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  1. In aftermath of a landslide that killed five, experts say government must act now to avoid more “preventable” deaths AS 2021 DREW TO A CLOSE, Premier John Horgan said many British Columbians would remember it “as the year that climate change arrived on our doorsteps.” Whether it was the wildfires that made breathing the air a risk and that wiped the town of Lytton off the map, or the unrelenting heat in June and early July that claimed 600 or more lives, or the mid-November rains, floods and landslides that killed at least six people, destroyed homes, farms and businesses and wiped away entire sections of highways and dikes, 2021 was memorable for the chaos unleashed by climatic events. But is it right to ascribe all the devastation to climate change and climate change alone? Yes, more extreme weather appears to be here. And yes, scientists have warned for decades to brace for more as we continue our collective assault on the earth’s atmosphere by relentlessly burning fossil fuels. But climate change alone did not kill Anita and Mirsad Hadzic on November 15 leaving their two-year-old infant daughter an orphan when their car was smashed by a thundering wall of mud, rock and shattered trees on the Duffey Lake Road. Nor is it solely responsible for the death of three others who were unfortunate enough to be on that lonely stretch of road with the Hadzics that night. Where the buck stops The “atmospheric river” that dumped heavy rain on southwest BC last November 14 and 15 may have been the proximate cause, or trigger, of the landslide that took those five lives, but the underlying cause was 730 metres up the mountainside on an abandoned logging road that was not properly deactivated and that failed. Climate change didn’t cause the landslide. Bad land use practices did. To learn more about the devastating landslide, the BC office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives reached out to geoscientists and engineers, both active and retired, and all with some experience working in or for the provincial government. All three say that while climate change is a clear threat, the more pressing issue is how the government, and in particular the Ministry of Forests, manages key natural resources. They also say that simple things can be done now to set us on a better path: Spend a nominal amount of money to rapidly assess what at-risk logging roads are out there. Step up inspections of aging infrastructure and prioritize repairs where people are most vulnerable. Restore powers to the provincial government to review and approve all logging roads and logging cut-blocks before they happen, rather than relying on industry professionals to make such calls. And, use a special stand-alone fund from levies on resource industries to cover the costs of some of that work. Failure to do such things, they warn, only courts more death, injury and loss. Not a good place to be It is unlikely that most motorists on the Duffey Lake Road, or any other highway for that matter, know that aging logging roads may be just a short distance away and hidden from view, or that such roads pose risks to those below, especially in mountainous settings. The Hadzics were on one such road not by choice but by necessity. The day before, they had learned that three highways were blocked preventing passage to the populous Lower Mainland. Mudslides and flooding had rendered the Coquihalla Highway between Merritt and Hope, Highway 1 through the Fraser Canyon, and Highway 3 from Hope to Princeton impassable. That left only the Duffey Lake Road (also called Highway 99). The narrow, winding road with its sharp ascents and descents was originally a logging road that later was updated to a highway and features on the website dangerousroads.org. Long-time friends Rob Graham and Brad Beggs were among those on the road that day. The men recall that the further they drove from Lillooet, the worse things got. There were rocks on the road almost everywhere and torrents of muddy water cascading off the surrounding slopes. Tons of mud, broken trees and rock carpet Highway 99 last November, the dangerous road where five people lost their lives in a landslide that engineers say was triggered by a failed logging road. Photo: BC Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure / Flickr “It was not a good place to be,” Graham said. Eventually, they found themselves in a long line of cars forced to stop due to debris on the road up ahead. “The impending doom feeling was hanging in the air big time,” he recalled. The men soon heard a “thundering noise” above them. Beggs turned the ignition, gunned the gas, cranked the steering wheel and had just enough room to swerve around and ahead of the car in front of him. Another driver in a vehicle behind them managed to do the same. The people behind that vehicle were hit by the landslide. Some crawled out of cars that had been flipped upside down. Others emerged from the wall of debris “covered head to toe in mud.” “All you saw was their eyes, their mouths open,” Beggs said, adding that he will “never forget” the terrifying speed and sound of the landslide. Inspection and spending shortfalls Ron Jordens was studying to be an engineer at the University of BC in 1965 when he landed a summer job with the BC Forest Service surveying the road to Gold River. The road was later taken over by the Ministry of Highways as a public highway. “At that time, the Forest Service engineering division was very operational, involved in the planning, location, survey, design and construction of main roads,” says Jordens, who would go on to work for the ministry for more than 30 years. “We had a wealth of experience, knowledge and skills to plan, locate, survey, design and maintain fairly high-standard roads, almost but not quite to the standard of highways.” The road Jordens helped survey was at the time a Forest Service Road, or FSR. They are the most frequently travelled of all logging roads and additionally are sometimes the only vehicular access into remote communities. They are also the most heavily engineered of logging roads. Today, there are more than 58,000 kilometres of such roads in BC—enough to circle the world almost one-and-a-half times. But it is one thing to build such roads, and a different matter to maintain them. BC’s Auditor General found in 2020 that the Ministry of Forests “did not manage safety and environmental risks on FSRs in accordance with its policies,” and that it also did not properly maintain and repair roads and crossing structures such as bridges and major culverts. Many bridge and culvert inspections weren’t done. And of those that were, half turned up problems that required repairs. But chronic ministry underfunding, averaging $35 million per year, meant that two years or more after problems were identified they still were not fixed. Woefully inadequate road inventories Even more problematic are hundreds of thousands of kilometres of “resource roads.” These less-travelled roads may experience steady logging truck traffic for a time before being largely abandoned. The road that failed, killing the Hadzics, was one such road. In 2015, the Forest Practices Board, BC’s independent forest watchdog, estimated that more than 600,000 kilometres of such roads existed. Today, that number is closer to 700,000, or enough roads to circle the earth 17 times. “Where these roads occur on steep slopes, they can cause landslides,” the Board noted in its report, adding that the frequency of landslides increases tenfold in logged areas, and that virtually all such landslides are associated with logging roads that fail, especially in steeper terrain. The highly critical report noted that the government’s resource road inventory was 20 years out of date. The government effectively had no information on an estimated 200,000 kilometres of such roads. Worse, many roads identified by the industry as deactivated were either insufficiently deactivated or not deactivated at all. A wakeup call In a self-described “wakeup call” published two years later, the Board reported on 26 different road segments it examined in steep terrain. In 21 cases, a “qualified registered professional” had been involved in the road design or construction. Yet the Board found: In only 10 of the 21 cases where a registered professional was involved were all legal requirements and professional guidelines met. In six of the 26 cases, the road segments were deemed to be “structurally unsafe.” And five of those six segments were built “in a manner that did not reduce the likelihood of a landslide or ensure protection of the environment.” The Board said this underscored the need for stepped-up provincial compliance and enforcement efforts to ensure public and environmental health and safety. Jordens is not surprised by such findings. He remembers hearing the following definition of a perfectly constructed logging road early in his career. “From a logging point of view, you want to spend the least amount of money for the road that will provide you sufficient access to your last load of logs. The best road is the road that falls apart after you get your last load of logs out.” Government oversight must be there to counter industry cost-cutting, Jordens says. But effective oversight is today largely absent. Twenty years ago, the government replaced the much more prescriptive Forest Practices Code Act with the Forest and Range Practices Act, ushering in a new era of “professional reliance.” The professional reliance free-for-all “What professional reliance meant was that if a logging company delivered a plan that was signed by a professional, that’s all the ministry needed to see,” Jordens says. “Cut block and road location planning in the forest was not left up to the ministry. It was left up to the industry and ‘reliance on professionals,’ who normally were not in charge of the road building and logging activities on a day-to-day basis. “It makes me wonder if what is on the approved plan is actually being followed on the ground and is there a mechanism that satisfies forest service staff that the conditions of the plan were followed.” In May 2018, lawyer Mark Haddock submitted a report on professional reliance to George Heyman, Minister of Environment and Climate Change Policy. Haddock spent years prior working as an environmental lawyer in non-profit and academic settings as well as at the Forest Practices Board. In his report, Haddock noted many concerns with the professional reliance regime including how it applies to the Forest and Range Practices Act (FRPA). He concluded that it placed public servants on a reactive rather than proactive footing because so little information was actually transmitted to the government by the logging industry before developments occurred. Haddock noted, for example, that Forest Stewardship Plans submitted to the government by logging companies were exceedingly broad and covered large areas of land—in the most extreme cases, two times the size of Vancouver Island. Absent from such plans were specific details on where new roads and logging cut blocks were to be located. What FRPA did, Haddock said, was place “high levels of dependence” on professionals outside of government to make key decisions. Government engineers were effectively cut out of approving where roads and cut blocks were located and a reduced complement of ministry compliance and enforcement staff was left to monitor such developments after the fact. “It took away the ability of ministry professionals to identify or review problems associated with harvesting activities on unstable or sensitive slopes and resolve those problems before the industry went into those areas,” Jordens says. “Roads are the worst culprits when it comes to sedimentation, debris torrents and landslides, particularly on the coast. If we want to manage, conserve and protect our forests—which is what we are supposed to do under the Ministry of Forests Act—we need to retain control because it’s questionable whether the current model of professional reliance can achieve that.” A gut feeling During a news conference on November 15 as the scale of flood-related damage became more apparent, Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth was asked about the plight of motorists stranded on highways cutoff by landslides. “Landslides, as you know, are unpredictable and they happen,” Farnworth said. But two professionals with expertise in landslides and road failures say that landslides and improperly built or decommissioned logging roads go hand in hand, and that tragic outcomes like those on the Duffey Lake Road are the result. Pierre Friele is a professional geoscientist with 30-years experience in the forest sector, predominantly in the South Coast Forest Region, where he has worked under contract for the Ministry of Forests out of its Squamish office. Friele suspected almost immediately that those killed on the road late last year died because a logging road high above them failed. “I just had this gut feeling,” Friele said in an interview. “So I got this local avalanche guy who was doing a flight to take some pictures.” When the avalanche expert returned with the photographs, Friele said his suspicion was confirmed. The aerial evidence was not enough for Friele, however. Eight days after the deaths, he elected to walk into the remote area before further rain or snow altered evidence of what happened. “I’m the only person who has seen it up close,” he says. Friele found that the road had been only partially deactivated. Deactivation can include many things such as breaking up the road surface to disperse water runoff during the winter season; or, where regular use is not required for several years, by removing culverts and installing cross ditches; or in the case when a road is no longer required for industrial use, by removing all culverts and bridges and pulling back fillslopes in steep terrain. Such work, if done promptly and properly, reduces the risks of future landslides. While there was evidence that culverts had been pulled out and cross ditches had been cut through the road surface to restore more natural water flows, much of the massive amount of rock and soil pushed to the roadside during road construction, known as fill slope, remained unaddressed, Friele found. And that was a problem, because over the years that untouched mass of earth and rock began to gradually fail in increments. Several small failures resulted in sections of ditch lining the old road becoming blocked. The blockages then caused water to flow onto the road surface in ways that weakened it causing the fillslope to eventually fail. Because the road was