In what’s being called the most intensive and thorough report ever produced on the state of B.C.’s forests, the Liberal government on Thursday provided a clear view of the devastation that has strangled one of B.C.’s most historic industries.
According to the 2010 State of Forests report, B.C. lumber production declined 19% last year compared with 2008.
In 2009, forest product exports totalled $7.6 billion compared with an average of $14.7 billion between 1996 and 2004.
This while U.S. lumber consumption dropped 51% since 2005, and lumber prices hit a 40-year low in 2009.
“Over the last 24 months, extremely difficult economic conditions have resulted in thousands of temporary and permanent job losses in the sector,” the report said.
“Overall, since the 1980s, employment in the forest sector has slowly declined, while the province’s economy has grown and diversified.”
Although the province’s overall economy has embraced diversification in recent decades, many rural communities are still highly dependent on the forestry sector, the report said, adding epidemics such as the mountain pine beetle do not help.
At the peak of the beetle epidemic in 2007, over 10 million hectares of B.C.’s 55 million hectares of forested land was under attack.
By 2008, the outbreak had spread over 14 million hectares, the report said, and killed half the province’s mature pine.
“The forest area disturbed by the beetle greatly exceeds the area disturbed by harvest, fire, and all other factors totalled over many years,” the report said.
“Climate change and fire suppression may have helped create favourable conditions for this outbreak, which is of a size unprecedented in the historical record.”
In addition to economic and pine beetle information, the report outlines 91 indicators of forest sustainability and management and comes one day after the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives called for an independent inquiry into B.C.’s forest service (see “Cuts have hollowed B.C.’s forest service: CCPA” – BIV Business Today, December 8.)