Jason Fisher
Ravi Parmar
Ken Day
We know that 2025 has had its share of challenging news in the forestry sector. FESBC continues to invest in the long-term health and resilience of the forests by investing in forest enhancement projects led by local organizations throughout the province. This spring, Minister of Forests Ravi Parmar highlighted 64 projects specific to wood fibre recovery and wildfire mitigation initiatives funded by FESBC, many of which are successfully wrapping up. In this newsletter:
- A message from the Minister of Forests, Ravi Parmar.
- A holiday greeting from FESBC’s Board Chair, Ken Day.
- A Holiday Safety Tip from our friends at the BC Forest Safety Council.
- An insight into FESBC Operations Managers’ favourite winter activites.
- Faces of Forestry: Famiheh Yazdan Panah, Wood Pellet Assn.
The Alberta government isn’t ruling out lifting a near 20-year ban on hunting grizzly bears, a divisive issue between conservationists, politicians, and hunters. Forestry and Parks Minister Todd Loewen says all options are on the table following several recent bear attacks and close encounters in the province. Grizzlies are being spotted in parts of the province they haven’t inhabited in more than a century. “There’s no plans at this time yet. We don’t want to take anything off the table. I think it would be irresponsible not to have all options on the table so we’re looking at everything,” Loewen said. There has been a ban on hunting grizzly bears in Alberta since 2006. …Loewen says there are several factors that would have to be considered …including the number of bears in the province and recent grizzly-human interactions, and their expansion into the foothills.
The RCMP made more arrests over the weekend for allegedly breaching the court-ordered injunction at a blockade near a forestry operation in the Carmanah Valley, near Lake Cowichan. A police statement said that on the evening of Dec. 12, while patrolling the injunction area around the Walbran Forest Service Road, police located a cantilever structure across a bridge and a tripod structure in the middle of the roadway a short distance away. The two structures blocked both directions in and out of the cut block where the Tsawak-qin Forestry Limited Partnership and Tsawak-qin Forestry Inc. forest companies were conducting work.
A First Nation is suing the B.C. government alleging it advanced a secret land claim policy to give away rights to its traditional territory, surrender control over lucrative carbon credits, and prevent it from safeguarding threatened caribou. The allegations, made in a Dec. 12 lawsuit filed by Chief Johnny Pierre on behalf of the Tsay Keh Dene First Nation, target the B.C. government’s handling of overlapping land claims—specifically, a policy that allows First Nations to switch between multiple identities to give them the best chance of claiming traditional territory. Tsay Keh Dene says it learned of the alleged government policy in October 2025 after the province confirmed the nation would see a sharp drop in the amount of money it received from a previously negotiated agreement to share revenue from forestry activities. In 2023, the province had quietly started negotiating with the neighbouring Kwadacha Nation to develop a similar agreement, the lawsuit claims.
Gold River, BC — This has not been a good year for forestry as the industry continues to feel the pain from escalating tariffs, mill closures and job losses. But in Nootka Sound a First Nation is looking to a future where trees have a higher value staying in the ground. …the Mowachaht/Muchalaht First Nation is looking at an entirely different economic approach to managing its territorial forests and waters in Nootka Sound. The First Nation’s Salmon Parks project aims to have 66,595 hectares, comprising approximately 20 per cent of its land territory, under a protected designation by 2030. The initiative strictly limits industrial activity within the Salmon Parks – particularly old growth logging – with hopes of eventually allowing nature to heal itself to the point that salmon runs rebound from the headwaters to the ocean. …As the project seeks an economic future, the Salmon Parks initiative is looking at the economic value of keeping trees standing by selling carbon credits. 
Band-aid solutions are not going to fix the flooding problems in the Chemainus River watershed, Chief James Thomas from the Halalt First Nation told North Cowichan’s council on Nov. 19. He said the watershed and its salmon are in jeopardy mainly due to logging practices that were conducted upstream in the watershed over the past 50 years. Thomas said the Halalt and its partners, who are working on finding solutions to the watershed’s issues, didn’t create the problem, they inherited it. There is general community consensus that gravel and sediment accumulation, scoured banks, and increased debris, largely from logging operations upstream, have increased in recent years causing extreme flooding downstream, including on Halalt reserve lands. …Thomas and Cheri Ayers from Waters Edge Biological Consultants made a presentation to council on the Chemainus Watershed Initiative. The initiative began following two flooding events in 2020 and 2021.
The EU Deforestation Rule has already caused supply chain hurdles for American farmers, ranchers and foresters, and the rule has not even begun being enforced. EU farmers themselves have raised concerns over their compliance requirements and received additional flexibilities, and member governments are still navigating how to implement the complex auditing system. With these logistical challenges clear even to EU officials, the European Commission has voted to once again delay the rule’s implementation until 2026 and 2027 for large and small businesses, respectively. However, as long as the rule stands as currently drafted, agricultural supply chains will be strained from the looming enforcement deadline. Overall, the EU fails to recognize the long-standing position of American farmers and ranchers as global leaders in agricultural production with environmental stewardship. A rule that was originally targeted to penalize bad actors in the global marketplace has now hindered some of the most productive producers in the world.