abandoned, “these small slides and the associated water misalignment were never identified and corrected,” Friele concluded, adding that failure to deactivate the road properly before it was abandoned led ultimately to the fatal disaster. In a report he subsequently wrote on his findings in the field, Friele said “failures on legacy forest service roads are common enough that those of us practising in the forest sector have been called to forensically investigate a number of them during our careers. Luckily, fatalities have been few, until this recent event, which has brought the issue to the fore.” Foreseeable and preventable Calvin VanBuskirk is a professional engineer and 30-plus year member of the Engineers and Geoscientists of BC. Like Friele, he too suspected that the Duffey Lake Road slide was not a natural event. Shortly after the slide, he reviewed aerial images from the University of BC’s air photo library. The images showed the logging road had been built in the 1960s and abandoned in the 1990s. The photos also suggested that the road had altered natural drainage patterns, redirecting water onto marginally stable areas that were prone to failure. In a letter he subsequently sent to Mike Farnworth, Forests Minister Katrine Conroy and Transportation and Infrastructure Minister Rob Fleming, VanBuskirk did not mince words. “It is my professional opinion that the 15 November 2021, tragic, fatal landslide event northeast of Duffy Lake on Highway 99 was both foreseeable and preventable. Engineer Calvin VanBuskirk at site of roadway that washed away in Saanich during November’s storms. People consistently fail to appreciate the power of water, he says. Photo: Ben Parfitt. “The landslide initiated on a resource (logging) road constructed in the late 1960s… It appears that the road was not deactivated and has not been inspected or maintained for decades… Had this area been subject to inspections/monitoring, the potential for this landslide could have been detected and appropriate measures… implemented to manage the landslide risk.” Adding weight to VanBuskirk’s conclusions is a work record that includes years spent in the field doing landslide hazard and risk assessments on resource roads for numerous forest companies including Riverside, Canfor, Bell Pole, Tolko and Interfor, as well as work for the provincial Ministry of Forests and its timber-auctioning arm, BC Timber Sales. We’ve been here before In 2003, VanBuskirk co-authored a technical report for the Ministry of Forests that examined the underlying causes behind a spectacular occurrence of 66 landslides over a three-day period in June 1990. The devastation occurred in an extensively logged area east of Enderby in the north Okanagan, known as Fall Creek. An estimated $8 million in damage occurred due to debris hitting homes, vehicles, hydro transmission structures, battered water intakes and a section of highway. Of note, the area studied was only equivalent to about seven Stanley Parks in size yet was crisscrossed by at least 100 kilometres of aging logging roads. VanBuskirk, and fellow geoscientist Freeman Smith, concluded that the likely cause of most of the slides was “drainage diversions.” In other words, water that was forced to flow in unnatural ways because of the old, improperly decommissioned roads, many of which were overgrown with brush. Those unnatural flows led quite naturally to landslides. Significantly, the duo concluded that the old Forest Practices Code, which was jettisoned in favor of today’s laissez-faire forest legislation, “would likely have prevented many of these slides”. In addition to flagging the Fall Creek fiasco in his letter to the cabinet ministers, VanBuskirk noted that June 1990 also saw a couple and their daughter killed in the Kelowna area by a mudslide following heavy rainfall. That same summer heavy rainfalls triggered a mudslide near Vavenby in the North Thompson region that killed one man, and four tree planters were killed when their vehicle plunged off a washed-out wooden bridge into the swollen waters of George Creek, southeast of Prince George. At-risk highway corridors Like VanBuskirk, Friele has investigated landslides. He has seen that a lot of old logging roads were not put to bed the way they should be and now the government has a big problem on its hands. “We end up with this situation where the companies didn’t fully deactivate (roads) but the government didn’t really oversee the system properly. And they’ve now taken over the land,” Friele says. “Now it’s the government’s problem.” Fortunately, for the province, many landslides triggered at old logging roads are far removed from human populations. But as the deaths at Duffey Lake underscore, logging roads can come very close to highways and vulnerable communities. That’s why Friele advocates a targeted, proactive approach to reducing landslide risks. If he were making the call, he would prioritize highway corridors. “Above Highway 1, in the Hope-Chilliwack area, there’s roads that are above the highway on the south side. The Trans-Canada Highway is constantly getting blocked. And a lot of those mudflows are related to old logging roads. And nobody’s been killed there. It’s quite amazing. There are mudslides almost every time it rains.” A tremendous disregard The damage unleashed by last November’s heavy two-day downpour extended well beyond old logging roads to major highways used by tens of thousands of motorists every day as well as less frequently travelled city and suburban streets. Like logging roads, more frequently travelled roads are highly vulnerable to damage by water, which is why the design, location, inspection and upgrading of critical drainage infrastructure like culverts are so important. One of the less high-profile roads to fail last November was Chalet Road on the Saanich peninsula, not far from VanBuskirk’s home outside Victoria. A commuter travelling the road that morning drove through about eight inches of water flowing over the road at a creek crossing. By the time she got to work and phoned the municipality to alert them, the road section was gone. Three months later, VanBuskirk travelled to the site to explain what had happened. Ducking below a line of yellow warning tape, he walked to the edge of the deep trench that severed the roadway. Typically, the creek below ran through a small 800-mm culvert underneath the road, he explained. But as the rains fell last November, VanBuskirk said the creek level rose rapidly to four metres, or five times the height of the culvert. With the culvert overwhelmed, the only thing holding back the rising wall of water was the roadbed itself, which had effectively become a dam. But the road hadn’t been built to be a dam and it failed. “When the road embankment gave way, it sent a wall of water down that channel that was estimated to be 30 feet wide and up to 10 feet deep. And it plucked chunks of rock off the bedrock surface—I measured one that was 18-inches thick, two-and-a-half-feet wide and just under five-feet long—and thrust it up into the trees. It was really impressive,” VanBuskirk said. “What’s going on with logging roads, with culverts, with highways, with streets, with everything, is, unfortunately, a tremendous disregard for how powerful water is and for the speed at which things can be swept away.” VanBuskirk, who has been hired to design the new creek crossing on Chalet Road, will be replacing that small culvert with a geotextile, reinforced soil arch that is more than four metres wide at its base (over five times that of the existing culvert) in anticipation of the heavy rains and high water flows that will inevitably come. “An enormous amount of water can flow through a culvert. But when there’s more water than the culvert can handle, that’s when it becomes a problem. That’s when it washes out,” he says. “Let’s take a look.” Friele, Jordens and VanBuskirk all say that one takeaway from last November is that government needs to arm itself with relevant information and then act. Where will more slides likely occur? What culverts and bridges may be most vulnerable? What repairs or reclamation needs to be done? “Let’s take a look. Let’s fly these drainages and see where these landslides initiated,” Jordens says. “Let’s take a helicopter flight and go right to the source. Where did these landslides start? And if they started at old roads or in logged-over areas, how can we improve our practices?” Helicopter flying is expensive, but sometimes necessary. Other technologies exist, however, that are relatively cheap and can provide valuable information quickly over large areas. “We have tools in our toolbox that have come about in the last 10 to 20 years and they are very economical as well,” VanBuskirk says. “One of them is LIDAR, which is the airborne mapping system that you can use where you can pick up extremely detailed topographic information for basically a buck or so a hectare or less. The province of Alberta has done their entire province. BC, from what I can see, has very little of the province covered.” VanBuskirk would also like to see the government use LIDAR data to help produce “detailed topographic and flow accumulation maps” that can be used to identify where the greatest landslide risks are. “The cost of this work is likely much less than the costs of the resource-road-related damage caused by this single landslide event on Highway 99,” he adds. Rehabilitating lands damaged by previous logging and road-building activities will be expensive. However, it is something the government has spent money on in the past and the results strongly suggest it was money well spent. In the 1990s, under the direction of the now-defunct Crown corporation, Forest Renewal BC, hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on “watershed restoration” projects following logging. Significantly, it was the logging industry that ultimately paid for this work through higher timber-cutting or stumpage fees imposed on them by the government. Between 1994 and 1999, a total of $302 million was spent on restoration work, much of it involving road deactivation—work that both improved water flows in damaged valleys, thus benefiting salmon and other species, and made things safer. “Both the government and companies were identifying old road systems and having them deactivated,” Friele says of those years. “There was a huge program of deactivation that went on for close to a decade. And then the Liberal government came in and just canned everything.” Since then, successive governments have failed to restore such funding, meaning the costs of rehabilitating roads like those that killed the Hadzics last November are rising. Government either bites the bullet now and recommences that work—or risks more preventable tragedies ahead. Ben Parfitt is a resource policy analyst with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, and a longtime investigative writer.
  2. More than the climate crisis was behind last November’s rising waters, death and destruction; experts urge province to make course correction. The catastrophic flooding in Merritt in November 2021 occurred after a rainfall similar to previous precipitation events that didn’t cause flooding. The difference? Professional hydrologists implicate logging, forest fires and snowpack in the nearby Coldwater River watershed. WHEN PREMIER JOHN HORGAN declared a provincial state of emergency in the wake of last November’s horrific floods, landslides and deaths, he was quick to name the culprit. The “never seen before” flooding in southern British Columbia was a direct result of “human-caused climate change,” he said, adding that such floods were “increasing in regularity” thanks to our unceasing use of fossil fuels. But climate change alone didn’t account for the numerous highway washouts, the lethal landslide that killed five on the Duffey Lake Road, the thousands of people displaced from their damaged or destroyed homes, the dikes and sewage treatment plants overwhelmed by the rising waters, and more. Other important factors combined to turn last November’s deluge into the monster it became. Heavy two-day rainfalls similar to those of late last year have occurred in the past without triggering the horrendous damage witnessed in November 2021. Not one, but many things conspired to cause such destruction. The essential public policy questions now are what lessons the government learns from last year’s events: Are there things it can easily do now to more accurately anticipate what troubles lie ahead and therefore provide robust early warnings to vulnerable communities? Can it better regulate industries known to play a role in increased flood frequencies, such as the logging industry? And finally, what can it do to better incorporate knowledge about climate change-related events such as wildfires into flood forecasting models so that more timely and effective warnings can be given to communities that may be in harm’s way? Deflecting accountability One person who has pondered such questions since November’s events is Allan Chapman. A long-time professional hydrologist, Chapman once headed BC’s River Forecast Centre, the critical front-line agency tasked with warning the public and vulnerable communities about flood risks. He says the premier’s invocation of climate change and climate change alone “deflects accountability for failures within government.” The potential for last year’s rains to trigger extensive flooding, particularly to lands damaged by wildfires, was foreseeable, Chapman believes, and had only a partial connection to climate change. Other factors like extensive logging and logging roads in key river valleys, or the accumulated snow in mountains that rapidly melted in the face of the rain, were both known risk factors that had nothing to do with climate change at all. Given the prospects for increased flood severity due to wildfires and logging or the presence of snow in watersheds forecast to get a lot of rain, Chapman says flood forecasting and emergency planning staff in the provincial government had all the information they needed to issue early warnings to vulnerable communities about the potential for dangerous times ahead. Chapman first publicly voiced concern about the government’s response to last November’s heavy rains a couple of weeks after the event after analyzing the forecast centre’s actions in the lead-up to the floods. He said then that weather and streamflow data readily available to professional staff at the agency should have resulted in them making higher-level warnings far earlier than they did. Since then, the provincial government has been named in a class action suit, in part for failing to adequately