Ontario is investing $2.5M in Thunder Bay-area mill upgrades and forest biomass projects, and another $1.1M in Indigenous forestry. In related news: more on Ontario’s $5.1M support to restart the Espanola mill; New Brunswick’s AV Group will temporarily idle its Nackawic pulp mill; and the US issues its final report on hardwood plywood imports. Meanwhile: Canadian building permits fell; wood producer prices declined; lumber futures hit a 9-month low; the US housing outlook weakens; and EU wood pellet imports rise.
In other news: the US Endowment awards $5.5M to expand wood-fiber markets; Red Rock Biofuels backs out of proposed plant in Oregon; Mississippi signs a shared stewardship agreement; Colorado examines feasibility of assisted migration; US reduces protections for endangered species; BC expedites timber supply reviews in the Northeast; BC’s Working Forest model worries some First Nations; Unifor takes its forestry campaign to the Union of BC Municipalities; the College of New Caledonia builds forestry skills; and the tallest mass timber student housing development tops out in Columbus, Ohio.
Finally, Hard Mountain Dew ventures into the forest, puts a $1-million bounty on Bigfoot.
Kelly McCloskey, Tree Frog News Editor
THUNDER BAY — The Ontario government is investing more than $2.5 million to advance major upgrades at Thunder Bay Pulp and Paper, as well as two additional projects in Northwestern Ontario that will increase the industry’s use of mill by-products and underused forest biomass. The upgrades will help increase the forest sector’s production and capacity, protecting over 700 direct jobs and more than 3,350 indirect jobs. This Forest Biomass Program funding is part of the government’s plan to protect Ontario forestry workers. …Ontario is investing more than $2.4 million to plan boiler and chemical plant upgrades at Thunder Bay Pulp and Paper, a critical anchor mill in Northwestern Ontario’s forest economy. …AUX Energy is receiving $92,500 to develop plans for a biomass-powered generator project that will increase energy security in Fort Frances. …Weyerhaeuser is receiving $32,650 for a study of production line upgrades to reduce costs while improving efficiency and product quality.
Canadian wood product prices fell 1.2% from July but remained up 8.6% from a year earlier, after rising 6.4% the prior month, Statistics Canada reported. Canada’s broader factory-gate prices rose 1.3% from July and were up 13.5% from a year earlier. Wood product prices trailed Canada’s total Industrial Product Price Index by 4.9 percentage points year over year, leaving August’s monthly gain short of the wider rise in factory-gate prices.
Lumber futures fell below $550 per thousand board feet, reaching their lowest level in nine months, as elevated borrowing costs continued to weigh on demand. The US housing market remains tight, with mortgage rates near their highest level in over a year and showing no sign of easing after the Federal Reserve hiked its key policy rate, weighing on demand from prospective homebuyers. Building permits also fell 2.7% over the month, although a 7.6% increase in lumber-intensive single-family housing starts in August. Provided an offsetting pressure, US-Canada trade talks fell through, raising concerns over lumber supply.
Single-family housing starts rose in August but are down for the year and are expected to weaken even further, as homebuilders slow production in the face of higher construction costs and hesitant consumer demand. While total new residential construction fell 2.6% in August, this monthly decline came amid a steep 21.7% pullback in multifamily starts, according to data released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Housing starts, when accounting for both single-family and multifamily, slipped to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.275 million units, 1.2% below the August 2025 rate of 1.291 million units. On the other hand, the seasonally adjusted annual rate of single-family starts in August grew 7.6% to 918,000. At first glance, this monthly growth may seem to signal strength, but single-family starts between January and August were 4.9% below the rate experienced during the same period in 2025, reflecting a slowing construction pipeline.
The EU’s appetite for wood pellets is being fed from outside the bloc, with member states importing 451,880 tonnes from non-EU countries in July, up from 345,074 tonnes a year earlier. That is according to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics office, whose first estimates for July were published on Tuesday 15 September and remain provisional. France brought in 115,845 tonnes from outside the EU in July, up from 72,181 tonnes in July 2025, and Italy’s imports rose to 76,051 tonnes from 39,172. The Netherlands remained the biggest buyer at 124,591 tonnes, while Denmark’s imports fell to 31,764 tonnes from 50,889. Latvia took 31,022 tonnes, in a month for which Eurostat shows no Latvian figure a year earlier. Imports from outside the EU reached 555,573 tonnes in June, the most in any month since January 2024, and July’s total was still higher than the 392,192 tonnes of July 2024. 
