Osoyoos Indian Band is working to revitalize forests in its territories that have been ravaged by wildfires — turning them into fire-resistent zones full of biodiversity, wildlife and medicinal plants for its members. The band-owned Nk’Mip Forestry is planning to revive two woodlands located above the First Nation’s reservation in the highlands between Oliver and Mount Baldy — making up just over 40 hectares combined. The forest tenure where the project is located is approximately 50,000 hectares in size, and is co-managed between the Osoyoos Indian Band and Gorman Bros. The two forests — a drier douglas fir ecosystem with ponderosa pine, and a montane spruce ecosystem dominated by dense lodgepole pile further up the hill — were both impacted by the 2021 Nk’Mip Creek Wildfire, which is estimated to have burned just over 20,000 hectares.
The Forest Enhancement Society of BC (FESBC) is highlighting the growing impact of community forestry across the province, recognizing projects that reduce wildfire risk, improve wildlife habitat and strengthen local economies. At the BC Community Forest Association’s 2026 Conference, FESBC presented its inaugural Community Forest Project of the Year Award to the Kaslo & District Community Forest Society for its “Jimi Crack Corn” project. The latest FESBC newsletter also features updates on fuel reduction work with Nazko First Nation, new federal funding aimed at reducing wood waste and supporting forest resilience, and a safety message from the BC Forest Safety Council encouraging supervisors to recognize early warning signs before serious incidents occur. Minister of Forests Ravi Parmar notes that more than 60 new FESBC-supported projects will build on last year’s wildfire mitigation and fibre utilization efforts, helping create safer, healthier forests and supporting jobs in rural British Columbia.
A Kamloops Fire Centre spokesperson told Sicamous council that local forests are still quite dry despite a burst of fresh green growth brought on by recent wet weather. At the June 24 District of Sicamous committee of the whole meeting, Kamloops Fire Centre manager Jeff Dunne gave council an overview of BC Wildfire Service’s regional operations and a look at what to expect in the coming months. Dunne said a dry start to the spring compounded on drought conditions experienced over the winter. “As everyone is aware, our spring this year looked a little bit challenging,” Dunne said. “Over-winter snows in some parts of the region were way below average.” …Dunne said typically, the Kamloops Fire Centre will be the busiest in the middle of July, but this year BCWS has already seen significant fire behaviour and growth across the region. 
The Syilx Okanagan Nation is petitioning the federal government to act swiftly to protect a prized and threatened caribou species that continues to fall off the map near Revelstoke and Nakusp. On May 28, the Nation announced it had filed for an emergency order under Section 80 of Canada’s Species at Risk Act to press Environment and Climate Change Canada to conserve federally threatened southern mountain caribou. The Nation says continued logging of critical old-growth habitat falls out of line with its forestry principles and standards, and jeopardizes the future of the three caribou herds that remain on Syilx territory. The Frisby-Boulder herd west of Revelstoke is already functionally extinct with just eight caribou, while the Central Selkirk herd … sits at around 27 caribou. The Columbia North herd, roughly 185 caribou strong in the Monashee Mountains north of Revelstoke, has the greatest likelihood of survival, though the Nation says long-term forest habitat recovery remains a challenge.
The Wood Pellet Association of Canada (WPAC) recently highlighted the Indigenous-led efforts of the Central Chilcotin Rehabilitation Ltd. (CCR) at the Palmer Lake forest fire site. Through an article and video, WPAC described CCR’s work and how it treats fire-affected stands by removing dead and damaged material, reducing fuel loading, and spacing young lodgepole pine to support forest recovery. It is also demonstrated how the CCR uses recovered fibre to be put to productive use rather than leaving it at the site. “It’s such a good news story,” wrote Gord Murray, WPAC executive director. “CCR is turning what might otherwise be seen as waste into jobs, economic development, community pride, and contributions to the biomass industry.”
The Province is creating a unified agency to bring together several compliance and enforcement functions from across the natural-resource sector, enhancing environmental protections and supporting a more fair and predictable business environment. The BC Compliance and Enforcement Agency (BC-CEA) will take effect Wednesday, July 1, 2026. By consolidating several enforcement functions from natural-resource ministries, the change will improve consistency and timeliness of services, enhance accountability, and achieve efficiencies by bringing enforcement, compliance and investigations, as well as corporate and digital services, into a single integrated model that supports more co-ordinated operations, better data alignment and stronger, more consistent enforcement.