warn residents in the Sumas Prairie about the impending flooding, which resulted in thousands of farm animals being killed, some of the best farmland in the province being contaminated and farm buildings and machinery destroyed. Chapman has since looked more closely at various data to try to make sense of what happened in mid-November. His review included rainfall data, water flow data in streams and rivers proximate to the flooding, snowpack data in key watersheds and significant land-use disturbances in the watersheds closest to where the flooding occurred. He has detailed his findings in a 22-page report that he sent to provincial Ministry of Forests hydrologists. The River Forecast Centre is housed in the ministry that is responsible for ensuring the safety of dikes, for managing forest industry activities—including logging and road-building on public lands—and for dealing with wildfires. Chapman also submitted a lengthy letter summarizing his findings to Forests Minister Katrine Conroy. One of Chapman’s key findings is that the intense rains of last November were unquestionably large, but in keeping with other heavy rains of previous years. What happened in November was, in many ways, a classic “pineapple express” or, as it is now more frequently called, an “atmospheric river.” At some Environment Canada weather stations, including Abbotsford, Aggasiz and Hope, the rainfall recorded for a single day was a record. But the rainfall accumulations over the two days of the storm were not. “Other major and similar storms appear in the record in October 2003, November 1990 and a few other years. The data lead to the conclusion that although the rainfall on November 14 and 15 was certainly large, it was not unprecedented and should not have been unanticipated” Chapman reported. Beyond extreme It is what was layered on top of all of the rain that became the issue. A pineapple express delivers lots of rain simultaneously with warmer temperatures. If such events are preceded by snow accumulating in the mountains, that can be a big problem. During atmospheric river or pineapple express storms, temperatures warm and the freezing line rises as the storm front passes over. The warmth and rain turn much or all of the snow below the freezing line to water. Chapman’s report looked at data from several “snow pillows” (sites where snow depths are measured) and weather stations operated by the BC government, and documented how the rapid melting of accumulated snow substantially augmented the rainfall water, increasing peak flows in key rivers. He concluded that “the water contributed by snow melt” in the critical 48 hours beginning on November 13 and carrying through November 15 was half as much and possibly equal to all of the volume of rainfall at some measurement locations and was “a significant contributor to the severity of the river flooding,” particularly in the Merritt area. This meant that on critical rivers such as the Tulameen, Nahatlatch and Sumas, peak water flows were in the range of what might be expected every 300 years. But this was nothing compared to the peak flows on the Coldwater River. Based on water gauge readings on that river both at Brookmere and Merritt, Chapman found that the peak flows were “beyond extreme,” possibly reaching levels seen only once every 1,000 years. Corresponding data for the Nicola River were not available in real time, Chapman noted. But by looking at readings from gauges in the nearby Coldwater, Chapman estimated that the Nicola’s peak flows were between 700 and 1,000 cubic metres per second—enough water to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool roughly every three seconds. That put the river’s peak flows at levels possibly 2.5 times higher than the previously highest recorded levels, based on 59 years of measurements. “The rainfall was large, but not unexpectedly large based on the historical record,” Chapman says. “It was the rain on snow that proved to be so significant.” And that, Chapman says, should not come as a surprise to anyone in the flood forecasting community. He explains that the historical data available show that “all the floods of record” in the Coldwater, Tulameen and Similkameen river valleys “result from October-January atmospheric river rain storms, and this combination of heavy rain and snowmelt. The November 13 to 15 storm, although extreme, should not be considered unusual in this regard. It is the standard flood-causing mechanism for these rivers.” A burning issue The “beyond extreme” water level on the Coldwater River was bad news for Merritt’s 7,000 residents. The town’s sewage treatment plant—like many such plants throughout BC—is on the floodplain. In a cascade of events, the plant was overrun by floodwaters, its contaminated sewage then mixed with the floodwater which in turn contaminated groundwater wells used to supply local drinking water as well. The evacuation of the town’s residents was inevitable under such circumstances. Heavy rain on snow—a phenomenon well understood by hydrologists—elevated the severity of the floods. But it was not the only reason flooding was so severe. Foresters and climate scientists know that temperatures are creeping up and more forests are becoming drier and susceptible to burning. Mike Flannigan is an award-winning researcher and internationally recognized expert on wildfire behaviour who works at Thompson Rivers University where he is the new BC research chair in predictive services, emergency management and fire science. He has long warned that wildfire seasons are starting earlier, extending later into the year and that BC along with Canada as a whole are witnessing “significant increases in the area experiencing high to extreme fire danger.” He would like to see the provincial and federal governments produce “risk maps” that clearly spell out where danger may be imminent due to wildfires and floods, especially for northern, more-remote rural communities, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. SparksGeo is a Prince George-based company whose geospatial analysts work with satellite data. In April, the company released a report suggesting a connection between the intense wildfires that burned in 2021 and subsequent flood-related destruction, particularly in the highway corridors where some of the most severe road damage occurred. While it cautioned that “the causes of flood damage are complex and involve the interplay of many different environmental and engineering variables,” the company said the satellite imagery suggests a compelling correlation between the fires and the floods. Given that apparent correlation, the company said it makes a lot of public policy sense to use satellite imagery and other knowledge of where wildfires have occurred as a tool to better protect the public in scenarios where there may be increased risks of flooding. “It seems clear that accurate and timely mapping of wildfire damage is an important part of being able to assess the risk that severe flooding poses to our settlements and critical infrastructure,” the SparksGeo report concluded. Letting communities in harm’s way know of such risks well in advance would give them a chance to proactively invest in flood-protection infrastructure and reduce the likelihood of last-minute, frantic scrambling as was the case in Abbotsford last November when the Barrowtown pump station was only prevented from being overrun by rising floodwaters by the heroic, last-ditch efforts of a volunteer sandbagging crew. Merritt was never given that opportunity. But in 2007, the community of Terrace was. That year there was widespread fear that major rivers like the Skeena in the Terrace area and the Lower Fraser could overtop causing extensive damage. The culprit was a huge snow pack that Chapman and others predicted had the potential to cause extensive damage. Forewarned with that knowledge and the assistance of $200,000 in provincial and federal funds, Terrace armoured its sewage plants treatment lagoons with tons of additional rock as well as digging a deep 100-metre-long trench and filling it with rock to prevent the Skeena from encroaching on and destroying the multi-million dollar facility. The funds were part of $33 million made available by both governments to communities deemed to be in harm’s way that spring. Unprecedented behemoth Three of the most-intense wildfires detailed in the SparksGeo report were the July Mountain, Lytton Creek and Tremont Creek blazes. Chapman considered all three in his report and found the significant areas of land burned in each amplified the flood risk. His analysis is that the July Mountain fire burned 26 per cent of the Coldwater River watershed at Brookmere and 16 per cent of the Coldwater River watershed at Merritt. That fire, combined with those at Lytton Creek and Tremont Creek, burned a further 13 per cent of the Nicola River watershed at Spences Bridge. Shortwave infrared satellite image of the July Mountain Fire (reddish brown area). The Coldwater River snakes along the fire’s lower edge on the left and then punches through the centre of the burn as it heads toward Merritt. SWIR image of the Lytton Creek Fire. The Fraser River is on the left. The Nicola River can be seen cutting through the eastern section of the burned area on the right as it heads for the Thompson River. SWIR image of the Tremont Creek Fire. Kamloops Lake can be seen in the upper right corner, the Thompson River on the left. One effect of such fires is to blanket once-absorbent forest soils with a wax-like coating—a result of chemical changes that occur during and immediately after fires. This can make them “hydrophobic” or water repellant. In an interview, Flannigan said that wildfires can have profound consequences as far as water runoff is concerned. “Some studies suggest as much as seven times more water flow between a forested watershed and a burned or harvested [logged] watershed,” Flannigan says. “Of course, it depends on many factors, but it is not unusual to see that kind of increase.” He added that in the case of “hydrophobic ash,” it acts “almost like cement. The water just runs straight down based on gravity, no absorption.” In his report, Chapman says the extensive area of land burned in key areas played a “compelling role” in the flooding that followed and that knowledge of where wildfires occur in future years and their proximity to vulnerable communities must become part of the flood forecasting and emergency planning regime. “It is probable that these fires were major contributing factors, taking what would have been a large rain and snowmelt flood and creating an unprecedented behemoth catastrophic flood with a 1000 plus--year return period,” Chapman wrote. Chapman notes that forest fire data are provided by the Northwest River Forecast Center in Portland Oregon as part of their flood forecast information for Washington and Oregon, but that similar information does not seem to be considered in BC. Flood forecasting and the models used to predict site-specific flood threats would be dramatically improved, in Chapman’s opinion, if two things happened: The Ministry of Forests clearly recognized the vulnerability that certain communities face in the event of rain-on-snow events and built that knowledge into flood forecast models. The ministry ensured that information on areas burned by wildfires be built into such models as well and be considered as a key risk factor when deciding when and where to issue flood warnings. This would involve much more information-sharing between water and wildfire experts spread through a very large ministry. Such changes become even more crucial with climate change, something the provincial government was specifically warned about in 2010 by Jim Mattison, a long-time civil servant and formerly the provincial government’s top water official. In a report that he wrote as a consultant that year, Mattison noted climate change was starting to “affect the lives of citizens every day.” This demanded improved and more-effective forecasting, he said, which was one reason he advocated for more than doubling of BC’s Forecast Centre staff. Today, 12 years after his report was submitted, staffing levels stand at six, one more than they were when Mattison issued his report and six positions below the 12 he said were needed. Mattison also warned that not enough data were being used by Forecast Centre staff to plug into their predictive flood models and therefore the models were “limited in their ability to provide accurate flow forecasts.” In its 2022 budget, the provincial government indicated the River Forecast Centre and provincial floodplain mapping programs will be expanded. The logging industry and flooding frequency The word anthropogenic has been joined at the hip with climate change because unlike previous dramatic shifts in the earth’s climate going back hundreds of millions of years, today’s shifting climate is being driven by human activities. But there are also more immediate human activities to be concerned about. One of the biggest in a mountainous, once extensively and naturally forested province is clearcut logging and related road-building activities. In recent decades, logging rates have accelerated to unprecedented levels, particularly in BC’s vast interior region, where the provincial government actively encouraged the logging industry to dramatically increase logging rates starting more than 20 years ago. The pretext for what became known as “the uplift,” was that mountain pine beetle populations had exploded in number thanks to generally warmer winters and killed tens of millions of lodgepole pine trees - the most prevalent tree species in BC’s interior region. “Salvaging” those dead trees before they lost their value became the goal, with the government giving industry the green light to log an additional 11 million cubic metres of trees per year. But turbo-charging logging rates had serious ecological and hydrological consequences as droves of healthy, living trees were cut down along with the beetle-attacked ones. By the time all this bonus logging was done, up to 63 million cubic metres of additional trees were logged, enough to fill a line of logging trucks bumper to bumper from Vancouver to Halifax five times over. Timelapse images of logging in the Coldwater River Watershed, 1984-2020, including an area later burned by the July Mountain Fire in 2021. Not surprisingly, by the government’s own admission logging rates are now poised to crash, much like the ecosystems that once supported healthy forests. Younes Alila is a hydrological engineer and professor at the University of BC who specializes in forest hydrology and watershed management issues. Over