Environmental groups call on B.C. to close loopholes and stop approving caribou habitat destruction

By Timothy Schafer
Castanet
January 21, 2025
Category: Forestry
Region: Canada, Canada West

Legislative loopholes have been discovered that enable extensive logging in southern mountain caribou habitat, claim local environmental groups. The Wilderness Committee and Wildsight are calling on the province to stop approving roads and cutblocks in no-harvest zones and to fully protect all federally-identified core caribou habitat. …“According to our new map analyses, more than 78 hectares of no harvest zones (NHZ) — set aside for caribou in the Revelstoke area — have been logged or approved to be logged since then,” noted a press release on the matter. …Over the past two decades, only 10 of the 18 sub-populations (herds) remain on the landscape in southern and central B.C. …New research from the University of British Columbia confirms this dependency on hair lichen, warning that abundant hair lichen can only grow in advanced aged old-growth forests, and that restoring such lichen is virtually impossible in young forests.

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