COLUMBUS, Ohio — The tallest mass timber student housing structure in the U.S. in Columbus, Ohio, recently topped out. The 13-story, 186-unit off-campus development, located near the Ohio State University, stands at 158 feet. 
HURKETT — The Ontario government is investing over $1.1 million in five projects that will increase Indigenous participation in forestry and build a stronger, more resilient forest sector. As part its plan to protect Ontario, the government is fighting back against unjustified U.S. tariffs and economic attacks by making strategic investments through the Forest Biomass Program that will support economic development and clean energy projects to help the forestry sector increase productivity and capacity, with the long-term potential to create over 200 good-paying jobs in the sector. …Since launching the Forest Biomass Program in 2023, Ontario has invested close to $5 million in 22 projects under the Indigenous Bioeconomy Partnerships funding stream. The government’s latest investments will build a more resilient forest sector by developing projects with the potential to add annual demand for over 100,000 tonnes of mill by-products and underused wood, known as forest biomass.
BILLINGS, Mont. — Killing endangered animals while logging a forest or building a dam would not be considered illegal unless the animals were specifically targeted, under a new interpretation of the Endangered Species Act by President Donald Trump’s administration that marks a sea change in how the landmark environmental law is enforced. A directive sent to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees this week says imperiled animals or plants must be intentionally targeted for their killing to be considered illegal. That’s a sharp turnaround from past practice at the wildlife service… Experts said the change would allow timber companies to log forests in the Pacific Northwest even if they knew that doing so could kill imperiled birds nesting in the trees…. …Under the new law, only people acting directly against animals, such as hunters, trappers, anglers and perhaps pesticide users would need permits, said Sandi Snodgrass, an attorney with Holland and Hart in Denver…
COLORADO—Six years ago, forest ecologist Marin Chambers looked toward the mountains with trepidation as a massive plume of smoke filled the sky above the largest wildfire in Colorado’s history. In June, she looked for clues to what the future forest might look like. …There is no guarantee that this high-elevation forest will come back as it was before. Many of the spruce trees were dead well before the fire hit, victims of an earlier beetle outbreak. The massive blaze killed much of what remained, burning so fiercely that vast swaths of land within the 845-square-kilometer burn scar were left with no living trees, limiting the cone crop needed to seed the next generation. A changing climate could pose a further obstacle to recovery. …Already there are signs that forest managers can’t count on natural recovery. …To prevent that transformation, some ecologists have proposed employing a forceful intervention called assisted migration. 
The U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities (the Endowment) today announced five awards totaling $5.5 million through its Accelerating Wood Fiber Markets initiative. The five-year effort will help connect underutilized wood fiber with new buyers and support the long-term economic viability of working forests and the communities that rely on them. The Endowment committed $5 million to the initiative, with an additional $500,000 provided by the Northern Border Regional Commission through its Forest Economy Initiative to support work in Maine, New Hampshire, New York and Vermont. The funding opportunity drew significant interest from across the country. The Endowment received 76 proposals requesting approximately $86 million, underscoring both the scale of the market challenges facing forest-reliant communities and the demand for practical, locally driven solutions. “These organizations bring deep regional knowledge and practical strategies for creating durable markets,” said Matt Krumenauer, Vice President of Markets at the U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities.
Do forests cool the planet or warm it? It’s a deceptively simple question with no clear answer. The catch is that the same forest can push climate in opposite directions at once. Forests are widely viewed as climate change mitigators—and planting trees as a partial climate solution—because they absorb carbon dioxide. Yet that framing is incomplete. Trees also release reactive gases called biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) that can influence cloud formation, contribute to air pollution, and extend the atmospheric lifetime of methane, a greenhouse gas that can trap about 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide. …Whether forests cool or warm the planet depends on how BVOCs behave once they leave the foliage. From there, the normal steps of plant metabolism synthesize and release BVOCs. …The Model of Emissions of Gases and Aerosols from Nature estimates BVOC emissions by combining information about terrestrial vegetation with data on environmental conditions that influence emissions.