years of study, he has concluded that “the flood regime in BC is super-sensitive to disturbances of any kind,” including logging activities, wildfires and climate change. Such disturbances are likely to result not just in the increasing severity of future floods but in their increased frequency. And their impacts, Alila warns, will be long-lasting. “British Columbians are in for a hell of a ride for decades to come,” he predicts. In the 1990s, when he joined UBC’s Faculty of Forestry, Alila recalls there were limits on the amount of logging that could occur in any one watershed, the limits generally 25 per cent. But that subsequently went out the window in the logging free-for-all that followed. “That threshold is not used anymore,” Alila said during an interview with CBC Radio a few weeks after last November’s floods. “Over the last 20 years, we have been clearcut logging watersheds across all sizes by as much as 40 per cent, 50 per cent, 60 per cent and even more, which, of course, increases substantially the risk of flooding. My research shows that the flood regime is highly sensitive to clearcut logging in both small and large watersheds. As little as 20 per cent logging in large watersheds causes a 20-year, a 50-year and a 100-year flood event . . . to become four to 10 times more frequent.” A sensitive and fragile flood regime “Entire ecosystems,” are being impacted by logging at such a scale, Alila warned, noting that if you could drop a hat out of an airplane flying over parts of the province today there is a 90 per cent chance it would fall in an area of forest that had been logged. Alila says that restoring more natural water flows in logged BC Interior forests takes a very long time. In the first 20 years following logging and replanting, only 20 per cent of the “hydrological functionality” is restored. (Logging roads and the threats they pose to landslides and altered water flows are discussed in a second piece that focuses on the tragic deaths of five people on the Duffey Lake Road during last November’s heavy rains.) “The way that we have been logging and increasing the cut rate and increasing cutblock size in my opinion does not reflect an industry or even a government that appreciates how sensitive and how fragile the flood regime in BC is to land use change and global warming,” Alila told CBC’s Chris Walker, adding that nothing less than a “complete paradigm shift” is needed to the way we manage forests. In his analysis, Chapman also focuses on logging and related logging road densities in the Coldwater, Nicola and Tulameen river basins. His conclusion is that “there is a strong possibility for historic forestry activity to be associated with the extreme peak flows in those rivers and the flood-related damage to follow. “Clear-cutting and forest fires encompass 35% of the basin of the Tulameen River at Princeton, and 41% of the basin of the Coldwater River at Merritt. Road densities are also very high at 1.85 km/km2, and 1.5km/ km2, respectively in the two basins, potentially augmenting the rapid movement of storm rainfall into stream channels, causing peak flows to be increased,” he wrote. Alila subsequently outlined numerous things he feels must change in revised provincial forestry legislation. An overhauled system should require a watershed assessment to be done prior to logging permits being issued. This includes projections of how logging may impact such things as floods, droughts, landslides and water yields, as well as considering the impacts of logging against the backdrop of a changing climate, Alila says. He also recommends that thresholds be reinstated placing strict limits on the overall area of forest in a watershed that can be logged and that priority should be given to community watersheds, which are often critical to the provision of clean drinking water, watersheds with high fisheries values and large watersheds that drain into urban and semi urban areas, some of which may be on floodplains and therefore extremely vulnerable to flood-related damage. “We cannot continue to log as if there is no connection between what we do to the landscape in the upland and downstream lowland values, especially when human lives and costly infrastructure are in harm’s way,” Alila says. He would also like to see the important hydrological functions performed by forests embedded into the critically important allowable annual cut decisions made by the province’s chief forester. Those decisions set the maximum logging threshold in various timber supply areas in the province and, in Alila’s view, have never properly accounted for the important hydrological role played by forests or how long it takes logged forests to recover once they have been logged. If such accounting happened, less forest would be logged. Cumulative impacts Lastly, Alila says successive governments have failed to grapple with the outstanding issues of cumulative impacts of multiple industrial operations—logging, mining, natural gas—in watersheds over time. “For decades, no considerations have been given in BC to cumulative effects of land use,” Alila writes, noting that cumulative effects can apply to the forest industry itself, as is often the case because many logging companies may operate at the same time in the same watershed “with little or no coordination” from the government. “In a nutshell, forest management in BC has never been conducted in ways that portray an appreciation of the value of forest cover in maintaining the overall health of the ecosystem,” he says. In northeast BC, the overall health of the forests was understood by First Nations in the region because from one generation to the next they hunted wildlife, caught fish, trapped fur bearing animals, harvested berries and gathered medicinal plants. When their leaders signed Treaty 8 in 1899, the agreement recognized the rights of First Nation members to continue to be able to hunt, fish and trap as before. More than a century later, when members of the Blueberry River First Nation realized how multiple industrial developments—including clearcut logging, hydroelectric dams, natural gas drilling and fracking operations—had so fragmented their lands that they could no longer carry out their treaty-protected rights over much of their traditional territory, they went to court. In a landmark decision last year, the BC Supreme Court ruled the provincial government had unjustifiably infringed on their rights through the cumulative effects of numerous government-approved industrial developments. The ruling effectively brought a great deal of industrial activity in the Nation’s traditional territory to a standstill, pending a court-ordered negotiation between the provincial government and the Nation. The Supreme Court decision may only foreshadow what is to come. In addition to being named in the class action suit in Sumas Prairie, another class action naming the provincial government has been launched by citizens in the Grand Forks area who were flooded out of their homes a few years ago, and who blame the cumulative impacts of government-approved logging and logging road developments in the Granby and Kettle watersheds for the devastation that befell them. Years of approving one industrial development after another and disregarding cumulative impacts are coming back to haunt the provincial government in a big way as residents, businesses and Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities alike across the province deal with the fallout. The bills for the destruction wreaked last November now approach $9 billion, and who knows what costs may be added into the mix as a result of the class action suits the government now faces. Climate change is making a bad situation of the government’s own making even worse. Highlighting, again, the need for corrective action. Ben Parfitt is a resource policy analyst with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, and a longtime investigative writer.
  3. With the best trees gone and revenues plummeting, what’s next? Extensive old-growth logging on Vancouver Island. (Photo: Russ Heinl) LAST YEAR, as hundreds of protesters were arrested at Fairy Creek on Vancouver Island for trying to stop logging of old-growth forests, the BC government raked in more money from companies doing such logging than at perhaps any point in history. In total, it collected more than $1.8 billion dollars in stumpage fees—a number that would have been higher still but for the protests. Nothing in the past 15 years comes remotely close to that revenue benchmark, a figure that underscores that it is not just the logging companies who benefit financially from logging old-growth or primary forests, but the provincial government as well. New research by the BC office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives shows, however, that the whopping stumpage revenues of last year mask trouble ahead. The high revenues were only made possible by an unprecedented run-up in lumber prices and the extraordinary value of the older trees that are the chief target of BC logging companies. With those trees disappearing as quickly as Newfoundland’s cod once did, the provincial government belatedly announced last year that it would defer logging in a portion of remaining old-growth or primary forests for two years, pending negotiation with affected First Nations. The fear now is that the government’s deferral announcement will be scapegoated as the cause of a coming crash in logging rates, as opposed to government forest policies that encouraged both the rapid depletion of BC’s once-bountiful old-growth forests and the production of low-value forest products that put few people to work. “The proposed deferrals have become the bogeyman, not the industry’s over-cutting, or its exports of raw logs, or the undisclosed huge number of logs being consumed by wood pellet mills—a forest and job killer if ever there was one,” says Torrance Coste, national campaign director for the Wilderness Committee. And we all fall down The long predicted “falldown effect” is here: logging rates are plummeting as old-growth or primary forests never before subject to industrial logging disappear. Many rural communities—Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike—have paid the price for that. The forests nearest to them are long gone. Local mills have closed. Many more soon will. Meanwhile, the prognosis for forest ecosystems is dire, with some globally rare forest types like the interior rainforest now so depleted that they are on the verge of ecological collapse. The companies who run the sawmills that remain know the jig is just about up. Consider BC’s biggest forest company, and one of the province’s biggest lumber producers, Canfor Corp. Where has it made new investments in recent years? Not in BC where it has sold one distressed asset after another, gut-punching communities like Mackenzie and Canal Flats in the process, but in the US states of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina. Or, next door in Alberta. Or, overseas in Sweden. “Canfor’s obviously seen the writing on the wall. If the worst is to be avoided, we need to scale back the number of trees logged and then do everything we can with the wood from those trees. But we see no sign that the government is serious about making that happen. Millions of trees continue to be cut down every year, only to be shipped as raw logs to China, Korea and Japan. And millions more are cut down simply to be turned into wood pellets, in one of the lowest value, poorest job-generating enterprises of any in the forest industry,” says Scott Doherty, executive assistant to the national president of Unifor, the largest private-sector union in Canada, and one of three unions representing forest industry workers in BC. The monster year that was To arrive at its numbers, the CCPA used a searchable government database to look at logging rates and stumpage revenues over the 15 years ending in 2021. The analysis shows that last year’s whopping stumpage revenues happened even as logging rates were falling. Typically, declines in logging should correlate with declines in revenue. But last year, things were flipped on their head. Why? In a nutshell, much of it traces to COVID. As the global pandemic spread and people isolated at home, those with means plowed money into renovations or purchased new homes, which sent lumber prices soaring to record highs. Since stumpage payments—the money companies pay to the government when they log trees on “Crown” or public lands—are pegged to markets, it was only a matter of time before the government’s stumpage account swelled to its heady height. The more than $1.8 billion in stumpage fees collected by the province in 2021 ended up being $600 million more than the next closest year, which was 2018, the only other year in the timeframe examined by the CCPA when stumpage revenues exceeded $1 billion. But the kicker in 2021 was that the $1.8 billion in revenue was generated on the logging of roughly 58.2 million cubic metres of trees. In 2018, by comparison, logging companies cut down 70.7 million cubic metres of trees, while paying $1.2 billion in stumpage. In other words, last year the government collected 50 per cent more in revenues than the previous highest year even though Canfor and other companies logged nearly 20 per cent fewer trees. Something else also drove those revenues up. The government’s own data underscores that in recent years the majority of trees logged were of the highest quality—an indication that the industry, with the government’s blessing, targeted the healthiest older forests for logging, leaving behind not only fewer forests, but more impoverished forests. And that spells trouble ahead for the industry and the province, because lumber and other wood products made from higher-quality old-growth trees command price premiums. Those price premiums translate into higher stumpage revenues, which the government in turn channels into various programs and services including healthcare and education. Logging rates halved in just 15 years The monster revenues of 2021 won’t be repeated, and the government has admitted as much in its recent budget document, saying that forestry revenues will fall by nearly 40 per cent this fiscal year due to declines in “historically high” lumber prices. But it’s what the government says next that is more crucial. While lumber prices are projected to decline, what’s really heading south is logging rates, which have already dropped off significantly from their levels of just a few years ago. According to the provincial budget, logging rates will fall to 39 million cubic metres annually within three years. That, according to