There are more trees in the forest than thought and those extras will help local sawmills get through the industry downturn brought on by the mountain pine beetle epidemic, a government committee says.
The Special Committee on Timber Supply released its report, Wednesday, detailing its three months of province-wide research and consultation. This group of seven, made up of both political parties working together, made 22 recommendations to government to steer the forest industry through the painful period between the rotting pine trees killed by the mountain pine beetle and the regrowth of the remaining young pines. It is a period called the "mid-term timber supply crisis" by those involved in forestry.
The main solution the committee unanimously pointed to is what the forest industry calls "marginally economic stands" of trees - a category of the forest never before calculated into the harvest plans of the province.
It's time to factor them in, according to the committee's report.
This untapped bank of trees was not accounted for because it was outside the government's definition of economically viable wood. The trees in this category were perhaps packed less densely onto the land, or sprinkled with poor-quality wood, or affected by past fires, or hard to reach due to difficult terrain, making it too expensive for a mill to harvest.
But with the diminished supply coming at the same time Asian and American markets are showing increases in demand, those fringe forests are now looking like a lifeline through the crisis. The committee's chair, Nechako-Lakes MLA John Rustad, said it can't take away all the pain, but "marginally economic" forests could be the best chance communities have of keeping their sawmills afloat.
Government should also help pay for some infrastructure like roads and power lines into these areas, to take the financial pressure off of industry, the report explained. The province would theoretically recoup the costs in the mill jobs it would save, the industrial spending that would happen, and the many other industries that could spring up around these new infrastructure features.
The environmental tradeoff was the committee's recommendation to resist the urge to log old-growth timber, parks, immature trees and visual buffer zones.
"If we do nothing, the estimated drop in the allowable annual cut (the trees the government allows mills to cut down in each community) will be 10 million cubic metres of timber," said Rustad. The whole province processes about 60 million cubic metres last year so this drop would be "a very significant amount of fiber - enough to support the equivalent of eight reasonably sized sawmills."
There are 20 to 25 of those mills in the areas most affected by the pine beetle epidemic, sharing the accumulated loss of timber supply, so that does not mean eight specific mills will close.
Among the other recommendations to ease the mid-term timber supply suffering was expanding provincial investment in replanting, strategic thinning and fertilization and moving carefully towards more area-based tenures for forest companies rather than the volume-based tenure plans of today (meaning each mill would get a set chunk of the forest they would be responsible for fostering through the cycles of planting, nurturing and harvesting).
