Forest Management or Forest Mining?

The proposed forest management plan put forward by Carrier Forest Products for the North West Term Supply License Area, and supported by the Saskatchewan Ministry of Environment, represents an expansion of commercial forestry operations further north into intact forest regions that have never previously been under industrial exploitation. There is no adequate rationale provided for this new intrusion into what remains of Saskatchewan’s primary forests.

According to James E.M. Watson and others, forest areas such as these that are “free of significant anthropogenic degradation (which we term ‘intact forest’) should be identified and accorded special consideration in policy-making, planning and implementation”.¹ Intact forest areas such as the proposed NW Term Supply Licence Area have exceptional ecological value for carbon sequestration and climate change mitigation, for hydrological processes such as purifying water and attenuating runoff, and for the conservation of species and genetic diversity. The Technical Review of this proposed Forest Management Plan by the Ministry of Environment provides no special considerations for these non-timber values.

There are few existing haul roads in the Licence Area so proposed harvesting costs will have to include construction of new roads and trails. Such access is expensive to build and has implications for other resources as it affects hunter access, potentially provides wolves easier mobility to and between habitats of the endangered woodland caribou and increases the risk of human caused forest fires. As you move further north, the trees get smaller and haul distances become greater, making the basic economics of producing forest products from such northern regions precarious. According to figures provided in the Carrier Forest Products plan, the recent harvest volumes in the existing Saskatchewan commercial forest area have been far less than the Annual Allowable Cut. Under such circumstances there should be no need to push harvesting further north into hitherto unexploited forests.

The Ministry of Environment is proposing to approve Carrier Forest Products’ request to harvest more old and very old stands in the Licence Area than is allowed under Provincial Forest Management Plan Standards. These older stands are important for wildlife habitat (with rich bird, insect and fungal diversity relative to younger stands) and for maintaining forest carbon stocks. The fact that Carrier Forest Products is proposing to intensify the harvest beyond the Provincial Forest Management Plan Standards demonstrates that this plan is not a sustainable approach to long-term forest management. The proposed 20-year cutting plan is a short term timber grab. Over 25% of the proposed Supply Licence Area is made up of forest stands in the 70 to 80 year-old age class and a high proportion of these stands are slated for clearcutting in the next 20 years under this plan. Once this single cohort of stands is liquidated, it is clear from the figure below that there are hardly any stands growing up to reach a similar level of maturity over the subsequent decades. Only 6% of stands are currently in the 20 to 70 year-old cohorts, meaning that there will be very little potential harvest over a 50 year period after the liquidation of the stands that are currently 70 plus years-old. This is the very definition of boom and bust forest exploitation.

Given that the House of Commons declared a climate emergency in June 2019, all efforts should be made to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and preserve and enhance carbon stocks such as forest cover in Saskatchewan. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, to “maximise the climate benefits of forests, we must keep more forest landscapes intact, manage them more sustainably, and restore more of those landscapes which we have lost.”² Rather than pushing forest harvesting into new areas further north, the provincial government should be mandating the forest industry to reforest at the southern extent of the boreal region where there have been successive decades of forest cover loss due to agricultural land clearing.³ According to the most recent State of Canada’s Forest Report, clearing of forests for agriculture is still going on today, with 12,000 to 42,000 ha being cleared annually within Canada between 1990 and 2016.⁴ A study by Bastin et al. published in the journal Science demonstrated that expanding tree cover could reduce the atmospheric carbon pool by 25%.⁵ It is extremely unfortunate that neither the Government of Canada or the Government of Saskatchewan have taken any meaningful steps to stop deforestation and promote reforestation.

The Forest Management Plan, as drafted, has many shortcomings and should not be approved by the Saskatchewan Ministry of Environment. There are other ways to support responsible forest management in the province than opening up new intact forests to commercial exploitation. What is proposed is akin to non-renewable resource management, more analogous to forest mining, than it is to renewable resource management or forest conservation. The proposal is a short-term project to liquidate a pulse of stands regenerated after fire 70 to 80 years ago with no thought as to the broader ecological impacts or to what will come after the planning period.

If granted a licence under this proposed Forest Management Plan, Carrier Forest Products may become one more corporation in Saskatchewan’s history that takes on a publicly-owned license area, removes the timber for a short period (in the life of trees) and then walks away, as was done previously by Parsons and Whittemore in Prince Albert, Simpson Timber in Hudson Bay, and Weyerhaeuser in Prince Albert. In such situations, the environmental and “social costs of the industrial forestry system are externalized from the private firm to the general public.”⁶

Conserving northern intact forests for biodiversity conservation, hydrological services and climate mitigation will be more important over the long term than one more brief boom and bust cycle where industry unsustainably poaches timber. Better forest management (including reforestation, regeneration and road reclamation) of landscapes that have already undergone forest harvesting and agricultural land-clearing should be the priority for Saskatchewan.

– Michael Fitzsimmons, PhD, PAg, Duck Lake, SK