Local forest advocates gathered in Nelson on Monday to call on Premier David Eby’s government to increase protections for old-growth forests. Eby was in the region this week, visiting and touring local facilities. More than 140 people attended a demonstration outside Kootenay Central MLA Brittny Anderson’s office… Organizer Rita Corcoran said protesters relocated to Taghum Hall after learning Eby was expected to attend an event there. …“We were hoping to talk to him directly and give him that same message directly in person about what we want and that we feel disappointed in the leadership,” said Corcoran. “But he didn’t arrive.” …“I’ve seen the premier meet with protesters across the province, and I know he would have been happy to meet with them here in Nelson as well,” Anderson said. “The RCMP made a security assessment, and we have to respect the decision that they made.”
In his 2025 book, The Genius Bat, Yossi Yovel, an Israeli ecologist, describes experiments he conducted with six Egyptian fruit bats, including an exercise in which he trained them to land on a target and wait for him to approach with a reward — a slice of banana. …Many readers will find the image of bats as trainable, friendly and possessing intelligence, distinct personalities and perhaps even a sense of humour to be quite jarring. But this effect is exactly what Yovel is striving to achieve. His goal with the book is to dispel the many myths surrounding bats and to convey what remarkable and endlessly fascinating creatures they actually are. …Due to misinformation many people are unaware of the benefits bats provide by eating massive amounts of harmful insects, producing guano, which is an important natural fertilizer, and pollinating plants and spreading seeds. Without bats, humans would be in deep trouble.
British Columbians are subsidizing the province’s forest companies to the tune of tens of millions of dollars each year under a government program that defrays the cost of shipping logs from remote forests to distant mills. In 2023, logging companies received nearly $33 million in public funds to underwrite the costs of hauling “low-value” logs to wood pulp and pellet mills. …The subsidies are posted online by the Forest Enhancement Society of BC, or FESBC, an organization created and funded by the provincial government and that reports to Forests Minister Ravi Parmar. The society’s mandate includes “preventing and mitigating the impact of wildfires” and “improving habitat for wildlife.” But many FESBC funds simply underwrite the increasing costs of hauling logs. Those expenses have been marching upward as logging activities push farther into the hinterland. That has some questioning whether the funding is accelerating the logging of forests, rather than enhancing them.
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The U.S. Forest Service published the results of a six-city study delving into consumers’ participation in urban wood systems and their interest in urban wood products. According to the Forest Service, for the past 20 years, approximately twice as many trees were removed annually from urban areas in the United States as has been harvested annually from the U.S. National Forest System. Yet, most of this urban wood is treated as waste instead of as a valuable resource to generate economic growth and sustainable cities. The waste and underutilization of this neighborhood resource has been countered by a growing movement to divert urban wood from the waste stream and utilize this significant resource in an array of wood products, from high-end furniture to construction grade lumber to wood chips. Using removed wood for valuable products both avoids substantial waste disposal fees and can be a foundation of profitable businesses and markets. 
The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) announced Monday a 10-year extension of the Indian Trust Asset Reform Act (ITARA) Demonstration Project, a program that allows participating tribes to exercise greater authority over the management of forest trust lands and surface leasing activities. The extension … continues a federal initiative designed to give tribes more control over the management of their trust assets while reducing federal oversight and bureaucracy. Under the program, tribes engaged in forest land management or surface leasing on trust lands may develop an Indian Trust Asset Management Plan. Approved plans allow tribes to establish their own forestry and surface leasing regulations and assume certain approval authorities that would otherwise remain with the Department of the Interior. …Officials said the extension reflects the department’s continued support for tribal self-governance and recognition of tribal expertise in managing forest trust assets.
A new lawsuit challenging a logging project in Oregon threatens to unravel the management plans governing hundreds of millions of acres of federal public land. At stake are thousands of leases and permits covering billions of dollars of economic activity — including mining, drilling, grazing, logging, ski resorts, wind and solar projects, outdoor recreation, hunting and fishing. If successful, the lawsuit could throw the management of huge swaths of the West into chaos. Some experts fear the new legal uncertainty around federal agencies’ management authority could unleash a tsunami of lawsuits targeting everything from mining to the conservation of wildlife habitat. “When you throw that whole system into chaos, it’s a problem whether you’re the oil and gas industry or the timber industry,” said Susan Jane Brown, the attorney who filed the lawsuit and serves as principal at Silvix Resources, a nonprofit environmental law firm.
Forest fires now burn ten times more acreage annually than in 1985, while wildfire severity has gotten even worse. In California, 30 times more acreage burned from high-severity, forest-killing fires, according to new UCLA research. In the 1980s and 1990s, California’s forest fires burned mostly at low or moderate severity, generally benefiting ecosystems. But as fires have grown in size, severe fires causing widespread tree death have overtaken beneficial fire as the most common fire type in California’s forests. Changes are tied to the increasingly warm and arid environment. These aridity-driven changes were also stronger in more densely forested areas, said senior author Park Williams. …The two main causes for the increase in fire severity are fuel density [and] environmental dryness. …The researcher’s conclusions show that the state can make some headway in protecting California’s forests with changes in forest management, such as doing more manual clearing of underbrush and conducting more prescribed burns.
