No News Today (Monday, February 19). In Canada, most provinces are celebrating Family Day. In the United States its Presidents Day. The Frogs are back tomorrow.
Interfor announced it will indefinitely curtail its Philomath, Oregon sawmill and reduce lumber production in BC. In related news: Mercer reported a Q4 net loss of $87M; West Fraser’s CEO remains optimistic despite Q4 challenges; Spruce Products, Manitoba fires up its continuous kiln; and US housing starts hit 5-month low, following Canada’s 10% drop yesterday. Meanwhile: BC Wood’s export readiness program launches (again), and Silvicom is named one of Alberta’s top employers.
In Forestry/Climate news: BC resets talks on proposed Land Act changes; ENGO’s protest Saskatchewan’s forest policy; illegal logging is alleged in a Wisconsin national forest; and FSC suspends a New Zealand firm’s certification over slash damage. Meanwhile: Colorado announces new wildfire mitigation grants; and research on a California wildfire supports more thinning and prescribed burns.
Finally, from fashion to burials, how fungi helps tackle climate change.
Kelly McCloskey, Tree Frog Editor
BURNABY, BC — Interfor announced that it will indefinitely curtail its sawmill operations in Philomath, Oregon. This curtailment is in response to persistent high log costs in the region and ongoing weak lumber market conditions. Sawmill production will be curtailed immediately followed by an orderly wind-down of operations, which is expected to be completed by the end of the first quarter of 2024. The Philomath sawmill produces a mix of kiln-dried and green Hemlock and Douglas-fir dimensional lumber and timbers and has an annual capacity of 220 million board feet. …In addition, Interfor announced today plans to temporarily reduce lumber production at its British Columbia operations by approximately 30 million board feet in the first quarter of 2024. These curtailments are due to a combination of weak market conditions, low log inventory levels and unseasonably warm weather that continues to negatively impact log deliveries across many areas of British Columbia.
Despite the federal government’s professed focus on housing, new home construction starts fell by 10 per cent last month, according to data from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). According to experts, the impact of housing measures recently introduced by the feds, including taking the GST off new rental developments and funnelling millions in funding to municipalities through the Housing Accelerator Fund, has yet to be borne out in the numbers. The latest figures are part of a larger national trend that has seen new builds in decline over the past few months. …Meanwhile, for Frank Clayton, at Toronto Metropolitan University, there are reasons to be encouraged by the data. …“I’ve seen cycles before and when we have interest rates double and triple…, you usually have a bigger impact on housing starts, so I find this quite amazing that they’re holding up as high as they have been.”
NEW YORK — Mercer International reported that Operating EBITDA in the fourth quarter of 2023 was $21.1 million compared to $96.1 million in the same quarter of 2022 and $37.5 million in the third quarter of 2023. In the fourth quarter of 2023, net loss was $87.2 million which included a non-cash impairment of $33.7 million, compared to net income of $20.0 million in the fourth quarter of 2022 and net loss of $26.0 million in the third quarter of 2023. …Mr. Juan Carlos Bueno, the Chief Executive Officer, stated: “In the fourth quarter, we saw improved pulp pricing for both NBSK and NBHK across all our markets as customers restocked inventories. We currently believe this pricing momentum will continue into 2024 with modest price increases expected in the first quarter. We continued to be negatively impacted by the overall weakness in the lumber market.
US new-home construction sank at the start of the year by the most since the onset of the pandemic, indicating the recovery in the housing market will be gradual as many buyers await a further decline in mortgage rates. Residential starts decreased 14.8% last month to a 1.3 million annualized rate, after an upward revision to the prior month, government data showed Friday. Multifamily home construction plummeted by more than 35% after surging in the prior month, while single-family groundbreakings also slowed. The headline figure was the slowest pace in five months. “The monthly housing starts numbers are extremely noisy and prone to revisions, but the bigger picture is that single-family starts are trending higher, lagging the drop in mortgage rates towards the end of last year, while multi-family starts are trending lower, lagging the rollover in rent inflation,” said Kieran Clancy at Pantheon Macroeconomics. Building permits, a proxy for future construction, decreased to a 1.5 million rate. 
