 and 2029 to remove a provision that forces it to pay all lenders equally when it seeks to strike a debt deal, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing private information. Separately, a group of Mercer’s creditors has organized in anticipation of debt talks with the company and plans to sign a cooperation pact binding them to act together. …Mercer is grappling with weak earnings and dwindling cash flow that’s left it struggling under the weight of its debt, which stood at about $1.6 billion at the end of last year. S&P Global Ratings downgraded the firm to CCC+ in February.
BRUSSELS — The European Union’s trade surplus with the rest of the world shrank by 60 per cent in February as exports to the United States dropped by more than a quarter, with U.S. import tariffs of 15 per cent largely in place on EU goods. EU exports as a whole were 9.3 per cent lower in February than a year earlier, while imports were down 3.5 per cent, EU statistics office Eurostat said on Friday. The largest export decline was towards the U.S., with a drop of 26.4 per cent, while imports from the United States were 3.2 per cent lower. EU exports to China were also down. A year ago, EU exporters had begun front-loading shipments to the U.S. in anticipation of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs, inflating the export figures for early 2025 and potentially explaining February’s sharp decline. Exports to the United States in February 2025 rose by 22.4 per cent year-on-year.
Rising tensions between the United States and Iran are creating mounting challenges for recycled paper mills across the Gulf region, known as the GCC. The sector is heavily dependent on imported recovered paper, particularly OCC (old corrugated containers) and mixed waste paper from Europe, the United States and Asia. Geopolitical instability has led to higher freight costs, increased insurance premiums and growing uncertainty in supply chains. Although local waste paper collection remains relatively stable, the unpredictability of imports has made procurement strategies more complex. Delays and disruptions in shipments risk directly affecting production. At the same time, the cost of key inputs is rising. Prices for chemicals, starch and spare parts are increasing due to logistical bottlenecks and delayed deliveries. …Despite these pressures, the market outlook in the Middle East remains relatively stable in the short term. …However, prolonged geopolitical uncertainty could gradually dampen industrial activity and consumption.
Global trade is being reshaped by escalating tariffs and geopolitical tensions, with the Nordic and European forestry industries directly affected. During 2025 and 2026, the United States introduced a series of trade measures that are altering the conditions for exports of timber, paper and pulp. …At the same time, the US has imposed steep tariffs on several major trading partners. Canada faces tariffs of 35%, although some products covered by the USMCA agreement are exempt. Brazil is subject to tariffs of up to 50% on paper and paperboard, while China continues to face high tariff levels. …Even where products are exempt from tariffs, trade is affected by higher supply chain costs, currency fluctuations and weaker demand. There is also a risk of trade diversion. If Canadian or Brazilian exporters face higher tariffs, they may redirect volumes to other markets, increasing competition in Europe. The broader trend points to a more fragmented global trading system.
Russia’s forest industry warns that up to 50% of companies could shut by the end of 2026 as lower export prices, higher transport costs and a strong ruble push producers deeper into losses. Regional lawmakers and industry participants ask First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov to approve a three-year moratorium on creditor-initiated bankruptcy cases in the sector, along with tax deferrals and a pause on debt collection for liabilities accumulated by January 1, 2026, Russian Kommersant newspaper reports, citing a committee of the Arkhangelsk regional assembly. The draft says even large companies in the region have exhausted their financial reserves, are operating at a loss and are starting to miss tax and other mandatory payments. It puts total sector losses over the past three years at more than 15 billion rubles. State support for exporters also drops sharply, with compensation for forest export costs falling from 7.6 billion rubles in 2023 to 550 million in 2026.
