For years, Canada’s forest policy has been torn between two competing priorities: one, a desire for climate leadership, the other, an unflinching fidelity to an unsustainable logging industry. The Government of Canada’s vehement opposition to proposed forest protection legislation in New York has made alarmingly clear which impulse currently has the upper hand. In aligning with short-sighted industry interests against environmentally, ethically, and economically imperative sustainability measures, the Trudeau government has pitted itself against the converging chorus of scientists, investors, NGOs, political leaders, and Canadians who have come out in support of the bill, and branded Canada as an obstructionist to global progress.
The B.C. government should do a better job of forecasting potential flooding and recognize that activities such as logging, road-building in forests, and the growing threat of wildfires contribute to flood risks, concludes a report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. The report — based on interviews with nearly a dozen experts, including a former head of the B.C. River Forecast Centre — calls on the province to enact reforms such as incorporating information on wildfires, logging and roadbuilding into flood forecast models to increase their effectiveness. …“The provincial government needs to listen to what these experts are saying. There are things clearly in the province’s control that could reduce the prospect for devastating floods and provide vulnerable communities with ample warning of troubles that lie ahead,” said the report’s author, Ben Parfitt, a resource policy analyst with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
After a couple of quiet years, the 2021 wildfire season in the Cariboo was another challenging one. The BC Wildfire Service has released a summary that shows that there were 305 wildfires between April 1st, 2021 and March 28th, 2022. That was up from just 48 in 2020 and 51 in 2019. 129,537 hectares were burned, which was also up significantly from just 57 and 189 hectares the previous two years. Of course, last year’s numbers pale in comparison to 2017, which was the worst wildfire season in BC’s history. …Most the wildfires of note were located in the South Cariboo region. …Province-wide, 60 percent of the wildfires were natural caused, 35 percent were human caused and 5 percent were undetermined.
The British Columbia government wants First Nations to reach consensus before logging is deferred in old-growth forests on shared Indigenous territories. Tara Marsden, sustainability director for the Gitanyow Nation’s hereditary chiefs’ office in northwestern B.C., said consensus represents a “high bar” in a complex process, which was not made clear when Forests Ministry staff introduced the province’s deferral plan last November. “I think the public who are concerned about old growth need to know that high bar, that it’s very challenging to work in this landscape with multiple nations,” said Marsden, the main point contact for her nation on deferrals. Marsden said she had initially understood from the ministry’s messaging that “if you support these (deferral areas), they’re going to be protected.” Instead, there was an “unspoken expectation” from the province that consensus among nations with overlapping territories was needed, she said. Forests Minister Katrine Conroy told The Canadian Press that if consensus on deferrals could not be reached among First Nations with overlapping or shared territories, the province would assess the strengths of their claims.
A process is underway in British Columbia to temporarily defer logging in priority old-growth forests, allowing time for the government to work with First Nations to decide how they should be managed in the long term. The province … identified 2.6 million hectares of unprotected old-growth forests at risk of permanent biodiversity loss… At the same time, it asked more than 200 First Nations across B.C. to decide whether they supported the deferral of logging in those areas for two years. Forests Minister Katrine Conroy has said that overall, about 80 per cent of the total 4 million hectares of at-risk old growth identified by the panel is not currently threatened, either because it was already set aside from logging, it’s been deferred, or it’s not financially viable to harvest in the current market. …for the deferrals to be meaningful, Karen Price, an independent member of the expert panel said they must be within the timber harvesting land base
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The Province will provide as many as six research grants of $25,000 to university graduate students to help guide effective wildlife stewardship in B.C. and support the goals of the Together for Wildlife strategy. “The more we understand about wildlife and how they interact with the ecosystems around them, the better our decisions on wildlife stewardship and biodiversity conservation will be,” said Josie Osborne, Minister of Land, Water and Resource Stewardship. “This research funding supports students and draws together the expertise of academics, First Nations and other partners to gather the knowledge and data needed to make well-informed, collaborative decisions about wildlife management.” The Together for Wildlife strategy was released in 2020… The $150,000 for these research grants is an important step toward realizing the strategy’s vision.
Paul Renaud is only too aware of what the power of wind can do to trees. After violent windstorms recently swept through southern Ontario and Quebec, uprooting trees and leaving a trail of damage across a vast territory, Renaud’s thoughts went right to his sugar maples in Lanark Highlands, Ont., where storms once considered rogue now seem more frequent. “We’ve had two in six months,” he said in an interview. “Each one has taken out maple trees.” Worsening storms aren’t the only changes Renaud sees. As chair of the climate change working group for the Ontario Maple Syrup Producers Association, he says dramatic weather is having a serious effect on his industry. Syrup producers are recording declining yields due to increasing global temperatures, which are leading to more invasive pests, sap that is less sugary and shorter harvesting periods than the normal four-to-six-week season.
