What Does Sustainable Forestry Even Mean?

By Ian MacNeill for Truck LoggerBC

Sustainable forestry. It’s an expression we hear a lot these days, but what does it mean?

A good working definition comes to us from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change. It explains that it’s “the stewardship and use of forests and forest lands in a way, and at a rate, that maintains their biodiversity, productivity, regeneration capacity, vitality, and their potential to fulfill now and in the future, relevant ecological, economic and social functions at local, national and global levels.”

It’s a mouthful, but that’s because sustainable forestry isn’t just about trees. It’s about an entire ecosystem, and yes, human beings are an important part of that ecosystem, whether they live in urban high rises or forestrydependent communities.

Although to many hearing the term for the first time it sounds like a new concept, progressive approaches to forestry have been around, and evolving, in one form or another for almost a century. Although it’s true that in the early part of the 20th century reforestation was minimal because it was deemed uneconomical, early tree plantations started sprouting in the 1930s, and by 1941, as many as 10 million seedlings had gone into the ground. But those were just a few drops in the old seed bag compared with today. According to the provincial forest ministry, BC planted more than a billion trees from 2018 to 2021, including a whopping 304 million in 2020.

As important as tree planting is to the sustainability equation, as the IPCC definition makes clear, it isn’t all there is. It’s about maintaining and protecting waterways, ecosystems, wildlife, cultural values, biodiversity, human diversity, recreational opportunities, communities, providing economic benefits, and as we have come to understand more recently, a way to address climate change and exercise more control over wildfires. And how to do all this is something of a moving target, says Lennard Joe, CEO of the BC First Nations Forestry Council. Stuff happens in the natural world, and it often catches us by surprise. There was a time when climate change, beetle kills and seemingly unstoppable forest fires weren’t on anyone’s radar. Now, responding to these challenges represents an essential component of sustainability in policy making.

“We must define it within current realities,” says Joe.

Sustainable forestry—indeed resource extraction in multiple sectors in BC—is also important to advancing reconciliation with First Nations. “For thousands of years, we have been looking after the forests,” says Joe. “They provide a wide range of benefits, including food and shelter, but there’s also an economic side because forests are in our backyards. Working in them provides

Indigenous Benefit More from Forestry Jobs

Data from the 2021 Census proves that forestry jobs put more money in the pockets of Indigenous Canadians and their families. Its Labour Force Survey indicates that the average salary for Indigenous people in forestry was $56,100 as compared with $51,120 for other forms of employment. Leading the way within the sector were jobs in pulp, paper, and paperboard mills, where the average paycheques added up to $89,100 annually. Other subsectors include:

• Sawmills and wood preservation – $60,200

• Logging - $56,650

• Forestry and logging - $56,100

• Truck transportation - $49,600

Despite this, the census also reveals that in Canada, Indigenous wages trail those of non-Indigenous by an average 14.2 per cent, says Heather Exner-Pirot, a senior fellow and director of natural resources, energy and environment for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa, a public policy think tank. On the upside, the data also shows that the gap has been shrinking steadily, especially in forestry. From 2019 to 2021, wages in forestry and logging increased by 9.4 per cent for all workers, while Indigenous wages in the same sector enjoyed a bump of 18.7 per cent.

Overall, Indigenous people are well represented in the resource sectors of the Canadian economy. While they only represent 3.9 per cent of the Canadian workforce overall, they comprise 6.9 per cent of the oil and gas workforce, 10.8 per cent of the mining workforce, and 9.2 per cent of forestry. Expect these numbers to increase as Native people take further control over the management of natural resources on their traditional lands. SP the certainty and security of well-paying jobs.” Although it doesn’t get a lot of ink amid the cacophonous noise that attends anti-logging protests and confrontations on forest roads, government and in- dustry have been working at an accelerated pace over the past two decades developing new techniques and best practices for promoting sustainability. We’re now seeing the results. In 2021, Interfor released its Sustainability Re- port outlining progress and goals for improving forest outcomes. It sets targets for hiring diversity, “meaningful” reductions of greenhouse gas emissions, and expanding third-party Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) fibre sourcing certification to cover 100 per cent of log sourcing.

In another example, Mosaic now has a manager of partnerships, Dana Collins. It will be her job to promote within the organization a culture of diversity, equity and inclusion, and to seek out Indigenous partners to collaborate with in managing sustainable timberlands. In a recent interview she explained that she’s always had an interest in increasing the representation of women and Indigenous cultures in the forestry sector, “I was often the only woman at the table, so I recognized the challenges facing minorities.”