the data analyzed by the CCPA, would mean a near halving of the logging rates recorded 15 years ago. What the budget document doesn’t do, however, is level with the public about the kind of logging that has taken place in recent years, where the biggest revenues were generated, and what that says about what remains of our forests. A hollowed out coast and a hollowing out interior Because of BC’s size and spectacular diversity, its forests are best divided into three broad zones —the coast, which includes everything from the coastal mountain ranges west to the ocean and all of Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii, and the northern and southern interior regions, which are divided by a line that bisects the province east to west roughly near the community of Quesnel. For more than a century, the coast with its treasure chest of massive and ancient cedar, spruce, Douglas fir, hemlock and other trees was the economic driver of BC’s forest industry. But that chest has been looted. Most of what remains is either smaller old-growth trees in higher, more remote terrain or, increasingly, second-growth and third-growth trees. As a result, the coast is no longer the driver of industry profits and stumpage revenues it once was. Forest companies say a government decision to defer logging in certain old-growth forests will cause massive job losses. Conservationists say over-cutting is to blame. (Photo: Blake Elliot/Shutterstock) Complicating matters, the coast has large tracts of privately owned forestland. Trees logged on private lands as opposed to public lands are exempt from stumpage charges. As a result, the biggest private forestland owners like TimberWest and Island Timberlands tend to take advantage of the lower costs by loading millions of raw, unprocessed logs into the holds of ocean freighters and shipping them offshore—a practice that comes at the cost of thousands of foregone local manufacturing jobs. The vast northern and southern interior regions are different from the coast in numerous ways. A big difference is that industrial logging in the interior regions only really gathered steam 50 years ago and everything logged since has effectively been in old-growth or “primary” forests where industrial developments had not previously occurred. Privately owned forestland in the interior is also negligible, which means far fewer log exports. The southern interior region is also home to the globally rare inland temperate rainforest, where wet coast-like conditions make for ideal growing conditions resulting in long-lived trees of a size and quality that approaches what was once the norm on the coast. The logging of these rarest of rare forests has accelerated dramatically in the past decade—particularly as highly inflated and unsustainable “salvage logging” in other pine beetle-ravaged areas declined because the industry had either effectively logged out such forests or the trees that remained had lost too much economic value following the beetle attack. As economically accessible old-growth forests have been logged out of existence on the coast, more and more industry profits and government revenues have come from logging the interior’s primary forests. Consequently, nearly twice as many trees were cut down in the interior regions last year than was the case on the coast. And the interior as a whole generated five times more in stumpage revenues than its impoverished coastal cousin. Feasting on the best wood The much higher revenues in the interior where some of the biggest sawmills in the world operate are almost entirely the result of the logs that go into sawmills. The best of those logs are assigned Grades 1 and 2. Such logs generally come from older trees that are healthy and alive before they are cut down. Such trees also have typically fewer defects such as checks, cracks or knots, and have sustained minimal to no damage from tree diseases or insect attacks. These logs generate higher stumpage charges than lower quality logs. In the last five years, the Grade 1 and Grade 2 logs coming out of the interior’s primary forests constituted 57 percent of everything logged, while generating 82 percent of all the stumpage fees paid, a clear sign of their value to the region’s big lumber producers, like Canfor, which last year posted a record $1.5 billion in net earnings. These outcomes matter, because as anyone paying attention knows, the forests in BC’s interior regions have been hammered by intense infestations of mountain pine beetles and other insects as well as tree-destroying blights, droughts and intense wildfires, leaving behind a landbase depleted of much of its commercially attractive trees. Yet in the face of growing scarcity, Canfor and others somehow managed to find the best possible stands of remaining trees to log. And the government helped make that happen, through an obscure subsidy program known as “crediting,” a program that its critics call a Ponzi scheme. “Perverse subsidies” Now in its 17th year, the crediting scheme works like this: Companies that deliver “lower quality” logs from forests to wood pellet mills or pulp mills can apply to the government for credits that allow them to go back into the forest and log an equivalent volume of trees again. This is a big incentive because the companies that obtain the credits for delivering lower quality logs can then go back into the forest a second time to get even more of what they really want, which is the higher quality Grade 1 and Grade 2 logs from primary forests. The government itself warned last year that its crediting scheme may be accelerating depletion of the province’s forests. Yet, incredibly in this digital era, the government claims that most of the credit transactions exist on paper only. Because of this, the government says it will not or cannot provide a figure on the overall number of additional trees logged under the subsidy scheme without receiving a formal Freedom of Information request—a process that often takes years to conclude. Herb Hammond is a professional forester and longtime advocate of ecosystem and conservation-based forestry, which allows for some low-impact selective logging while leaving behind forests that continue to function much as they would had no logging taken place. Hammond says the credit scheme has propped up a house of cards and that there will be an inevitable crash, as he and others predicted decades ago. “Government and timber companies, aided and abetted by forest professionals in their employ, have overestimated a sustainable rate of cut and focused on progressive high-grading of remaining old-growth and other primary forests. Perverse subsidies like the ‘log credit’ program only postpone the inevitable. The only winners in this Ponzi scheme are corporate timber companies, who are collecting the last of the gold from BC’s forests on their way out the door to fast-growing tree plantations elsewhere,” Hammond wrote when details of the subsidy program were revealed late last year. The Science Alliance for Forestry Transformation, a group of top forest ecologists who joined forces in 2021 to “debunk myths” and provide information on alternative, more ecologically sound approaches to forestry in the province, recently released a video that dissects the credit program and how, in particular, it has fueled a troubling growth in the wood pellet industry, which has increased its output fourfold since the credit scheme began. In another related video, Michelle Connolly, director of Prince George-based organization Conservation North, warned that the surge in wood pellet production in BC has had grave consequences for interior forests because, contrary to the industry’s claims that sawmill waste is used to make wood pellets, whole tracts of forest are now being directly logged to make a product that is then burned. “The pellet industry in BC is set to expand in a big way,” Connolly warns in the video. “And the only way they can do it is if the BC government continues to allow the logging of primary forests for this purpose. And this has to stop.” The old-growth blame game To understand the coming crash it helps to go back to events in the interior regions in the early 2000s when an epic infestation of mountain pine beetles killed hundreds of millions of lodgepole pine trees, briefly becoming front-page news in the province. The government encouraged the logging industry to cut down as many of the attacked trees as possible so that the companies and government alike could reap a short-lived economic windfall by “salvaging” them before they lost their value. At its height, the inflated logging rates approved by the government allowed the companies to cut down an additional 11 million cubic metres of trees per year. The result was that as many as 63 million cubic metres of additional trees were logged, enough wood to fill a line of logging trucks lined bumper-to-bumper from Vancouver to Halifax five times over. The consequence of the decision to turbocharge logging rates is the falldown effect. A wall of logs await conversion to wood pellets at a mill in Houston, BC. (Photo: Stand.earth.) Complicating matters greatly is the provincial government’s belated decision in November to defer the logging of 2.6 million hectares of at-risk old-growth and primary forests. The government said the decision could eventually lead to outright protection of those forests, but that will depend on consultation with affected First Nations. Dave Daust, one of a number of scientists appointed to the old-growth advisory panel whose report guided the government in its deferral announcement, says that if every one of the areas proposed for deferral is eventually protected permanently—a far from certain outcome—it would result in a six percent decline in the overall land base currently considered available to log. The deferral decision pleased no one. The Council of Forest Industries (COFI) immediately warned of economic carnage, claiming that 18,000 jobs were at immediate risk—a claim it did not support with any backing documentation of how much logging rates would fall or where the biggest declines might be. Katrine Conroy, Minister of Forests, presented a much lower but still humbling projection of 4,500 jobs lost. She, too, did not elaborate on how she arrived at her number. On the environmental side, organizations that had long campaigned to protect remaining old-growth and primary forests pointed out that deferrals are just that. Outright protection may or may not occur down the road. Meanwhile, many of the most at-risk older forests will continue to be logged, with the industry claiming that any limitation will have catastrophic consequences. Consent by coercion Placed squarely in the hotseat in all of this are the First Nations on whose traditional lands all of the logging to date has taken place—sometimes with the active involvement of First Nation members and businesses and sometimes not. After the deferral announcement on November 2 of last year, the government gave First Nations just 30 days to respond to specific deferrals proposed on their traditional lands. When that month came to an end, the Union of BC Indian Chiefs decried the untenable position the government had placed First Nations in. “The provincial government made its announcement to much fanfare on November 2nd, but a month later First Nations are still lacking supports, and threatened old-growth forests continue to be destroyed,” UBCIC president and Grand Chief Stewart Phillip said before adding: “The Horgan government is abdicating its responsibility to protect old-growth, is pressuring First Nations into making critical decisions regarding the territories and forests they have stewarded over since time immemorial and is continuing to deny the fact that they must immediately provide substantial resources to support First Nations towards this goal—this is consent by coercion.” Predictably, the doomsday numbers advanced by COFI and the general lack of enthusiasm with which the government’s old-growth deferral decision was received were grist for the mill for media pundits following the release of the provincial budget document. In his reporting, post-budget, Black Press’s Tom Fletcher wrote: “Projections in Tuesday’s BC budget show a decline in provincial revenue from timber cutting, from $1.8 billion in the current year to $1.1 billion in 2024-2025. The drop is mainly as a result of province-wide deferrals of harvesting in areas identified as rare and threatened old-growth forests, Finance Minister Selina Robinson said Feb. 22.” But a read of the budget document itself reveals that the primary reasons for the staggering revenue declines are an entirely predictable cooling off of over-heated lumber markets and a relentless decline in logging rates that “includes” projections associated with old-growth logging deferrals, which may or may not happen. To suggest that responsibility for the downfall ahead lies solely with the government’s decision to defer logging of some old-growth forests pending negotiation with First Nations is a gross mischaracterization. In 15 years, logging rates have fallen 25 per cent. In three more years, they will be nearly half of what they were in 2007, and only some of that coming decline will “include” the impacts associated with old-growth deferrals. We have stripped our forests of much of their green gold. Government subsidies have encouraged that tragic outcome. And the long-predicted decline has begun. Ben Parfitt is a resource policy analyst with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, and a longtime investigative writer.
