EDITOR'S NOTES: Reforesting Climate’s Disturbances
by Dirk Brinkman

New housing demand in the US is the primary market for Canada’s sawmill products and that market is in one of its deepest down cycles in 35 years. Historically, that means a down cycle for the silviculture industry will follow. Fire and pest disturbances from warm winters and drier summers due to climate change is up, however, and has the potential to create a counter cycle of reforestation demand. The challenge for the silviculture industry is to work with government and through public awareness to secure appropriate funding and implementation. This requires a level of public debate not seen from the silviculture industry since the years when “reforest what you reap” became law. 

A twelve month inventory of new homes accumulated in the US market will have sub-prime bank re-possessions added to the unsold housing backlog by early next year. Despite the bullish US economy, new home building will continue to fall off until inventories are below five to six months. Combined with stockpiles in US lumber and Canadian mill yards, sawmilling and logging may be down for the next two years, dragging the by-product pulp chip supply across Canada down with it. 

While reforestation in the east will decline with the sawmilling market, the demand for reforestation in the west is growing, because unfortunately, harvest disturbances are not the only market driver for reforestation. Pest populations are disturbing many times the area Canada harvests annually, as is well illustrated in Managed forest sinks and sources 1990-2005 from Is Canada’s Forest a Sink or Source? CFS Science Policy Notes.

CFS analyzed hundreds of scenarios to 2012 from recent data, finding it 90% likely that there will be even more wildfire and pest disturbances. These scenarios did not factor in the effect of climate change nor the invasion into Alberta of the MPB. (Alberta’s planned fall blitzkrieg fire to create a food free zone ahead of the beetle invasion was foiled by wet weather.) A high level of certainty that there will be more fire and pest disturbances in the coming years creates a unique and potentially overwhelming new reforestation challenge. 

The MPB has disturbed over 9 million hectares in BC, so BC’s response will become a template for predicted disturbances in other provinces. This is the largest catastrophic infestation in North American forest history. Of course it has added to the sawmill market surplus supply problems and the market simply cannot accept such a large salvage volume. Plans for 8 to 15 years of pine salvage harvest are grinding back to 3 to 5 years as dried logs check and then shatter profit margins under blades designed for wet wood processing. If less wood is harvested less of the reforestation will be funded by industry.

BC has offered million cubic meter bioenergy tenures for the standing dead on the same basis, reforest what you reap, with viability depending on the forest sector utilizing the highest value wood and on government commitments to support kilowatt pricing, transportation, carbon, or other enablers to bringing an adequate scale for this new industry into the forests. The energy industry knows how to lobby and of course, the pulp sector is protesting bioenergy subsidies, as competition for sawmill waste is increasing fibre prices and threatening billions in pulp mill and infrastructure investment. Government will have to cut through this conflict because the traditional forest sector cannot absorb BC’s standing dead pine volume and the bioenergy harvest will add enormously to BC’s economy.

Not all sawmilling companies can survive the long cash flow drought without restructuring and pressure on the provinces to review all forest tenure arrangements will be intense. During the last down cycle, some industry restructuring defaulted silviculture obligations to the BC government. Even Ontario’s reforestation trust funds, designed to protect against stranding future reforestation obligations, have some exposure during restructuring as they can be advanced into company cash flows before work is complete. Silviculture industry vigilance will be required to protect harvests’ reforestation obligations. 

The beetle disturbance will be the largest forest driven social disruption in Canadian history and the mayors of the remote resource towns that are soon to be without resources are demanding solutions. Government will attempt to avoid Forest Renewal BC’s failed experiment to employ laid off local loggers planting trees and spacing, but the circumstances that spawned BC’s biggest boondoggle are back with a vengeance and government must respond. 

In 2004, the BC government initiated Forests for Tomorrow to reforest Firestorm 2003’s intense fires for areas where there was little salvage wood. This program’s initial 5 million trees has shifted to MPB stands and is scheduled to scale up to 25 million/year by 2009. Provisionally, government has targeted young stands (<60 yrs) and is busy surveying to create a “map of the dead” and confirm its estimated 25 million/year plan. The program for reforesting these areas is being delivered by the silviculture sector through public tender, and may soon have to be scaled up.

Pine regenerates vigorously and Forests for Tomorrow only targets a small portion of the <60 year-old stands. Future forest ecosystem models that anticipate climate change may recommend that BC’s Forests for Tomorrow program should not be seeded from forests of yesterday. If these models recommend seed adapted to warmer, drier, or wetter climates a greater proportion of the area may require artificial reforestation from more climate-appropriate seed sources. 

Even if bioenergy harvesting kicks in, the scale of Forest for Tomorrow’s public program may hurdle all precedents in federal/provincial forest negotiations. The bioenergy industry’s counterpart, the oil sector, set precedents for federal subsidies that the forest sector has never been able to negotiate. Forest restoration of catastrophic scale fire and pest disturbances will also be critical to mitigating climate change. These unfortunate times offer the reforestation industry a unique challenge. 

Let’s make sure BC’s provincial/federal MPB stewardship response sets appropriate precedents for all of Canada.