Flying Finns
British Columbia
| Population: | 4.1 million |
| Total Area: | 94.8 million ha |
| Land Area: | 93 million ha |
| Forest Land: | 60.6 million ha |
| Provincial Parks: | 11.3 million ha |
In June 2004, a gathering at the First Nations community of New Vancouver on British Columbia’s central Pacific Coast marked a key step along the path toward resolving what could have become one of the province’s toughest resource management issues.
Three years earlier, forest industry and environmental organizations had ended a standoff over 12 million acres of temperate rainforests and important watersheds along the Pacific Coast in a region containing part of what some call the Great Bear Rainforest. Industry agreed not to log in the areas of greatest concern and environmental groups agreed to end specific market campaigns. They formed an alliance and began to work with First Nations and other interests to develop an ecosystem-based model for conservation and management of the coastal forests as part of the provincial govern-ment’s regional land and resource management planning process.
In December 2003, the disparate Coast land and resource management planning completion table reached a consensus agreement, with recommendations consistent with the guiding principles of ecosystem-based management—an adaptive approach to managing human activities that ensures coexistence of healthy, fully functioning ecosystems and human communities. The recommendations are part of the discussions between the B.C. government and area First Nations that will help lead to decisions on the legal designation of the lands and an approved land use plan.
“I think this marks a real milestone that the table members and their caucuses were able to reach a significant agreement,” process chair Jim Lornie said shortly after the agreement had been reached. “There were some tense moments—but every participant at the table should be proud of the recommendations we are turning over to government.”
The Central Coast planning process reflects the kinds of challenges that are so common in British Columbia, where the largely publicly owned forests support an amazing array of natural values, and anchor the province’s economy. They help paint the magnificent vistas that attract millions of tourists every year to the province, which is gearing up to host the Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2010.
The Central Coast also demonstrates the value of comprehensive government-led land use planning. By the end of 2004, government will have completed land use plans for more than 80% of British Columbia. While the process is consistent across the province, each plan is unique to reflect the vast differences among British Columbia’s regions.
British Columbia’s north-south mountain topography and a climate that includes a small desert and North America’s wettest weather station make it the most biologically and ecologically diverse province in all of Canada. It has grasslands, oak parklands, desert-like steppes, dry pine forests, boreal black spruce muskegs, tundra and alpine meadows. It is home to 1,138 known species of vertebrates including 488 species of birds, 468 species of fish and 142 species of mammals.
Two-thirds of the province’s 235 million acres is forest land, representing seven of Canada’s 12 forest regions and covering an area twice as big as all of the New England states and New York state combined. Temperate rainforests stretch along the Pacific Coast from Washington state north to Alaska; there’s a slice of boreal forest in the northeast and vast pine forests across the Interior. On the slopes of the Columbia and Rocky Mountains in the southeast, moist, wet conditions have even created an interior rainforest, with more tree species than any other ecological zone in the province.
British Columbia’s 62 million acres of old-growth forest include ten million acres that are fully protected and another 30 million acres that will likely never be harvested due to conservation, inaccessibility or other operational restrictions. British Columbia’s economy is forest-based, one in every five jobs in the province depends on forestry and it is the world’s largest exporter of forest products, yet less than one-third of one percent of its forests is harvested each year. And less than two percent of the forest land has been converted to other uses over time—most of this in the highly populated areas around Vancouver and Victoria or in farmlands of the Peace River Valley near the Alberta border in the northeast.
In a comprehensive survey of Canada’s wild forests last year, Global Forest Watch reported that more than one-third of British Columbia forests, or close to 50 million acres, is within a large intact forest landscape. The report credited the province for adopting policies to maintain large intact forest landscapes.
British Columbia has doubled the amount of fully protected areas from 6% in 1992 to 12.5% today —and half of this, or 14 million acres, is forested. It has the largest provincial parks system in Canada, and its protected areas include Tatshenshini-Alsek wilderness park in the remote northwest which joins with parks in Alaska and Canada’s Yukon to form the largest international protected area in the world—at 20.7 million aces, it is almost as big as Minnesota.