If the US-Israeli ceasefire with Iran holds, it could offer the clearest hope of an end to the energy crisis since Iran’s Revolutionary Guards assumed control of the strait of Hormuz. …Even if the temporary detente manages to hold and hundreds of tankers stranded in the Gulf start to transit once more, analysts fear that will not be enough to return the flow of oil, gas, chemicals and other vital items to pre-crisis levels. An estimated 2,000 vessels have been trapped in the Gulf. …Shipping analysts predict operators will gain confidence once a ship owned by a large European company has safely made the crossing. However, they caution that it is a different matter for empty ships to decide to enter the strait to load up at the region’s ports, and it is unclear when this may start to happen. …Experts have said it could take months or years to fully restore the Gulf’s energy production.
Higher inflation and weaker growth ahead are inevitable for the global economy as a consequence of the Iran war, the head of the International Monetary Fund warned on Monday as the institution prepares to cut its forecasts. “All roads now lead to higher prices and slower growth,” IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva said Monday night. Before the war, the IMF anticipated issuing a small upgrade on its outlook for global growth of 3.3% in 2026 and 3.2% in 2027, according to Georgieva. But those expectations have since been upended as the Iran conflict has sent shockwaves through the global economy that are unlikely to unravel anytime soon, even if the war is brought to a rapid resolution. …“Directionally, it is stagflation,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “It’s higher inflation and weaker economic growth that is the result of policy — tariff policy and immigration policy.”
The landscape of the United States wood products industry in 2026 is being shaped by evolution from commodity lumber toward high-performance engineered wood systems. …While traditional sawmills have faced a turbulent consolidation period, the emergence of mass timber, specifically glulam and cross laminated timber, have created a high-growth sector that is increasingly more independent from the traditional volatility of the single-family residential market. …On the supply side, the wood industry is navigating a period of restructured supply and capacity following a series of significant mill closures in recent years. …Looking ahead to 2027 and beyond, as new mills come online, the industry is poised to move engineered wood products and mass timber from a niche specialty to a standard building practice. The core business challenge for the next 24 months will be the development of a more robust domestic supply chain that can support American builders amid logistics disruptions. 
Log cost inflation, tightening felling regulations, muted end-product demand and the disruption of Middle East & North Africa (MENA) export channels by the conflict in the Persian Gulf are combining to test the resilience of sawmills in Finland and Sweden, with the pressure being felt all the way to Central European timber yards. In September 2025, Finland and Sweden jointly wrote to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, warning that both countries were on track to miss their binding EU forest carbon-sink targets. …Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo said, that reducing felling volumes was “not a viable option” and that it would have “dire consequences” for Nordic economies.” This high-level lobbying by Norway and Sweden highlights the central tension now confronting the Nordic sawn timber industry: that a sector already struggling with elevated sawlog costs and sluggish end-user demand has found itself additionally squeezed from above by environmental regulation.
As the world gets hotter and wildfires more intense, architects are turning back to trees for more than inspiration. Engineered materials like cross-laminated and glue-laminated timber, in which layers of wood are glued together, create beams that are tough and somewhat flexible, yet lightweight. They’re so strong, in fact, that designers are crafting wood structures that are 15, 20, even 25 stories high: In 2022, the 284-foot Ascent MKE Building opened in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, becoming the world’s tallest timber building. It’s exactly because the world is getting hotter that architects are pushing the limits of how tall they can build with “mass timber,” as it’s known in the field: As trees grow, they capture planet-warming carbon, which is then permanently incorporated into the edifice. To that end, last month crews completed a 10-story building in Vancouver, called the Hive, which is now North America’s tallest brace-framed, seismic-force-resisting (meaning it shrugs off earthquakes) timber structure. 
The UK construction sector is being encouraged to increase its use of homegrown timber, as industry experts highlight the benefits of locally sourced materials over imports. Despite the availability of sustainable domestic options, nearly 80% of timber used in the United Kingdom continues to be imported. This reliance is now being questioned across the supply chain. …A key issue raised within the sector relates to timber grading. Architects and engineers frequently specify higher grades such as GL28 or C24 without fully assessing project requirements. This trend has developed due to historical dependence on imported Scandinavian timber, where C24 is the standard grade. In contrast, the most common grade produced in the UK is closer to C16. This mismatch has led to inefficiencies. British timber is often overlooked. Specifications are sometimes made without full evaluation. The ‘Trust UK C16’ campaign is aiming to address this imbalance. 