  4. As more old-growth trees topple and forest industry jobs plummet, an obscure government subsidy scheme fuels the collapse. Thanks to generous BC government subsidies, wood pellet mill yards are overflowing with logs culled from the interior region’s primary or old-growth forests. Photo: Stand.earth. FOR MORE THAN 15 YEARS, the BC government has rewarded logging companies with millions of additional old-growth trees to chop down thanks to an obscure “credit” program that allows companies to log bonus trees that don’t count toward their licensed logging limits. The virtually unheard of program was noted briefly in a report released by the government in June following a press conference in which Premier John Horgan boasted of his government’s efforts to protect more old-growth forests even as protesters were being arrested in his own riding for blockading logging roads leading into ancient stands of trees. Despite being a fixture of government policy for a decade-and-a-half, the credits or subsidies, which one former senior-ranking civil servant in the provincial Ministry of Forests likens to a Ponzi scheme, have flown almost completely under the radar. Under the scheme, which applies across BC’s vast interior region, logging companies that truck lower value trees to wood pellet mills and pulp mills receive credits from the government that allow them to go back into the forest and log as many trees again. In addition to accelerating the loss of irreplaceable old-growth ecosystems, the bonus logging is certain to fuel even more job losses in BC’s battered forest industry, where 40,000 workers have lost their jobs in the past 20 years. But a new investigation by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives finds even more to be concerned about including: • No record of how many millions of additional trees have been logged since the subsidies began in 2006, and government refusal to provide such information short of a formal Freedom-of-Information request, which could result in months if not years delay. • More than $37 million in taxpayer dollars given directly to wood pellet and pulp mills or their suppliers to help underwrite their costs of purchasing lower-quality wood fibre. • Rapidly rising demand for lower-quality logs from BC’s wood pellet mills, which further threatens old-growth forests, despite the industry’s claims to the contrary. Double-dipping The credits effectively amount to a government-sanctioned double-dip for the logging companies. But the biggest consequence may be that the bonus logging is off the books. In its June report, the government disclosed that the credit logging doesn’t count towards a company’s logging entitlement, known as its Allowable Annual Cut or AAC. That means that one of the only tools the government has to control logging rates—a cap—is badly compromised. Despite the government acknowledging that the subsidies will accelerate “declining mid-term timber supplies,”—a euphemism for running out of trees—it cannot or will not say how many millions more trees have been logged as a result of the credits. It’s certain, however, that the number is high. In the Prince George area alone, a 2017 report by the province’s chief forester, Diane Nicholls, found that in just one five-year period, logging companies cut down an additional 2.4 million cubic metres of trees under the credit scheme, with much of the downed trees going to the region’s wood pellet mills, a bottom-feeding industry that cares not a whit whether its wood comes from centuries-old or 20-year-old trees. In the same report, Nicholls, who occupies one of the highest positions in the provincial Ministry of Forests, noted that it is possible that the rate of credit logging will increase even further, resulting in a greater area of forest logged each year. However, she said, the additional logging was an “important tool” to keep lower quality logs flowing to the region’s wood pellet mills, and therefore she would not adjust future logging entitlement (AAC) downwards to reflect the additional number of trees being logged under the subsidy scheme. In an interview, Anthony Britneff, a former registered professional forester who held senior positions in the same ministry during his nearly 40 years of public service, called the credit scheme “a secretive, fraudulent Ponzi scheme in which the public’s timber is being allocated out of the legislated AAC process.” He said all British Columbians will be the victims, since the credit logging is happening in publicly-owned forests, “and that those responsible should be held accountable.” “A crime against the province” Arnold Bercov, a former president of the Public and Private Workers of Canada, said he is deeply unsettled by the subsidy program’s implications. He fears the credit logging will further deepen problems for already stressed forest ecosystems, community watersheds, rural First Nations, non-Indigenous rural communities, and forest industry workers alike. “It’s so bad what we’re doing. We’re liquidating what’s here. That’s what’s going on. And that’s just a crime against this province,” Bercov said. The union is one of three representing forest industry workers in BC and has been vocal about the need to protect more old-growth forests, and ensure that much higher value is added to whatever trees are logged in the province’s forests. While Bercov says the credit program poses risks to forests and forest workers alike, its biggest victims will be First Nations on whose ancestral lands all the bonus logging is taking place. “Ultimately, it won’t matter about First Nation land claims. In a few years, it won’t matter if they win or lose because there won’t be anything left to win,” Bercov says. “Here we are speeding down a climate emergency and we are putting holes in our only lifeboat,” says Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia and author of Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. Simard said she wonders now how many of the logs “trundling out of the woods daily” near her home community of Nelson in the West Kootenay region may be a result of the credit program, including trees from the interior rainforest, one of the rarest forest ecosystems on earth. Simard’s concerns are shared by Michelle Connolly, director of Conservation North, an organization devoted to trying to protect the interior region’s primary forests, those forests not disturbed by logging, mining or other industrial activities. “The BC government is targeting natural hemlock forests in our inland temperate rainforest for pellets even though this ecosystem is red-listed,” said Connolly. “Now we find out that the direct destruction of these rare forests is being subsidized with public money and packaged as a bioeconomy. I really want to know how decision-makers sleep at night endorsing this and calling it clean and green.” Connolly’s and Simard’s concerns appear to be borne out by data analyzed by the CCPA showing escalated the logging of old-growth cedar and hemlock trees, a clear sign of increased logging in wetter forests where such trees are found. Where the trees go, the jobs go Despite such concerns, the Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development, says that it cannot say how many trees have fallen as a result of the credit program. In an emailed response to a written request from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives or CCPA, the ministry said that information on credit applications and approvals is largely confined to paper documents and therefore not available. To arrive at a rolled up figure for the total number of credits granted would involve a “large and complex” search that the government won’t even consider doing until it receives a formal Freedom-of-Information request. “Although some of the information is available electronically, most is housed in other forms that will take time to research and compile,” Doug Kelly, the ministry’s acting executive director of safety, engineering and tenures said in an email. Short of waiting months if not a year or more to learn how the government would respond to an FOI request and what, if any, documents it would release, the CCPA has tried to gauge the potential scale of the credit program by analyzing publicly available logging data in BC’s interior region for each of the years from 2006, the year the credit began, through 2020. The vast interior region stretches east of the coast mountains to Alberta and everywhere between BC’s southern and northern borders. Some of the largest sawmills in the world are located in the region, along with pulp mills and a growing number of wood pellet mills. The combined horsepower of all those mills has escalated demand for trees from the region’s forests, which have been extensively logged for decades as well as being hammered by wildfires and massive beetle attacks that prompted even more logging. The CCPA analysis identified three notable trends including: A 50 per cent increase, on average, since 2006 in logs that could potentially trigger credits. These logs are identified in the database as Grade 4 logs. Steady logging of the highest value trees, which yield Grade 1 and Grade 2 logs. Under the credit scheme, a company receiving credits for delivering low-value logs can then use those credits to log higher-value trees. A decline in the logging of higher-quality pine trees, and increases in the logging of higher-quality spruce, fir, cedar, hemlock and balsam trees. The drop in logging of higher-quality pine trees suggests that logging companies have effectively run out of many forests where healthy pine once dominated, and are making up the shortfall by intensifying logging elsewhere, including the rare inland temperate rainforest, which scientists warn is on the verge of ecological collapse. Collapse, also neatly summarizes forest industry employment, which in 20 years has plummeted from 91,000 jobs to just 49,000 today. A beetle attack, logging frenzy and mounting wood waste The credit program has its origins in the epic mountain pine beetle infestation that gathered steam in the interior more than 20 years ago and that killed hundreds of millions of lodgepole pine trees. The scale, severity and duration of the infestation was made far worse by climate change, but infinitely worse by ill-advised, government-approved clear-cutting and tree-planting programs. Those programs saw vast swaths of forest logged and replanted primarily with tiny nursery-raised lodgepole pine seedlings, even though in many cases the forests that had been logged contained a mix of tree species. Forest scientists including Alex Woods, David Coates and Andreas Hamman were among those to warn early on that the overreliance on clear-cutting and pine-planting was a mistake, because the plantations would act as magnets not just for mountain pine beetles but tree-killing blights such as Dothistroma. As more and more of those vulnerable pine plantations began to fail, making a mockery of computer models that confidently predicted that they would maintain their health and vigor, the scientists warned that such plantations had become “a major restoration liability” and would remain so for years if not decades to come. In response to the epic infestation, the government decided to open the floodgates and allow logging companies to dramatically escalate clear-cut logging in the name of “salvaging” millions of the beetle-attacked trees before they became unusable as feedstock for two-by-fours and other lumber products. But data maintained by the BC government showed that it wasn’t just damaged pine trees that were logged, but millions of healthy spruce, fir, cedar, balsam and hemlock trees as well. The salvage logging was a bonanza to the interior forest industry and its two undisputed powerhouses, Canadian Forest Products or Canfor and West Fraser Timber, which own and operate some of the biggest lumber mills on the planet. But it also fueled a surge in wood waste, as millions more trees fell, only to be rejected for hauling to the nearest sawmills because they allegedly lacked the highest quality wood fibre. Making it easier for the companies to leave the rejected logs behind, provincial timber-pricing policies required them to pay just 25 cents—the bare minimum —for each cubic metre of lower quality logs left behind, even though many of those same logs could have been made into lumber. Waste Away The credit program emerged in response to the mountains of wood waste, but it also had roots in the growing demand for wood fibre from an aggressive new player in the forest industy. In 2006, the nascent wood pellet industry had eight mills in the province and was consuming roughly 2.5 million cubic metres worth of wood fibre a year. In the years to follow, it would grow to 13 mills and its appetite for wood would increase fourfold. And the industry isn’t done growing. Witness a proposal to build what would be the largest pellet mill in Canada in Fort Nelson, a mill that would require the logging of an additional 1.5 million trees per year. Traditionally, pulp and paper mills relied mostly, but not exclusively, on the mountains of wood chips and sawdust generated at sawmills, where, as a consequence of round logs being turned into rectangular products, only about half of each log ends up as lumber. But with surging wood pellet production putting the squeeze on a finite wood supply, it wasn’t long before both pellet mill and pulp mill owners were clamoring for huge numbers of whole logs. With droves of trees being cut down and left where they’d fallen, the challenge became how to convince Canfor, West Fraser and others to bring those logs into town. Enhancing business conditions The credit program effectively put fuel in logging truck tanks by rewarding logging companies with the promise of more trees to come. But there were even more tangible ways that the government subsidized or accelerated old-growth logging. It put money directly into the pockets of the major logging companies and sawmill operators, as well as the wood pellet and pulp companies. In 2016, a program unveiled by the provincial government created a new entity called the Forest Enhancement Society with an initial infusion of $85 million in taxpayer dollars, later topped up with a second installment of $150 million. The society is chaired by former provincial chief forester Jim Snetsinger, who is now a forestry consultant based out of Prince George. Over the years, the society has doled out money to reforestation and reclamation projects that rehabilitate lands damaged by wildfires and insect attacks. But it has also channeled significant funds into projects that it claims will substantially reduce carbon emissions by bringing lower quality logs and logging debris in from the bush, rather than seeing those logs burned. After reviewing the society’s lengthy list of funded projects, the CCPA estimates that at least $37 million in taxpayer dollars went directly to wood pellet mills and pulp mills or to companies working to bring lower quality logs and wood fibre into mill towns. Notable recipients of those public funds included: $4.37 million to BC’s biggest wood pellet company, Pinnacle Renewable Energy. Pinnacle is now owned by Drax, a UK company that burns 10 million tonnes of imported wood pellets per year to generate electricity. $2.18 million to Pacific Bioenergy, another large wood pellet producer based out of Prince George. $1.5 million to the Prince George Pulp and Paper mill. $1.25 million to the Domtar pulp mill in Kamloops. $3 million to Mercer’s Celgar pulp mill in Castlegar. In its 2020 “accomplishments” report, the Society states that “one of the biggest challenges” with lower quality logs left behind at logging operations “is that the value of the wood waste is lower than