Another 14% of British Columbia’s land base is designated for special management, which means other values such as wildlife habitat take precedence over resource use. In north central British Columbia, the almost 15 million acres in the Muskwa-Kechika special management and protected areas represent one of North America’s last true wilderness areas south of the 60th parallel.
British Columbia’s natural diversity presents a challenge to resource managers who want their actions to be compatible with the needs of each unique ecosystem. One solution is the Biogeo-climatic Ecosystem
Classification System, also known as BEC, which provides a common reference point for forests and other natural resource professionals, including naturalists, ecologists, soil scientists and biologists.
BEC got its start with the work of ecologist Vladimir Krajina and his botany students at the University of British Columbia from 1950 to 1975. They found that naturally occurring plant species varied according to soil, climate and land form combinations, and they proposed ecological zones throughout British Columbia based on these biogeoclimatic characteristics—bio for plant, geo for landform and climatic for climate. No other jurisdiction in the world works with such a detailed accounting of diverse ecosystems covering such a large land base.
BEC uses a wide variety of ecological information about plants, animals, soils, landforms and climates to describe, name and classify the full range of ecosystems found in the province. Since the 1970s, resource professionals with the provincial Ministry of Forests have collected data from 30,000 ecosystem field plots and mapped out 14 broad zones and many finer sub-zones across the province with similar climates and distinct patterns of soil and vegetation, usually characterized by the general tree species that eventually dominate the site.
This kind of detailed information is invaluable for forest companies licensed to harvest public land in British Columbia because they are expected to create new forests that mirror the ecological and biological diversity of the natural forest. BEC is also one of the many reasons why British Columbia is well positioned to become one of the few jurisdictions in the world to move to a results-based approach to forest practices legislation.
British Columbia has other advantages that make it an ideal candidate for a results-based system, including its comprehensive land use planning system, a forest industry that has high compliance with forest laws, skilled resource professionals, and experience gained through a number of pilot projects. The province also has a high rate of sustainable forest management certification—more than 55 million acres is certified under third-party certification.
In 1995, British Columbia consolidated and strengthened its forest legislation in the Forest Practices Code, creating some of the toughest and most comprehensive forestry legislation on earth. The code increased environmental protection and provided a consistent set of rules for forest licensees.
Early in 2004, British Columbia began its transition to the new results-based Forest and Range Practices Act, which emphasizes on-the-ground results rather than process. The new act aims to maintain British Columbia’s high level of environmental protection, while encouraging more innovation and reducing costs. The transition will be complete by the end of 2005.
Under the act, companies licensed to operate on public land must develop a forest stewardship plan that sets out how they can best achieve government objectives for soils, timber, wildlife, water, fish, biodiversity and cultural heritage resources. While they can choose the best way to meet the objectives, they are accountable for the results.
Government may also require results or strategies for special management of areas of local concern, such as recreation trails, wildlife habitat areas, winter range for animals such as deer and mountain goats, lakeshore management zones, community watersheds, fisheries-sensitive watersheds and scenic vistas. All activities must be consistent with approved land use plans.
The new forest regulatory regime also specifies requirements to conserve soils, support sustainable forest management, and protect riparian areas, fish and wildlife habitat, watersheds, bio-diversity and wildlife. And it specifies the requirements for building, maintaining and deactivating forest roads.
The Forest and Range Practices Act allows resource managers the flexibility they need to deal with British Columbia’s diverse forest resource, and it is backed by both a comprehensive compliance and enforcement regime and tough accountability rules for trained resource professionals such as foresters, agrologists, engineers, geoscientists and biologists.
The safety net also includes the independent Forest Practices Board, which functions as auditor-general and ombudsman for the forestry sector and holds both government and industry publicly accountable for forestry practices. Since its creation in 1995, the board has made more than 270 recommendations in 120 public reports on ground-level examinations of forest practices. Government and industry have implemented the majority of the board’s recommendations.
Dr. Bruce Fraser, a forest ecologist who studied at the University of British Columbia under Vladimir Krajina, was appointed board chair in November 2003. With 17 years of experience as a consultant in the areas of community economic development, public participation in resource management and resource conflict resolution, he is well positioned to lead the board into what he sees as interesting times ahead.