OREGON Gov. Kate Brown has signed legislation that makes the Private Forest Accord . …We understand why many segments of the timber industry have embraced the forest management framework spelled out in the accord. Only time will tell whether it will provide the regulatory certainty that it promises. …The legislation is expected to set the stage for a federal Habitat Conservation Plan for the state’s private forests, which would shield landowners from liability under the Endangered Species Act when harvesting trees. That would be a huge benefit to private timber owners. Support for the deal is not unanimous in the timber industry — critics argue that it complicates forest management. …But several forest product companies and the Oregon Small Woodlands Association signed onto the Private Forest Accord with the understanding that it would provide more regulatory certainty and reduce the likelihood of disruptive lawsuits.
Driving around parts of southern El Dorado County, you can’t miss the trucks. Everywhere near the areas ravaged by the 2021 Caldor fire that leveled the community of Grizzly Flats, you see semis hauling trees and Ford F-150s with their company logos. Residents could understandably wonder: Who is paying for all this work? And who is profiting from it? It’s mostly the federal government and insurance companies writing the checks, meaning taxpayers and insurance customers are footing the bill. …The economic costs of a disaster to state and local governments are much discussed, but less explored are the economic benefits to governments and contractors. …Take logging, for example. Logging in federal and state parks is prohibited, and it is cost-prohibitive on residential property. …When a wildfire sweeps through an area, however, the burned trees that remain present many hazards. … As part of the debris removal process, these hazardous trees are removed.
ELKINS — A new program is now available for landowners with a minimum of 30 acres of wooded land, to improve forest health on their property. The program, the Family Forest Carbon Program, is a carbon program designed to help forest owners find resources and adopt long-term sustainable forest practices that will improve the health of their forest over time. Interested landowners can log on to familyforestcarbon.org to learn more and see if their property and goals are a fit. Enrollees receive annual payments to implement improved forest practices, as well as expert consultation from a local forester who can help identify tree species, provide advice on invasives and will help write a forest management plan customized for their property. Enrollment is for 20 years, and annual payments are determined by property size and forest conditions.
Warnings of critical fire conditions blanketed much of the U.S. Southwest on Saturday, as crews in northern New Mexico worked to stop the growth of the nation’s largest active wildfire. The 7-week-old fire, the largest in New Mexico history, has burned 491 square miles (1,272 square kilometers) of forest in rugged terrain east of Santa Fe since being started in April by two 
On Wednesday, a federal court halted a U.S. Forest Service logging and road-building project in the Kootenai National Forest. The case centers around whether the Forest Service properly evaluated the Ripley project’s impact on grizzly bears. The project includes over 10,000 acres of commercial logging, construction of 19 miles of new permanent and temporary roads and over 90 miles of maintenance and reconstruction of existing roads, according to court documents. The Alliance for the Wild Rockies argued that the Forest Service skirted its responsibilities to properly evaluate the impact of road construction and work on the small threatened grizzly bear population in the bordering Cabinet-Yaak ecosystem, which is located in northwest Montana.
AUSTRALIA– About 220,000 hectares of previously logged West Australian (WA) forest could still be subject to tree removal beyond a 2024 native timber logging ban “for environmental health” as trees compete for water in a drying climate. The figure is about 11 per cent of the forests currently available for harvest in the government’s existing forest management plan, which expires when the ban begins. WA’s remaining native timber businesses, which employ about 500 people, are concerned despite government reassurances that the thinning will not provide enough material for firewood, furniture and charcoal for products such as silicon, a material needed in solar panels. They say without formalizing the plans for “thinning”, people will have to accept that all hardwood timber would need to be imported. For their part, forest protection groups are also concerned that too much land is being made available for thinning.
A new analysis of satellite data of the Amazon published in late May provides the most detailed analysis yet of year-to-year deforestation in the region, revealing exactly where and why the rainforest is being cleared across Brazil, Bolivia, Peru and Colombia. The 
For conservationists working to save the Atlantic Forest in Brazil, a key challenge has been maintaining recovered areas that lie inside private properties. Yet for recovery efforts to be successful, it’s necessary to investigate how long naturally regenerated forests (those recovering without human interference) are surviving. Scientists now have an answer to that question: less than eight years on average, according to a recent study by a team of Brazilian researchers. A total of 4.47 million hectares (11.05 million acres) of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest has regenerated naturally since 1985, but nearly a third of this area has been cleared again. These “ephemeral” forest patches last less than eight years on average…raising concerns about the durability of efforts to recover deforested swaths of the Atlantic Forest. Most of the regenerated forests that get cleared lie inside private properties, raising questions about how landowners can be persuaded not to cut this vegetation.