Pursuing sustainability goals is not just virtue signaling, says SFI President and CEO Kathy Abusow. “Nowadays both customers and investors want to know that the products they are buying are produced using best practices.” The proof of this is in the numbers. According to an SFI survey from 2022, 84 per cent of SFI-certified organizations reported steady or increased demand for certified products over the last 12 months.

Charges that certification is just corporate “greenwashing” don’t stick. SFI is an independent non-profit committed to best practices. Its 18-member, three chamber board includes representatives of conservation organizations, academic in- stitutions, aboriginal/tribal entities, family forest owners, public officials, labour, and the forest products industry. “This diversity reflects the variety of interests in the forestry community,” says Abusow.

Linda Coady, incoming president and CEO of the Council of Forest Industries identifies as a “sustainability practitioner,” something she became thanks to her engagement with conflict resolution on the Coast over forestland usage issues. In her role she worked with industry, environmental groups, local communities, forest workers, Indigenous communities and leaders, government officials, and international buyers. Her goal now that she has joined COFI is to move the conversation along at all levels because continuously raising the industry’s sustainability performance is not just a ‘nice-to-do’ thing, it’s a ‘mustdo’ thing.

“The forest companies in BC that constitute our membership understand that to be globally competitive, we must recognize that our environmental, social, governance and economic performance reflect the evolving priorities of our communities of stakeholders, including employees, communities, Indigenous people, supply chain partners, customers, shareholders, investors and governments.”

As a way to promote education on the subject to its members and policy makers,

COFI released a Statement of Sustainability Commitments outlining a broad number of responsibilities that are now a condition of membership, and she promises that member performance will be monitored and reported on regularly. (The initial report, Sustainability is Growing, is available at cofi.org.)

Forestry is increasingly recognized as an important tool when it comes to addressing climate change, but unfortunately, this is a view that has not been widely understood. Now is the time to change that, says Coady.

“We need to acknowledge and promote the role of sustainable forest management and forest products—from lumber and food packaging to biofuels—as tools that can fight climate change and plastic pollution. It’s critical that Canadians, and customers around the world, know the facts about our globally leading regulatory regime, third-party certification, and products sourced through best practices.

It’s also critical that we show the world we’re doing the work necessary to continuously evolve and strengthen our forest management regime to keep forests healthy, promote biodiversity, and deal with the impacts of climate change, forest fires, pests and more.”

SFI’s Abusow agrees that perception is a problem in these embattled times, especially with the public, or to put it plainly, voters. “We’ve learned that proving your bona fides to customers and investors was the easy part,” says Abusow. “The harder part is public perception, which comes down to sound-bite management issues directed at a public that tends to have a short attention span.”

The answer is a “forest literate society” built from the ground up through education, something SFI has been doing for the past 20 years with a variety of initiatives in the United States. These include Project Learning Tree, which supplies educational learning tools to schools that examine forests, ecosystems, wildlife, water and watersheds, forest pests, forest policy, fire, forest economics, and human health. SFI is currently developing materials with Canadian content for students of all ages in Canada, ranging from early childhood to high school graduation, and plans to liaise with educators both within schools and government to have the materials included in the curriculum, where it is going to have to be inserted in order to have any meaningful impact.

“The goal is to ensure every child knows about and has a better understanding of forests and realizes that there are many “green” jobs within forestry,” she says, adding that young people today are fully committed to environmentalism and need to understand that green jobs in forestry allow them to be part of the change they want.

Lennard Joe says he is optimistic about where the conversation is going, in part because Native people, the original stewards of the forests in BC, now have a seat at the table, and they bring to it a unique perspective, one that is both cultural and economic.

“The harsh reality is that economics play a role in any discussion,” he says. “We need to survive. Everybody needs to, so sustainability is about managing the forests in such a way that we can ensure economic survival as well as preserve cultural values. Now that we all understand how important it is, we can stop finger pointing and start having the kind of hard conversations we need to have if we are going to achieve it, and First Nations will never not be part of those conversations.”

It is almost a certainty that over time, as circumstances change, and new technologies are developed—and perhaps unforeseen environmental challenges emerge—that the definition of sustainable forestry will change. Like the trees themselves, it will grow and mature. But the fact that it is being embraced by government, industry, and an increasingly forest-literate society ensures that forestry has a promising future for those that work in it, and for those that benefit from its contribution to health and well-being, and that is pretty much everyone else. SP