DENMARK — The timber industry is intensifying efforts to expand the use of wood in construction, with a new action plan aiming to raise its market share to 20% by 2030. Launched under the “TiB 2.0” initiative by industry body Træ i Byggeriet, the strategy seeks to accelerate adoption by addressing key barriers, including restrictive building regulations, entrenched industry practices and limited knowledge of wood’s capabilities. Lauritz Rasmussen, head of the organisation’s secretariat, said the initiative builds on growing interest in timber as a sustainable building material but acknowledges progress has been too slow. He stated that “all reason dictates that we should use more wood for the climate, the environment and for the qualities for which wood is recognized”. The plan focuses on increasing visibility, improving documentation and promoting knowledge-sharing to influence decision-makers. Leadership changes also form part of the strategy, with Per Thomas Dahl of CLT Denmark appointed as the new chairman.
TOKYO — Leaders from the global forestry sector met last week in Tokyo to advance the 
Tropical forests span 1.6 billion hectares of Earth. …But over the past two decades, an average of 10 million hectares of these forests have been lost each year, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, affecting the ecosystems and communities that depend on them. NASA scientists recently developed a new method for tracking tropical forest loss that delivers deforestation alerts more than three months faster than current methods. Although the technique was designed for the Amazon rainforest, data from a recently launched satellite are expected to expand its application globally. …To address Landsat’s cloud challenge, researchers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center tuned into a different wavelength. Led by Africa Flores-Anderson, associate program manager for NASA’s Ecosystem Conservation Program, the team piloted a system for the Amazon that combines existing satellite-based approaches with cutting-edge radar data. …Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) doesn’t require daylight or clear skies. 
The Drax power plant in North Yorkshire received record subsidies of almost £1bn for burning trees to generate electricity in 2025, a climate thinktank has calculated. The company was paid £999m last year for generating about 4.5% of Great Britain’s electricity from its biomass plant, costing each household £13 a year, according to analysts at Ember. The power plant was able to claim £2.7m a day from energy bills in part by increasing its power generation by about 2% from the year before – but mostly due to the rising payouts from a legacy renewables support scheme. …The Guardian revealed last November that forestry experts believed the company was burning 250-year-old trees sourced from some of Canada’s oldest forests as recently as last summer. …The government has already halved the subsidies available to Drax. …Drax will have to switch to using woody biomass from 100% sustainable sources, up from the current level of 70%. 
EUROPE — The war in the Middle East has – among many other unintended but avoidable consequences – put renewed pressure on the European Union to water down its carbon pricing policy. The focus right now is on the existing Emissions Trading System (ETS), but it’s not too soon to be concerned about the fate of its upcoming sequel, known as ETS2. ETS2 is the most consequential climate policy most Europeans (much less the rest of the world) have never heard of. Whereas the existing ETS puts a price on the carbon pollution caused by major industries such as power generation, steel, shipping, aviation and cement, ETS2 does the same for fossil fuels used for land transport and to heat buildings. As such it will impact as much as 40% of the EU’s total emissions – and the living costs of 450 million Europeans. The clock is ticking. ETS2 is scheduled to come into effect in 2028.
FRANCE — Wood pellets, commonly used in stoves and boilers in homes across France, can release carbon monoxide (CO) during storage even without being burned, reports the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety (ANSES). Natural chemical reactions inside the pellets, particularly the oxidation of fatty acids in the wood, can cause them to heat up slightly and release gases without any combustion. In addition to carbon monoxide, stored pellets can emit other gases such as carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄), and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). These processes can also reduce the amount of oxygen in the surrounding air. ANSES says these emissions are usually low and gradual – but tend to increase at higher temperatures. They decrease over time. The type of wood is a factor with, for example, pine pellets likely to emit more gases than spruce. Although the overall risk is limited.