The arrival of La Niña could slow the rapid global warming that began with El Niño. In related news: sparse snowpack raises drought fears in BC; Alberta readies for a busy wildfire season; wildfire pollutants can damage your skin; carbon credits put New Hampshire timber at risk; not all EU carbon credits are created equal ; climate change shrinks good-burn days in Georgia; and Forestry Australia says prescribed burning is key.
In other news: NRDC pans Home Depot’s sourcing policy; Bob Brash on BC’s forest of opportunity; Rosboro idles its Springfield, Oregon stud mill; Interfor reports Q4, 2023 loss; and Acadian Timber reports positive Q4, 2023 results. On the mass timber front: US demand exceeds supply; the US Deputy Secretary tours Oregons’ advanced wood products lab; and why mass timber is exceling in Canada’s community centres.
Finally, please consider supporting the Tree Frog News as a Friend of the Frog (small companies and individuals) or as an official Sponsor. Suffice to say, without our supporters, North America’s only open-access forestry news aggregator (focused exclusively on the forest sector), simply wouldn’t exist. Have a great weekend!
Kelly McCloskey, Tree Frog Editor
BURNABY, British Columbia — Interfor recorded a Net loss in Q4’23 of $169.0 million compared to a Net loss of $42.4 million and a Net loss of $72.2 million in Q4’22. Adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $51.4 million on sales of $785.9 million in Q4’23 versus Adjusted EBITDA of $31.9 million on sales of $828.1 billion in Q3’23 and an Adjusted EBITDA loss of $68.7 million on sales of $810.3 million in Q4’22. …Lumber production totalled 1.1 billion board feet, representing a 105 million board feet increase over Q3’23, which was impacted by temporary wildfire-based downtime in B.C. …Capital spending was $39.6 million, including $17.2 million of discretionary investment focused on multi-year projects in the U.S. South region. …Planned capital expenditures for 2024 have been reduced to approximately $90.0 million from the preliminary estimate of $140.0 million in response to ongoing lumber market weakness
The U.S. exported 1.01 million metric tons of wood pellets in December, according to data released by the USDA on Feb. 7. Total exports for the full year reached 9.54 million metric tons. The 1.01 million metric tons of wood pellets exported in December was up when compared to both the 655,649.2 metric tons of exports reported for the previous month. The U.S. exported wood pellets to approximately 16 countries in December. The U.K. was the top destination for U.S. wood pellet exports, followed by Japan and Denmark. The value of U.S. wood pellet exports reached $181.34 million in December, up from $116.84 million in November and $157.95 million in December of the previous year. Total wood pellet exports for 2023 reached 9.54 million metric tons at value of $1.75 billion, compared to 9.01 million metric tons exported in 2022 at a value of $1.56 billion. 
Recreation and community centres are important hubs that serve many roles for an area’s residents. Given the range of uses these large public facilities exist to fulfill, a lot goes into their planning and design. …wood is the material of choice for most community centres, and Meredith Anderson, Principal with RJC Engineers, has a lot of love for this versatile renewable resource. “Wood brings huge benefits to the overall carbon footprint of a building when looking at it from the perspective of the embodied carbon through a Life Cycle Assessment,” she says. “Wood is a beautiful building material. There is an efficiency in using the building structure to express the architecture, rather than cover it with finishes.” Another 
With 767 mass timber projects under construction across the U.S., there is more demand than ever for a more sustainable alternative to traditional building components. But this surge in demand is running into a supply chain marred by pandemic-era economics and trade policy that makes an already more expensive product even pricier. These challenges are holding up the entire industry just as sustainable builders need it to take off. …This year’s 767 projects marks an increase from 600 such projects in 2020, according to the 
PRINCE GEORGE — A mayor of a community deeply impacted by recent changes in the forestry industry says… the province needs to take strong action to protect jobs and communities. It was less than a month ago when the Province announced… funding through the BC Manufacturing Jobs Fund, but the North was mainly absent from the announcement. Minister of Jobs Brenda Bailey said that the Fund was designed to help communities. However, Joan Atkinson, the mayor of Mackenzie, a community that has been hit hard by mill closures, says that communities like hers needs action, not promises. It is hard to understate just how much Mackenzie has been impacted… after Canfor shut the sawmill down … “My message to government is stop these make work projects to make it appear that you’re actually doing something because you’re not doing a thing that matters to the people who are dependent on resource communities.” 
