Former NDP premier Glen Clark says the cumulative impact of NDP’s land use changes has been devastating. In other Business news: Simpson Strong-Tie acquires Calculated Structural Designs; three North American construction trends; and Canadian and US housing market updates. Meanwhile, news on Forest Products EXPO 2025; US WoodWorks’ events; and the BC Community Forests conference.
In Forestry/Climate news: a federal judge says Canada waited too long to protect the spotted owl; from Hawaii to BC—wildfires create challenges for telecoms; NRCan supports forest restoration in Ontario; Massachusetts’ new climate plan involves more forest conservation; and New Mexico evolves its forest management to create resilience to fire.
Finally, a new online tool measuring a neighbourhood’s wealth according to its trees.
Kelly McCloskey, Tree Frog Editor
The first interest rate cut from the Bank of Canada in more than four years will not be enough to help most prospective homebuyers feeling sidelined by high borrowing costs, new polling suggests. The Ipsos poll conducted after the Bank of Canada’s 25-basis-point rate cut on June 5 shows pessimism about housing affordability persists. The central bank’s policy rate is a key input into housing costs, affecting both the size of mortgage Canadians can qualify for and the amount they pay on a monthly basis. Just over six in 10 respondents (63%) to the polls said they’ll remain on the sidelines. …Though the Bank of Canada kicked off its easing cycle last week and suggested there could be more interest rate cuts in the cards this year, rates remain at elevated levels. …The Bank of Canada’s next interest rate decision is set for July 24.
A closely-watched report on US inflation showed consumer price increases cooled during the month of May, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics released Wednesday morning. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) remained flat over the previous month and rose 3.3% over the prior year in May — a deceleration from April’s 0.3% month-over-month increase and 3.4% annual gain in prices. Both measures came in lower than economist expectations. It was the lowest monthly headline reading since July 2022. A decline in energy prices, led by a drop in gas prices, contributed to further downward pressure on headline CPI. …”The CPI release for May is very good news for the Federal Reserve and it is going to be even better news for the PCE price index, which will be released at the end of the month,” Raymond James’ Chief Economist Eugenio Aleman said.
Colorado School of Mines professor Shiling Pei’s research is helping lead the way for a revolution in construction using strong, lightweight, renewable timber. “We submitted a proposal to the National Science Foundation to ask, ‘can we build a resilient, tall wood building in seismic regions made of mass timber?'” Pei explained. Pei was part of a group that made history in San Diego. …Pei’s research tackled one key component: how a mass timber skyscraper would handle an earthquake. …This research, according to Pei, is invaluable for establishing that this building type, a carbon-storing renewable resource, can exist on the West Coast of the U.S. and become a preferred building type for skyscrapers. But what about Denver — an area without much seismic activity? According to Greg Kingsley, president of KL&A Engineers, the Mile High City has been at the forefront of mass timber building technology.
Concrete is perhaps the most commonly used building material in the world. With a bit of tweaking, it could help to power our homes too. On a laboratory bench in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a stack of polished cylinders of black-coloured concrete sit bathed in liquid and entwined in cables. To a casual observer, they aren’t doing much. But then Damian Stefaniuk flicks a switch. The blocks of human-made rock are wired up to an LED – and the bulb flickers into life. …Despite some new discoveries of lithium reserves, the finite supply of this material… has driven the search for alternative battery materials. This is where Stefaniuk and his concrete come in. He and his colleagues at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have found a way of creating an energy storage device known as a supercapacitor from three basic, cheap materials – water, cement and a soot-like substance called carbon black.
A week after his presidential inauguration, Joe Biden cited the climate and biodiversity crises as reasons to set a sweeping new goal – to conserve at least 30% of America’s vast lands and waters by the end of the decade. Three years on, new protections have spurred meaningful progress towards meeting the target by 2030. …As Biden took office, about 12% of US land had been protected by previous administrations. About 41m acres has been placed under some form of new protection across public and private lands during Biden’s term, meaning that about 13% of the US’s landmass is now deemed protected, up by about 1%. A far smaller expanse of US waters have been newly conserved under Biden but the aquatic side of the goal is closer with 26% currently protected and with new designations planned for territories in the Pacific Ocean set to push the total above the 30% target.
GATINEAU
Summers keep getting hotter, and the consequences are impossible to miss. …One driving force behind these projections are the alternating Pacific Ocean climate patterns known as El Niño and La Niña, which can create huge shifts in temperature and precipitation across the North and South American continents. After almost a year of El Niño, La Niña is expected to take the reins sometime during the upcoming summer months. As climate change cooks the planet and the Pacific shifts between these two cyclical forces, experts say the conditions could be ripe for more extreme weather events. “We’ve always had this pattern of El Niño, La Niña. Now it’s happening on top of a warmer world,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, an environmental data science nonprofit. “We need to be ready for the types of extremes that have not been tested in the past.”
British Columbia’s CleanBC Industry Fund invests carbon taxes paid by large industries back into clean-technology projects that reduce emissions. …In 2023, 12 projects were approved under three funding streams for a total of $32.6 million. The recipients include… Skookumchuck Pulp in the Kootenbay region will demonstrate the direct firing of pulverized wood into its lime kiln to displace the combustion of natural gas without compromising lime production, quality or reliability. …Skookumchuk Pulp will also investigate the use of high-temperature pyrolysis on waste forestry residuals to produce high-quality/caloric content syngas while producing high-quality biochar….Canfor Pulp will explore the potential of renewable diesel as an alternative fuel to reduce emissions in the pulp industry’s transportation of raw materials. …Catalyst Paper will investigate options to enhance biofuel delivery at its Port Alberni site. Catalyst Paper will also investigate the opportunity of installing a heat-recovery system in the power boiler exhaust at its site. 
After more than three decades on Wall Street, Tom Montag thought he’d seen most forms of financial wizardry. Then Hank Paulson asked him to tackle carbon offsets. …The goal was to “unleash as much carbon finance as possible,” Montag said. But a string of scandals threw the anticipated boom into question. …Prices for carbon offsets tracked by MSCI peaked in 2022, when Paulson recruited Montag, and have been on a downward trajectory since. …Montag and other backers on Wall Street haven’t blinked. They’ve remained convinced companies and governments will eventually embrace carbon offsets as an indispensable climate solution in a world racing to reach net zero emissions. And last month, Rubicon signed a deal with Microsoft Corp., one of the world’s largest offset buyers, to generate credits from a tree-planting project in Panama. …Offset bulls recently scored big wins. The US just issued the US government’s first-ever official blessing of the credits.
Cities concentrate problems that affect human well-being and biodiversity. Exploring the link between mental health and biodiversity can inform more holistic public health and urban planning. Here we examined associations between bird and tree species diversity estimates from eBird community science datasets and national forest inventories with self-rated mental health metrics from the Canadian Community Health Survey. We linked data across 36 Canadian Metropolitan Areas from 2007-2022 at a postal code level. After controlling for covariates, we found that bird and tree species diversity were significantly positively related to good self-reported mental health. Living in a postal code with bird diversity one standard deviation higher than the mean increased reporting of good mental health by 6.64%. Postal codes with tree species richness one standard deviation more than the mean increased reporting of good mental health by 5.36%. Our results suggest that supporting healthy urban ecosystems may also benefit human well-being.