“We will have a key role in providing scrutiny over whether results are being achieved, and whether those expected results represent good forestry practices,” Dr. Fraser says. “We have already begun changing our approach to auditing and monitoring forestry operations to reflect emerging trends, including results-based regulation and third-party certification. We need to be sure we can measure the effectiveness of forest practices on the ground.”
Larry Pedersen is not surprised that British Columbia keeps finding innovative approaches to forest management, like result-based regulations and ecosystem-based management. Pedersen is British Columbia’s chief forester, and he has been involved with forest management in the province for more than a quarter of a century. He’s seen a lot of changes in that time, some in response to new science, some in response to social pressures.
He was one of the authors of a report in the early 1990s that led to the introduction of British Columbia’s comprehensive timber supply review system. It requires that the chief forester determine how much wood can be harvested from each of the province’s forest management units at least once every five years. The decision is based on the latest policies, detailed technical, scientific and economic information and, like everything else related to forest management in the province, consultation with the public and with First Nations.
“There was a time when allowable annual cut determinations were not being done fast enough to keep pace with changing management objectives and practices, and all forest values were not being given full consideration,” Mr. Pedersen says. “Today, allowable annual cut determinations are outcomes based on the best available information about the forest, its current use and management. They are independent, professional judgments that respect the objectives of local land use plans and the views of British Columbians.”
The chief forester can postpone a review for up to five additional years if an annual allowable cut is not expected to change significantly, or set a new harvest level earlier to deal with urgent situations where new information is available. Recently, Pedersen set early determinations in several Interior management units in response to wildfires and a catastrophic mountain pine beetle infestation.
In 2003, record drought, high temperatures and wind results in wildfires that burned 640,000 acres across the province, compared to 75,000 acres in an average year. And most of this was in the Interior, which was already in the midst of the most extensive mountain pine beetle infestation in British Columbia’s recorded history, thanks to a very abundant source of mature pine trees, hot summers and mild winters.
“Beetles are natural occurrences in British Columbia’s Interior but we have never seen anything like the recent situation,” Mr. Pedersen says. “Government and industry have been working hard to slow the beetle infestation but we have not been getting the frigid winters we need so it keeps expanding exponentially. We can’t harvest all the beetle-killed trees before the wood deteriorates, but we can harvest more and still protect all forest values. This will also allow us to speed up reforestation.”
British Columbia is also committed to ensuring that First Nations, which have traditionally and culturally depended on forests for economic, environmental and spiritual values, participate more in the province’s forest economy. The British Columbia government has invited a number of First Nations to apply for forest licences, including several that involve harvesting timber damaged by fires and beetles. At the same time, modernday treaties and interim measures agreements are being negotiated to address outstanding aboriginal rights and title issues, and to provide a stable environment for resource development.
Back at the big house of the Da’naxda’xw First Nation in New Vancouver, Dallas Smith, representing area First Nations leaders, and George Abbott, British Columbia’s Minister of Sustainable Resource Management, formally accepted the recommendations of the Central Coast land and resource management planning table from chair Jim Lornie.
“It’s historic—the work that you have done,” Mr. Smith told the process participants. “You have built a foundation that is necessary for First Nations and the provincial government to agree on land and resource management in a pre-treaty environment.”
Kerry McGourlick, chief forester with Western Forest Products, one of four major forest companies that played a role in the process, also welcomed the certainty that comes with the recommendations. “It will allow us to go forward and balance the needs of the environment with the needs of the communities and our businesses needs.”
After honouring the participants for their work, the Government of British Columbia and the First Nations moved into discussions informed by the recommendations, decisions that ultimately will protect the environment, maintain spiritual and cultural values, foster community stability and allow ecosystem-based resource management based on sound science.
While the decisions will focus on the Central Coast region, the benefits will resonate across the province and beyond its borders, showing the world how British Columbians are achieving the necessary balance in managing and conserving their natural resources.
human need to use natural resources is fundamental to our continued presence on earth."