François-Philippe Champagne
OTTAWA, ON – Over the past years, Canada has built renowned world-class strength in genomics research. This, along with our strong public health care system, diverse ecosystems, and abundant natural resources and food sectors, has positioned Canada as a leader in genomics technologies and innovations. The Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, announced the launch of public consultations for the upcoming Pan-Canadian Genomics Strategy. The consultations will provide the government with valuable insights on the development of a strategy aimed to enhance federal investments in genomics and advance the commercialization and adoption of genomics to cement Canada’s position as a leader in research and innovation. Canadians are invited to review the consultation paper and to provide input through an online survey. …A summary report of the findings will be published later this year.
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.
VICTORIA – During the week of May 30, 2022, the Forest Practices Board will examine the activities of the BC Timber Sales (BCTS) program and timber-sale licence holders near Williams Lake, in the Cariboo-Chilcotin Natural Resource District. Auditors will examine whether timber harvesting, roads, bridges, silviculture, fire protection activities and associated planning carried out between June 1, 2020, and June 3, 2022, met the requirements of the Forest and Range Practices Act and the Wildfire Act. The audit area is located in the Williams Lake Timber Supply Area (TSA), which includes the communities of Williams Lake, Anahim Lake, Tatla Lake, Alexis Creek, and Horsefly. The TSA overlaps the traditional territories of the Secwepemc, Tsilhqot’in, and the Southern Dakelh Nation Alliance. There are many resources in the TSA, including timber, recreation, tourism, ranching, and wildlife.
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.
On May 16, you published 
An arborist who specializes in urban forestry says the massive loss of trees in Ontario and Quebec over the weekend due to a severe storm will keep happening if land-use planning doesn’t change. Dr. Danijela Puric-Mladenovic, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, said she wasn’t surprised when thousands of trees were uprooted and destroyed by the deadly storm that swept through the province on Saturday because trees in urban and suburban settings are from nurseries and planted in soil that is very shallow. “We talk about puppy mills, right? Because it’s a terrible practice. And that’s literally what we do with trees,” said Puric-Mladenovic. “There is no deep root system developed. Because we plant trees that are coming from tree nurseries, whose root ball has already been chopped a million times. Then you plant them in compressed soil, literally like a bedrock … there is no stability.”
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.
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.
One of the longest-running scientific studies of tropical forests has revealed rainforest trees are dying twice as fast as they were in the 1970s. The paper, published in Nature, looked at hundreds of trees in plots across the Australian wet tropics. From 1971 to 2019, researchers measured every plant in the plots greater than 10 centimetres in diameter, every two to five years. Professor of Tropical Ecology at James Cook University and Susan Laurance said the data showed mortality rates started to increase in the 1980s. She said they compared it with local climate conditions and found decreases in air moisture and rising temperatures were likely to be the main culprits, driven by climate change. “It’s hard to identify very specific climate signals, but by far the most likely response is going to be the increase in what we call vapour pressure deficit,” Laurance said.