PHOENIX — New technology is coming to Arizona to predict flooding and prevent wildfires. Moisture sensors are going in the ground to gauge just how dry the land is. Soil that is too dry cannot absorb water, which creates a higher risk for flooding and wildfires. This advancement should help predict wildfires and flooding across Arizona. Salt River Project (SRP) officials say plant moisture, in both dead and alive plants, is one of the most important indicators of wildfire danger. However, taking field samples by hand is tough, so this new technology will do the heavy lifting. SRP crews in the Tonto National Forest are planting tiny pieces of technology in the ground to provide data. …These moisture measurements should provide important clues, like the risk of a wildfire at a given location, how likely it is to spread, how big it might get, and predicting floods.
MONTANA — More than 190,000 acres of recommended wilderness in the Flathead National Forest could be opened up to off-road vehicles (ORVs), according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture secretarial memorandum that leaked earlier this month. The memo, which laid out federal officials’ plans to unwind protections that have been in place in northwest Montana since 2018, prompted local and national advocacy groups to rush to action. Following four years of interagency collaboration, environmental analysis and an extensive public participation process, the Flathead National Forest’s Revised Land Management Plan was officially adopted in 2018, designating 193,403 acres of land as recommended wilderness… The New York Times earlier this month reported that a leaked memo directed the use of ORVs on 5 million acres in Montana and Idaho, 193,403 acres of which are within recommended wilderness areas on the Flathead National Forest. Local stakeholders say the directive would unwind years of collaborative work if it comes to fruition.
LONDON — The world’s rainforests are to be better protected from deforestation as the government will confirm during London Climate Action Week, that plans to take forward new rules in Great Britain including using powers in the Environment Act alongside legislation strengthening the UK Timber Regulation. Under the proposals UK businesses who trade in commodities sourced from rainforests… will need to check that their supply chains are not contributing to illegal deforestation. …UK companies have been at the forefront of global efforts to tackle deforestation within their supply chains, but voluntary action alone cannot tackle this global challenge, and several major supermarkets have been calling for stronger regulation. Rainforests and other forests are vital for storing carbon and sustaining biodiversity, yet they are increasingly threatened by deforestation. … Rules will be enforced using powers in the Environment Act, alongside legislation strengthening existing timber rules.
AUSTRALIA — Tasmania’s public native forestry company has corrected the record in a parliamentary committee after earlier stating that all logs from public native forests were processed in Tasmania. Tasmanian sawmill operator James Neville-Smith confirmed that some logs had been sent to Victoria, where processors had received compensation from the Victorian government as part of its industry shutdown. Mr Neville-Smith said the decision was due to retooling a sawmill to be plantation-only, meaning that hardwood logs needed to be processed elsewhere. Logs displaying stickers from Tasmanian state forests were also spotted at a mill in Powelltown, in the Yarra Valley, that was also a recipient of millions in Victorian compensation payments. Victoria phased out native forest logging in 2024. Since then, environmental groups have raised concerns about large quantities of logs being transported to Victoria on the Spirit of Tasmania, but were told that all were from private forests.
JAKARTA — Pulp and paper giant APRIL’s recent decision to lower its deforestation commitments and source wood from two companies associated with extensive recent forest loss has created a new challenge for its relationship with the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), with environmental groups urging the world’s leading forestry certifier to terminate the already suspended reassociation process. In late May, APRIL announced it was reviewing its decade-old Sustainable Forest Management Policy 2.0 and lowering its deforestation cutoff date from 2015 to Dec. 31, 2020. The move allows the pulp and paper producer to source wood from PT Industrial Forest Plantation and PT Mayawana Persada, two companies that have experienced some of the country’s largest recent forest losses. APRIL said the decision was necessary to address fibre shortages after the Indonesian government revoked the operating permits of four of its long-term suppliers earlier this year, affecting around 15% of its wood supply in Riau Province.
During the 1930s, Italy’s government launched a sweeping reforestation effort in the Prealps region near Lake Como, planting fast-growing Norway spruce on land that had been pasture and meadow for centuries. It was a conscious decision, made mainly to answer the demand for timber, but it did not involve much ecological thinking. Now, 90 years later, a new study has gone back to measure what that decision actually did to the landscape, and the results are not flattering. According to the study, ‘