Wildfire fuel mitigation work will kick off next week in Prince George. The work will take place at Broddy Road between the Vanway Firehall and the Vanway transfer station starting from Monday, Feb 12. The project is expected to be completed by the end of August and there may be the need for short road closures (of a few hours) of Broddy Road over the coming weeks. Wildfire fuel removal activities reduce the amount of combustible material that can be used as fuel for a fire. This might include thinning trees, pruning branches and removing dead wood, reducing the amount of litter and debris on the ground, or creating buffer zones between homes and wildlands.
The beginning of a new year brings with it the persistent and eternal optimism in all of us working and involved in our forest sector. …Let’s start with managing for less wildfire risk. Frankly, our loggers are the best in the world so when it comes down to adopting innovative harvesting techniques. …For carbon sequestration, active management and harvesting of the forest resource is the pathway to maximizing carbon capture of the forests. …There is a need for a whole lot of housing and wood is the core material to deliver. …The real question is whether the leadership is in place to capitalize on this forest of opportunities. …The ingredients needed are not that complex: a pragmatic and scientific approach to the future versus dogmatic alarmist rhetoric; a clear and consistent framework of policy and legislation; an invigorated investment climate; a renewed globally competitive sector; and a collective vision endorsed and supported by all involved.
Crook County is calling for the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) to rethink its plans to amend every national forest land management in the nation to create one overall strategy for managing old-growth forests. In a comment letter signed by the county commissioners last week, the county criticizes the one-size-fits-all approach and the USFS’s failure to include local governments in the process. “Upon reading through it, it will affect all the National Forests in Wyoming, which includes the Black Hills; it will also include Thunder Basin National Grasslands,” said Dru Palmer, consultant for the county, at a special meeting on Thursday. …“I think treating old growth different to the rest of the forests is self-defeating anyway, because if you save all the old growth, guess what’s going to burn first,” he said. “They’re swimming upstream there, I think.”/bnn/media/media_files/63c6cac08f70fe3d45da6bec0482605dfa95c1c973d01c0bdc0685c546e3cce8.jpg)
NEW HAMPSHIRE — For centuries the monetary value of forested land has been realized only when trees are felled, when standing timber is turned to finished lumber. With the onset of climate change, the economics of traditional forestry are being disrupted by monetizing the role of forests as sequesters of CO2 and storehouses of carbon to address the warming climate. Carbon harbored in standing trees has become a virtual commodity. In managing a forest for capturing and storing carbon timber, harvests are reduced to reap the value of the carbon in standing trees. Reduced timber harvests shrink employment and investment in traditional forestry industries while transferring income earned by foresters, loggers, truckers, mechanics and sawmills to the investors and traders plying the carbon markets. …It is a lot easier for trees to capture and store carbon than for lawmakers to strike a balance between harvesting timber and trading carbon.
Bob Brown Foundation is celebrating the release of an Instagram post by Leonardo DiCaprio calling for swift parrot protection and an end to native forest logging in Tasmania and Australia. Reaching 62 million around the globe, this is global coverage for the critically endangered swift parrot that is on the path to extinction due to logging. “Leonardo DiCaprio has put Tasmania on the map big time, and the plight of the swift parrot is now well and truly global. We are delighted to see Leonardo’s full endorsement of our campaign to end native forest logging and save the critically endangered swift Parrots. We are inviting Leonardo to Tasmania to see this beautiful island, its forests and wildlife for himself,” Bob Brown said. …DiCaprio Instagram post states: Australian Conservationists have won a temporary injunction to stop logging in Tasmania nesting sites of the Critically Endangered swift parrot. 
FORESTRY Australia has 
BOSTON — For many parts of the country, devastating forest fires are an annual event. But last summer, for the first time in memory, daylight was obscured in the northeast for days, as unprecedented fires burned in Quebec and Nova Scotia. We all remember the photos from New York — essentially turned to night as pollutants blocked out the sunshine and the medical community sent out warnings against breathing in particulate matter. Dermatologist Shadi Kourosh, director of the Dermatology Division of Community Health at Massachusetts General Hospital noticed something else: a sharp increase in the number of skin conditions she and her colleagues were treating. Those observations inspired Kourosh to dig deeper. Her study was published in the online journal “
New climate projections for the City of Vancouver have found the number of days the city spends under a heat wave every summer could spike 16 fold compared to the 1990s if the world continues burning fossil fuels under a “business-as-usual” scenario. The 