the cost to haul it to a facility like a pellet plant, co-generation electrical plant, or a pulp mill.” “Through grants that help cover transportation costs, we support organizations and companies who want to use that leftover wood fibre...instead of burning slash piles, the wood fibre is put to good use and supports our province’s bioeconomy and climate change goals.” Left completely unsaid is how saving wood from being burned at logging sites only to deliver it to pellet mills that make a product that is then burned equates to a climate benefit. Also left unsaid is the sweet deal that the combined Forest Enhancement Society and credit program subsidies bestowed on the companies involved. Old-growth cedar logs from one of the world’s most unique and imperilled forest ecosystems—BC’s interior rainforest—make their way into a wood pellet mill yard in Prince George. Photo: James Steidle. Take as one example, Canfor. Canfor is a partner in the Pacific Bioenergy pellet plant. It also owns the Prince George Pulp and Paper mill. Through grants received by the society, Pacific Bioenergy and Prince George Pulp and Paper got to underwrite their log purchase costs at taxpayer’s expense thereby increasing their profits. Then, after delivering such logs to those facilities, Canfor could apply for credits allowing it to log even more trees, including the higher-value trees that it covets for its sawmill operations. Credits equal further losses of remnant old-growth On BC’s coast, the earliest commercial logging dates back to the 1820s, when a sliver of the forest’s tallest and straightest old-growth fir trees were cut down to make ship’s masts. Since then, significant tracts of coastal forest have been logged two or more times. But in the interior, the commercial logging of “primary” or “old-growth” forests, which have never before been clear-cut, really only got seriously underway half a century ago. Because many interior trees are smaller than on the coast, the area of land cleared to yield a similar volume of wood to that on the coast is far greater. The interior region is also much more conducive to clear-cut logging on a vast scale due to its generally gentler terrain, which is not the case on the more mountainous coast. That reality, combined with the interior’s proximity to the United States’ lucrative housing market, made the region a magnet for lumber producers. When the first significant modern era pine beetle infestations began in the late 1980s on the vast Chilcotin plateau west of Williams Lake, the combination of big sawmills and highly automated logging equipment in the form of feller buncher machines resulted in a rapid increase in clear-cuts. The even more consequential beetle attacks that followed 20 years later only accelerated the deforestation because by then the sawmills were even bigger. The consequence? In just 50 years much of the interior’s once-bountiful primary or old-growth forests are gone, with horrendous consequences for endangered wildlife species such as woodland caribou, who need all that the forest contains and where a “low-quality” tree for lumber may be the highest-quality tree for lichen, without which caribou cannot survive. The additional forest losses associated with climate change and its role in fueling more prolonged and intense wildfires, tree-killing droughts, insect attacks and tree diseases, have further speeded the losses, leading to the deepening ecological and economic crisis. The BC government, which regulates the forest industry, says it cannot say how much government subsidies may be contributing to logs showing up at pellet mills, like this one in Burns Lake. Photo: Stand.earth Double trouble Earlier this year, the environmental organization Stand.earth released photographs and video footage showing pellet mill yards in Smithers, Burns Lake and Houston filled to overflowing with towering walls of logs. The images confirmed that contrary to the pellet industry’s assertions that “residual” wood chips from nearby sawmills were the primary feedstock for pellet mills, it was massive numbers of whole logs that kept such operations afloat. Provincial government subsidies have fuelled additional logging in the Houston area, where logs like this await conversion into wood pellets. Photo: Stand.earth Two of those pellet mills—in Burns Lake and Houston—are in the Nadina Natural Resource District, which is administered by the provincial forests ministry. In addition to the two large pellet operations in the Nadina district, Canfor operates a sawmill in Houston that was the largest mill in the world when it opened its doors in 2004 and remains one of the biggest lumber mills on the planet. The CCPA analyzed five years of logging data in the Nadina and found that on average the region’s logging companies extracted 14 per cent more trees from the region’s forests than they were entitled to cut under their Allowable Annual Cuts. Nearly one in every three trees logged during that timeframe were “lower quality” logs that could be used to generate credits. Although just how many actually resulted in credits being claimed is unknown because of the government’s refusal to release such information. Because we don’t know that number, we also cannot say to what extent Canfor and other companies operating in the Nadina may have used the credits as collateral or leverage to get what they really wanted, which was access to the highest-quality old-growth trees. But what can be said, because the data supports it, is that Canfor and others logged the region’s richest forests at a prodigious clip with two out of every three trees extracted producing Grade 1 and Grade 2 logs. What can also be said is that any lower quality logs claimed as credits by Canfor in the Nadina district provided a double economic benefit to BC’s largest forest company. As is the case in Prince George, where it is a partner in the Pacific Bioenergy pellet plant, Canfor has a stake in the Houston pellet mill, where it is a co-owner and operator along with Pinnacle Pellet and the Moricetown Indian Band. In Houston, Canadian Forest Products (Canfor) operates one of the world’s largest sawmills and is also a partner in the local wood pellet mill. Logs seen here will be chipped to make wood pellets at the Houston pellet mill. Photo: Stand.earth In the absence of a proper accounting from the government, it remains uncertain how much the credit program contributed to the Allowable Annual Cut being exceeded for five years running in the Nadina district. It is also uncertain how much the credit program has contributed to the increasing clip at which logging companies throughout the entire interior region have cut down the highest quality trees. In 2011, 39 per cent of all the trees cut down by Canfor and others yielded the highest quality logs. Every year thereafter that number increased to reach 59 per cent of the total at the end of last year. But what is certain is that logging more trees today means logging less trees tomorrow. A fall down in future logging rates is guaranteed for the simple reason that the industry is running out of the most desirable trees to cut down. And when the fall down comes, don’t expect any of the region’s major logging and sawmilling companies to stick around. Both of BC’s lumber giants, Canfor and West Fraser, have invested heavily in mills and forest assets in the US South, a hedge on the day when BC’s interior forests are thoroughly depleted. And we all fall down At more than 6.4 million hectares in size, the Mackenzie Timber Supply Area surrounding much of the massive Williston Reservoir is one of the largest forested administration zones in BC and larger in size than many European countries. But the once prosperous community of the same name is a shadow of its former self. As Mackenzie’s forest industry built up in the 1970s, jobs were so plentiful that workers were firmly in the driver’s seat. They could quit a job in one of the town’s mills in the morning and be working at another mill in the afternoon. Nearly 2,000 workers were once employed in one of Mackenzie’s five sawmills, two pulp mills, one paper mill, a value-added mill and a chip plant. Today, only one sawmill remains employing roughly 300 people (although the mill has been taking periodic shutdowns) along with the value-added mill, which employs a little more than 100 people in an operation that takes short trim ends from lumber mills and fits and glues them together in a process called “finger-jointing” to make longer finished boards. So decimated is Mackenzie’s once vibrant forest sector, that the value-added mill now imports trim ends from mills eight or more hours away. Peter Merkley is president of Local 18 of the Public and Private Workers of Canada, which recently lost 211 members who worked at Canfor’s last remaining sawmill in Mackenzie. The mill closed its doors for good on June 17, 2019. The union used to represent upwards of 800 mill workers in Mackenzie. Today, not a single union member is employed in the town. Adding to the angst of those who cling to the increasingly dim hope of a resurgence in local forest industry activity, Mackenzie’s remaining residents watch as logging trucks by the thousands truck logs past their doors to sawmills starved for logs in Prince George, Quesnel and elsewhere. Last year, according to data analyzed by the CCPA, Canfor pulled more than 425,000 cubic metres of logs out of the Mackenzie TSA, with a healthy 43 per cent of all those logs being the highest quality Grade 1 and Grade 2 logs. Merkley equates the activity to strip-mining. And he now fears no forest or community will be spared. “It’s going to happen everywhere, without a doubt, until there’s nothing left. And then, the companies are going to be out of here. It’s disgusting. And our government’s letting it happen, which is beyond me.” Ben Parfitt is a resource policy analyst with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, and a longtime investigative writer.
  5. Image: Drax's wood-burning power plant in UK. As UK’s Drax makes play for BC’s wood pellet mills, questions grow about wood-fired electricity. Go to story
  6. As UK’s Drax makes play for BC’s wood pellet mills, questions grow about wood-fired electricity. WITH ITS SIX MASSIVE 660-megawatt power units, the Drax power station in North Yorkshire is the United Kingdom’s largest thermal electricity plant. When it opened in the mid 1970s, the giant facility burned coal. Today, however, Drax burns something else: wood, a raw material that grew so scarce during the Elizabethan era that it forced the country to convert to coal. So, when it comes to finding enough wood, Drax has an intractable problem. Only 13 per cent of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland combined is forested, a number that would be smaller still were it not for major tree-planting efforts over the last century. Incapable of meeting its raw material needs from within the UK’s borders, Drax relies on imports, which now amount to 10 million tonnes of wood pellets annually. That is effectively double what all of the UK’s forests currently produce in new tree growth each year. The scale of Drax’s enterprise prompted the company to hire engineers to design new rail cars capable of holding 30 per cent more volume than coal cars. The new cars feature retrievable tops that open for loading and close during transport, thus preventing the wood pellets from getting wet. Meanwhile, the port facilities that those trains travel to can accommodate huge bulk carriers that arrive at dock with as much as 63,907 tonnes of wood pellets. Big as such shipments are, they are not even enough to keep Drax operating for two-and-a-half days. Only with big “fibre baskets” outside the UK, can Drax meet its needs. In early February it announced that it had reached an agreement with Pinnacle Renewable Energy Inc., British Columbia’s largest wood pellet producer, to purchase the company. Pinnacle is the world’s second biggest pellet producer and owns facilities in Alberta and Alabama as well. Logs await grinding into wood pellets at pellet plant in Houston, BC. Photo: © Stand.earth. Virtuous energy or a false solution? Drax says that once its takeover of Pinnacle is complete it will be the world’s largest producer of “sustainable biomass” power. It also says that using wood to create energy is part of a “virtuous cycle” that ultimately benefits “the forestry sector, rural communities and the environment.” All of which allegedly helps the UK and its EU neighbors get off “dirty” coal as part of a broader suite of objectives aimed at lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Drax’s claims rest on the fact that mountains of wood waste are created all over the world as a result of industrial wood processing. When round logs are turned into rectangular lumber products, only about half of each processed log actually ends up as lumber. What’s left over is sawdust and wood chips, material that is a “perfect” source of fibre for wood pellets, Drax says. Turn such waste into a product that burns efficiently, then plant enough trees to suck up the equivalent of all the carbon that is released during that burning, and, presto—you have a “carbon-neutral” energy source. New research by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), however, suggests that Drax’s claims are greenwashing. Whole trees, indeed whole tracts of forest, are being logged with the express purpose of turning trees into a product that is then burned. This results in immediate pulses of greenhouse gases sent into the world’s overheating atmosphere. Such pulses are as damaging to the Earth’s climate as burning coal—and can only be offset over decades—assuming that replanted trees actually live that long. This is a major reason why 500 scientists have warned that wood pellet burning is a “false solution” to climate change. An ancient relationship Logging forests to turn them into pellets has many British Columbians worried, including Quesnel mayor Bob Simpson. “There is no justification with what’s happening with climate change to allow tree harvesting for pellets,” Simpson says, noting that we cannot afford to be “going back to an ancient relationship with the forest [where] we cut them down to burn them.” Provincial data shows that logging trucks delivered massive numbers of logs to BC wood pellet companies between 2010 and 2020. Photo: © Stand.earth. The CCPA’s research shows that from 2010 through 2020, three wood pellet companies in BC— led by Pinnacle—took at least 1.3 million cubic metres of logs out of the province’s forests. At 645,211 cubic metres, Pinnacle alone was responsible for just under half those trees. Prince George-based