One of the most profound shifts in how the United States manages wildland fire is underway. Federal wildland fire forces are spread across several agencies, closely collaborating but each tackling prevention and protection somewhat differently. Now, the Trump administration is creating an entirely new “U.S. Wildland Fire Service” to combine as much of that under one headquarters roof as it can. A firefighter with decades of federal and local experience says he has been tapped to head that agency, news that heartened much of the wildfire community when it broke just over a week ago. …But the muddled rollout of these plans—along with widespread layoffs at agencies that fight wildfires and a crackdown on efforts to combat the climate change that’s fueling the flames—have sowed concerns that this is not the right administration to carry out such a significant transformation.
President Trump swept into office with a promise to ramp up the timber business on national forests. So far, they’re just treading water. The Forest Service reported relatively flat timber harvests and sales for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. …According to the agency’s cut-and-sold reports, national forests cut 2.52 billion board feet of timber for the fiscal year, down slightly from the 2.66 billion board feet cut during the last full fiscal year of the Biden administration. Sales volume totalled 2.95 billion board feet, a slight increase from the prior year but a drop from 3.08 billion board feet the year before that. The suppressed returns reflect some of the challenges in meeting Trumps’s directive to use national forests to reduce the nation’s reliance on wood imports. Those include wildfires, market conditions… and the Forest Service’s ability to set up and run timber sales after the administration whittled the workforce. [to access the full story, an E&E News subscription is required]
Cutting red tape and streamlining project work have been marching orders for the U.S. Forest Service throughout the first year of the second Trump administration. Last week, a federal court ruling on a Greater Yellowstone landscape project showed how far those directives can backfire. …Initially proposed in 2020, it received a decision notice in 2023. Opponents referred to it by its acronym, SPLAT, and promptly sued to block it. In his December 11 opinion, U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy wrote that South Plateau failed to meet requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act, National Forest Management Act and Endangered Species Act. But he added the “primary challenge concerns the project’s conditions-based management approach.” Molloy generally agreed with the plaintiffs’ concern. “This approach,” he said, “conflates a promise of future statutory compliance with actual compliance.”
Gov. Jared Polis signed an 
Climate change is contributing to drier conditions in the Pacific Northwest, causing wildfires to become more intense and destructive. A growing reforestation industry has emerged in their wake. The company Silvaseed is a key player in the region. Based southeast of Olympia in Roy, Washington, Silvaseed collects, cleans, catalogues and preserves seeds. It also raises millions of seedlings every year in its greenhouses and fields. Customers include private timber companies, public land managers and tribal nations. …Inside a warehouse built in the 1940s, Silvaseed general manager Kea Woodruff starts a tour of the facilities by flipping a switch to fire up a huge, old kiln. …Woodruff said most species’ cones need the kiln to reach about 100 degrees Fahrenheit. …At every step of the way, as the seed gets refined and purified, the bags are meticulously labeled and tracked.
Two meetings next week between U.S. Forest Service leadership and timber industry representatives in Southeast Alaska are raising concerns among tribal and other officials about the possibility a years-long revision of the management plan for the Tongass National Forest will be halted by the Trump administration. At least one additional meeting is now planned next week because of those concerns, scheduled next Friday in Juneau between Forest Service leaders and members of the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, according to officials. A request to halt work on the revised plan is being made by the Alaska Forest Association, which states less than 10% of old-growth trees allotted to the timber industry in a 2016 revision of the plan have actually been authorized for harvest. The allocation of 430 million board feet (mmbf) was intended to support a 15-year industry transition to harvesting new-growth trees, according to AFA.
IFA Farm Forestry Chair Padraig Stapleton has acknowledged the establishment of the Group Forest Certification Ireland Board as a positive development for the Irish forestry sector. This follows the inaugural meeting of the Board which was held this week. IFA Forestry Policy Executive Amy Mulchrone has been appointed as a member of the Board by Minister Michael Healy-Rae. “The establishment of the Group Forest Certification Ireland board is a positive initiative by the Minister. The increased focus on voluntary certification of privately-owned forests that this Board will now hopefully bring should significantly scale up the area certified. To date, only 8% are certified, substantially lower than Coillte plantations, which have dual certification from both the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and the Programme of Forest Certification (PEFC).”
Forestry leaders have warned Scotland will fail to meet its planting targets for yet another year amid concern investment is going elsewhere. Since annual targets for woodland expansion were set, the Scottish Government has missed the goal every year apart from 2018, when it was met for the first time. In recent years, planting rates have often fallen significantly short of the set targets, with the year from 2022 to 2023 seeing only 8,190 hectares of a 15,000 target planted. Jon Lambert, of Goldcrest Land & Forestry Group, an independent UK firm of chartered surveyors and foresters based in Edinburgh, warned the figures are down because of the lengthy and clunky grant application process. “The amount of planting in Scotland is way down than it should be,” said Mr Lambert.
Douglas-fir may prove to be a productive alternative to Sitka spruce for the UK’s commercial forestry sector. That is one of the early conclusions from ongoing research to test the suitability of 17 tree species as potential options for future timber production. Taking place across a network of nine large-scale experiments (in locations such as the Newcastleton, Cowal, and the Black Isle), the Forest Research-led investigation also found Douglas fir had the promise for further use in the south and east of the country, where the climate is forecast to become significantly hotter and drier than today. While already considered by many as a serious option, the species only makes up around 4 per cent of the UK’s total commercial forest.