Whether you are starting from scratch with exporting, or looking for new markets to branch out into, the BC Wood Export Training Program (ETP) helps prepare wood product companies for success by reviewing best practices around exporting, researching new markets, selling into international and through distributors, managing international logistics and dealing with the complexities of international finance. Each of the 5-courses are focused on exporting best practices, regardless of what target market has been chosen by you for expansion. The ETP consists of 5 courses and each 2-hour long course can be taken individually, or as a complete program to earn a Certificate of Completion. All sessions are recorded and sent to participants soon after the session has ended each day. So it’s OK to miss a day and still receive the full programming and credit.
IDAHO – Faced with a formidably steep site, Skylab turned to prefab mass timber and on-site light-frame construction for the Humbird Hotel in Northern Idaho. The result is a meticulously designed 31-room, three-story boutique mountain resort that refines the alpine vacation experience by paying attention to details—big and small. This hybrid timber solution was not only well-suited to the project’s challenging locale, but reflects the area’s heritage, once the site of a working forest and sawmill. Beyond showmanship, the project’s generous use of wood serves triple-duty—as a light-weight, prefabricated, flexible building system well-suited for the hard-to-reach site; as a natural renewable material with biophilic, sustainable benefits; and as a warm, welcoming material historic to the region. Learn more about how wood made this project a reality in our new project profile. 
Neither plant nor animal, fungi are not only an important part of our ecosystem but can also play a large role in the fight against climate change. Here are some ways fungi help the environment and are becoming the basis for a variety of eco-friendly industries.
New research at the UBC Malcolm Knapp Research Forest in Maple Ridge could lead to healthier forests that take more carbon out of the atmosphere, say researchers. Dr. Suzanne Simard and Dr. Dominik Roeser are leading field-based experiments looking at silviculture practices by the B.C. lumber industry in the 1960s and 1970s, and how those 60-year-old forests could now be much improved. The view back then was to grow and harvest stands of Douglas-fir, like a Saskatchewan farmer might raise fields of wheat. The result is plantations that are not as biodiverse, nor as productive as they should be, said Simard. …Selective logging and cutting-edge equipment will be used to address biodiversity and carbon deficits in industrialized conifer plantations. The project involves transitioning monoculture stands to healthier forests, with greater species diversity, and testing various retention levels and harvesting techniques.
One of New Zealand’s largest forestry companies has had its certification suspended over slash damage in and around Tolaga Bay. The company, Ernslaw, is owned by a Malaysian forestry giant. The certification was from the Forest Stewardship Council, an international body that sets forestry standards. Damage to the area from the slash is from 2018, however, locals still remained concerned. Tolaga Bay farmer Mike Parker said there’s “thousands” of areas which have had slash damage. …Chair of the Ministerial Inquiry into Land Use Hekia Parata said it was an environmental disaster unfolding in plain sight. Not only has Ernslaw lost its certification from the Forest Stewardship Council but an audit was being conducted into many forests around the country. Ernslaw said it was appealing the suspension.
The diversity of life has plummeted over the past 30 years in more than a dozen tropical forest reserves in Mexico, a new study shows. Even these highly protected areas are seeing the array of plant and animal life follow a now global trend in which a few groups thrive and proliferate in human-altered landscapes where most groups decline. …The 14 studied reserves, which are part of a biodiversity hotspot that spans across Mesoamerica, have each been designated under a UNESCO program aimed at establishing a scientific basis for improving human livelihoods and safeguarding ecosystems. In and around many of the protected areas, the authors found that new roads continued to go up and trees came down between 1990 and 2020 as people cleared forest for timber or cattle grazing. The abundance of long-lived, shade-tolerant tree species declined on average across all reserves by more than 25%.
Germany wants to curb the use of unsustainable crops for biomass and force producers to better utilize animal dung and organic waste, a move which has prompted warnings from the industry. While only about a third of animal manure is currently utilized for biogas production, the government wants two thirds to be used by 2030, a draft strategy paper says. It also wants organic waste and cover crops to play a greater role in bioenergy, while plant operators typically prefer to use energy crops such as corn or wood to produce heat, power or biofuels. Biomass, which is the main renewable energy source in both Germany and the European Union, has been considered a controversial alternative to conventional fossil fuels. While proponents argue that burning trees and plants — which absorb carbon dioxide — results in lower net emissions, critics worry about deforestation, land use and biological diversity.