Incumbent David Eby clinches election for BC NDP, recounts will determine if it’s a majority. In related news: the United Steelworkers says both parties were pro-forestry; Geoff Russ says the potential minority is bad for forestry; and Nelson Bennett says the winners will face economic headwinds, regardless. In other Business news: Stora Enso acquires Finnish sawmill company Junnikkala; PotlatchDeltic reports Q3 earnings of $3.3 million; and lumber prices tick up again.
In Forestry/Climate news: prescribed burning is used to fight west Texas wildfires; the US Forest Service decision to halt prescribed burns in California is panned; putting Washington’s forests into carbon markets to address climate change; the UN says the world is on pace for more warming without action; COP16 reports trees at risk but also progress in biodiversity protection; and Australia is developing emissions standards for forestry.
Finally, the Global Wood Summit kicks off in Vancouver. Check here for daily updates.
Kelly McCloskey, Tree Frog Editor
As the elected Director for the United Steelworkers union (USW) in Western Canada, I was truly hoping for an NDP majority government. The BC NDP was our choice, as the party’s positions better reflect issues important to working families: strong worker rights – including the right to freely join a union; safe and healthy workplaces; affordable housing; access to health care; and commitment to public education in our communities. It was also clear to me that this past election was NOT fought over who had the best plan for B.C.’s mining and forest sectors. I believe that would have been a much less divisive debate, given that David Eby’s NDP and John Rustad’s Conservatives put forward platforms that tried to appeal to these two important sectors. …So, it’s not surprising that there is not much political divide on supporting and building a vibrant resource sector in British Columbia.
Persistent upward movement in framing lumber prices left many items approaching their highs for the year in the fourth quarter. The current supply-driven run has pushed the Random Lengths Framing Lumber Composite Price to its fourth consecutive weekly increase. The front month in lumber futures continued to trade at a slight premium to the physical market, but the January contract opened a sizable spread with cash. …Mills in the South continued to push for double-digit price hikes with moderate success. Most Southern Pine prices continued to climb. However, buyer resistance to the highest mill quotes grew more intense as the week progressed. …Coast dimension sales continued to outpace production, keeping upward pressure on some prices. Board markets remained on a divergent trend. Producers continued to adjust prices predominantly downward.
Months before the Texas Panhandle erupted with destructive wildfires, fire crews in Borger were igniting fire intentionally on a seven-mile, roughly 250-foot wide ribbon of land on the edge of town. The prescribed burn in November removed dense grass and brush next to homes on the southwest side of the town. When the Windy Deuce fire ravaged the region in February, the prescribed burn area acted as a fireproof wall that stopped the blaze in its tracks. …Before modern firefighting and fire suppression techniques, fires across forests and grasslands were a part of the Earth’s natural cycles. Prescribed burning is an ancient technique still practiced by some Native Americans. In the range ecosystem that dominates the United States from the Texas panhandle through the Great Plains, land managers and firefighters are recommending prescribed burns to protect communities and restore natural fire cycles. But in Texas, prescribed burning has yet to be widely accepted.
The National Wood Flooring Association (NWFA) signed a memorandum of agreement (MOA) with the United States Forest Service (USFS) to support the creation of a publicly accessible platform to provide transparent, high-integrity forest and wood product carbon data. The platform will include six measurement, monitoring, reporting, and verification tools that align with a USFS objective to serve as the primary source of information on carbon and carbon flows across U.S. forest lands, harvested wood products, and end-use life cycle assessment. Currently, forest and wood product data exist in disparate sources. Connections and improvements are necessary to produce standardized data and approaches for quantifying forest-sector greenhouse gas flux for entities across the value chain… USDA has committed $4 million in funding, with $1 million provided by the U.S. Endowment.
Australia’s Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment, and Water is developing voluntary greenhouse gas accounting standards for agriculture, fisheries, and forestry sectors as farmers face higher pressure from supply chains and the finance sector to provide accurate GHG emissions data. The government’s obligatory climate-related financial disclosures, traceability requirement for market access, as well as the employment of science-based emissions reduction targets are some of the factors driving this demand. These reporting standards aim to enhance the accuracy and consistency of accounting methods and tools, fine tune GHG accounting at the farm level for greater market access and further mitigation action support, and finally reduce the reporting burden on farmers and landowners by giving them reliable tools to understand their emissions.
The world is on a path to get 1.8 degrees Celsius (3.2 Fahrenheit) warmer than it is now, but could trim half a degree of that projected future heating if countries do everything they promise to fight climate change, a United Nations report said. But it still won’t be near enough to curb warming’s worst impacts such as nastier heat waves, wildfires, storms and droughts, the report said. Under every scenario but the “most optimistic” with the biggest cuts in fossil fuels burning, the chance of curbing warming so it stays within the internationally agreed-upon limit “would be virtually zero,” the United Nations Environment Programme’s annual Emissions Gap Report said. ..Instead the world is on pace to hit 3.1 degrees Celsius (5.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times. But if nations somehow do all of what they promised in targets they submitted to the United Nations that warming could be limited to 2.6 degrees Celsius (4.7 degrees Fahrenheit), the report said.