pellet producer, Pacific Bioenergy, logged slightly less at 611,833 cubic metres while Princeton Standard Pellet was a distant third at a little more than 45,000 cubic metres. The CCPA crunched the numbers using a searchable database known as the Harvest Billing System, which is maintained by BC’s Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development. The database provides details on logged trees by or on behalf of companies, where the trees were logged, the quality of the logs and what companies paid in stumpage fees to the Province for each tree they logged. In Pinnacle’s case, 95 per cent of all the trees ascribed to it in the database were in areas of forest auctioned by BC Timber Sales, an arm of the BC government. The data show that Pinnacle paid an average of $20.57 for each cubic metre of trees it logged during those years and that its total payments to the Province were more than $13.27 million. Most of its logs came from the Quesnel region, including trees from the extremely rare interior temperate rainforest to the east of Quesnel. The CCPA asked Josh McQuillan, Pinnacle’s superintendent of biomass, and Mike Thomas, a Pinnacle biomass purchaser, for details on the company’s log supplies. Neither replied. Instead, an email came from Karen Brandt of Pinnacle’s communications department: “The data you are seeking directly from Pinnacle is competitive in nature and therefore we are unable to disclose. However, I can say that we are 100% committed to ensuring that trees go to their highest and best use. Our pellets are either a direct by-product of the lumber industry, or the purposeful extraction of dead, diseased or damaged or low-quality trees.” Whole logs await conversion directly into wood pellets at a Peak Renewable Energy pellet mill in Burns Lake in March, 2021. Photo: © Stand.earth. In addition to its data analysis, the CCPA has obtained photographs and video showing large numbers of logs amassed at Pinnacle’s pellet mills in Smithers and in Burns Lake. The photographs show pellet mill yards filled with whole logs that are destined to be converted directly into pellets. Simpson says a similar situation exists at a Pinnacle mill to the north of Quesnel. Because of Pinnacle’s decision not to answer any questions about its wood fibre sources, it is unclear whether the photographs represent logs that are in addition to those analyzed by the CCPA. Logs at Pinnacle’s overflowing pellet mill yards could, for example, be delivered there by major logging companies under a new provincial program known as the “concurrent residual harvest system.” The new system, launched in the spring of 2019, encourages “business agreements” between logging companies and pellet mill operators, and is intended to ensure that “low quality” logs are delivered to pellet mills at deeply discounted stumpage rates. Identifying such logs would require knowing precisely who Pinnacle is doing business with. But that is something the company is apparently unable or unwilling to disclose. Whatever the ultimate source of Pinnacle’s logs, the data and photographs contradict the pellet industry’s assertions that it uses “residual” (i.e., waste) wood fibre to meet its needs. It also contradicts what BC’s chief forester, Diane Nicholls—one of the most powerful officials in the forests ministry—has said about the province’s pellet mills in a promotional video for the Wood Pellet Association of Canada. Pellets: the antithesis of value-added “When you look at pellet production in British Columbia, it’s part of building that circular economy in the forest sector. It uses residuals from sawmill production that may not be used otherwise,” Nicholls says in the video. “And that is a win, because it’s something that is an added value for the benefits of British Columbians. It provides jobs. It fulfills a niche in our sector that we didn’t have before.” But while making wood pellets adds value of a sort to trees that are logged, Nicholls did not address just how few jobs the wood pellet industry actually creates. Using job figures provided by two unions that represent workers at four of the province’s 14 pellet mills, along with published job figures from industry sources as reported in various media accounts, the CCPA estimates that BC’s 14 pellet mills directly employed just 303 workers in 2020. The United Steelworkers Union and the Public and Private Workers of Canada (PPWC) report that workers in the unionized pellet plants are paid about one-third less than their counterparts working in sawmills, and that pay in non-unionized pellet mills may be lower still. That same year, according to labour force statistics compiled by the provincial government, 45,000 people worked in BC’s forest industry. That figure includes all logging and log hauling jobs, all jobs in wood product mills, and all pulp and paper mill employees. This means that the wood pellet industry last year accounted for just over one-half of one per cent of the province’s forest sector jobs. Drax’s entry also comes at a pivotal moment for the wood pellet industry in BC. In a move without precedent in the province, another new entrant onto the wood pellet scene—Peak Renewables—is proposing to build the largest wood pellet mill in Canada and by far the largest in BC, in the remote Fort Nelson region. Because the Fort Nelson region has no active sawmills, the proposed pellet mill would feed on whole trees from the moment it opens. The company says the mill’s biomass would come almost exclusively from logging the region’s aspen trees and that about 1.2 million cubic metres of wood from such trees would be required annually (equivalent to approximately 1.5 million aspen trees). When the CCPA published details on the proposed pellet mill in February, concerns were voiced immediately from forest industry unions and conservation organizations. “A truly healthy and stable forest industry is built around the idea of circulating wood between mills, adding value at each step of the way,” Gary Fiege, national president of the PPWC, and Jerry Dias, national president of Unifor, wrote in a letter to Katrine Conroy, BC’s minister of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development. “The proposed Peak mill is the antithesis of that idea. If built, it will be the first pellet mill in the province that is intentionally designed to churn through whole, living, perfectly healthy trees to make one of the lowest value (from a jobs perspective) forest products on Earth,” they continued. Conservation North, an organization that is fighting to protect primary, unlogged forests in the interior of the province, where all of BC’s wood pellet mills are located, also wrote to Minister Conroy voicing its opposition to the project. The Fort Nelson region has some of the largest tracts of primary or old-growth forests remaining in the Interior. Protect more forest & add more value “Wood pellets derived from primary forests are not a renewable source of energy,” Michelle Connolly, Conservation North’s director, wrote. “By definition, primary forests are forests that have never been disturbed by industrial or other human activity, and consequently are irreplaceable. They are ecologically important, they store more carbon and harbor more biodiversity than plantations or second-growth stands of the same forest type, and they mitigate flood risk.” Numerous letters of opposition to the project were received in the minister’s office. Notably, Minister Conroy was told in her ministerial mandate letter from Premier John Horgan to both conserve more old-growth or primary forests and to ensure that more value is added to the province’s forest products. The ministry must now decide whether or not to allow Canfor Corp, the largest forest company in BC, to transfer logging rights it holds in the Fort Nelson region to Peak, which would mark a critical milestone in Peak’s pellet mill plans. Opposition to the forest-harvesting project goes well beyond just conservation and union circles. Even the industry association representing Canada’s wood pellet manufacturers has voiced its objections. Major wood pellet purchasers, such as Drax, do not operate in a vacuum. The European Union has made it abundantly clear that sourcing wood pellets from primary forests, which store huge amounts of carbon in their old trees, is to be avoided because it is neither renewable or carbon neutral. The wood pellet industry portrays itself as using “residual” wood supplies, largely in the form of waste from sawmills or broken log bits left behind following clear-cuts logging. Junk wood? Apparently sound logs about to be turned into wood pellets at a mill in Houston, BC, where Pinnacle Renewable Energy is a partner. Pellet makers say “low-quality” logs have no value and should be turned into pellets and burned. Photo: © Stand.earth. Shortly after the CCPA released details on the Peak Renewables plan for the forests of Fort Nelson, Gordon Murray, executive director of the Wood Pellet Association of Canada (WPAC), published a commentary criticizing the company’s plan. “WPAC does not support wood pellet manufacturing proposals that are predicated on the large-scale harvesting of forests for the sole purpose of pellet production,” Murray wrote, adding that his organization was “inundated” with calls after details of Peak Renewable’s plan surfaced. “WPAC’s history is rooted in a fundamental principle: responsible sourcing,” Murray wrote in Canadian Biomass Magazine. “That means our pellets are produced entirely from a combination of the waste or residuals left from harvesting and sawmilling activities, the limited quantities of low-quality logs that need to be removed for forest enhancement or salvage projects and material that can’t be used for any other purpose. We are opposed to initiatives that risk the reputation we have built as a leading global supplier in sustainable wood pellet production.” A last resort But what does Murray mean when he says “can’t be used for any other purpose?” In Quesnel, Mayor Simpson says there may be an argument for burning wood at some point. But in his view, it should be at the absolute end of the production train. If a tree is logged, the log should go first to mills where everything from lumber to furniture is made because solid wood products hold onto the carbon in trees and those products may continue to store that carbon for decades and in some cases centuries. After the logs first pass through such mills, Mayor Simpson says, the leftover wood is best sent to a pulp mill (of which there are two in Quesnel). A pile of wood chips awaits conversion to wood pellets at Pinnacle mill in Burns Lake. Critics say far more value and far more jobs are generated when chips go to pulp mills instead. Photo: © Stand.earth. Traditionally, the mayor notes, pulp mills turned wood chips and sawdust into wood pulp that was then turned into various paper products. But these days, pulp mills can make everything from much-in-demand fibres used in surgical gowns, to bioplastics and biofuels. The pulp industry is only scratching the surface of what can be made from so-called “waste” wood, Mayor Simpson says, whereas the pellet industry is capable of making just one product and a product to immediately be burned at that. Wood pellets, says the mayor, should be “the last resort,” the caboose at the end of the train. What have we learned? In 2018, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Richard Rhodes, wrote Energy: A Human History, a book that looks at how societies transitioned from one energy source to another. The first chapter, No Wood, No Kingdom, begins in 1598 in London, England, as a group of workers dismantle a theatre building as William Shakespeare looks on. The timbers of the ancient theatre are then carted away and resurrected on the other side of the River Thames to become the Globe Theatre, where some of the playwright’s most famous works were first performed. Scarcity is what drove the salvage and reassembly operation, as the forests around London—indeed across England—were steadily logged and people had to go farther and farther in search of trees to cut down. Rhodes’s journey through more than 400 years of history makes two things abundantly clear: energy transitions occur as energy supplies run short, and when the transitions occur, they do not happen overnight because of the immense engineering challenges involved. Fully transitioning from wood to coal did not happen in the blink of an eye. As coal-mining picked up, mines quickly became flooded with water and people then had to figure out how to dewater the mines, first with the power of horses and later, after horsepower’s limits became better understood, with steam. Contacted at his home in California, Rhodes said he was mystified that England appears to be reaching far back in time to harness the energy of wood, a raw material in very short supply in the UK today, and one that will ultimately not solve a planetary climate crisis as there is no guarantee that the greenhouse gases emitted when wood is burned today will be made up tomorrow when a tree is planted. “I really do wonder about this cycling of wood,” Rhodes said. “I really do wonder if there’s a CO2 advantage when they’re shipping these pellets. They’re putting them on diesel-fired freighters, I presume, and shipping them across the Atlantic.” Logs await conversion to wood pellets in Burns Lake. Will demand for renewable, “carbon-neutral” wood-fired energy in the UK, European Union and Japan be B.C.’s forests undoing? Photo: © Stand.earth. Despite this, the Wood Pellet Association of Canada believes that a surge in wood pellet demand lies ahead and that many more wood pellet mills will be built, including in BC. By 2027, the Association says that installed wood pellet production globally could reach 51 million tonnes annually. That would require a 40-per-cent growth in the industry in just six years. Where all the wood needed to make those pellets will come from is anyone’s guess. If the new pellet mill in Fort Nelson materializes and is built to the scale that Peak Renewables envisions, it would bring the number of pellet mills in BC to 15. Based on last year’s logging rate in BC of 52.3 million cubic metres of timber, the province’s pellet mill industry alone would account for the equivalent of just under 15 per cent of the entire provincial log harvest. The combined annual output of all of those mills would be a little more than 3.1 million tonnes of wood pellets, which is less than one third of what Drax’s power plant in North Yorkshire needs every year. Can the world’s forests supply enough biomass for another four such power plants while still protecting forest ecosystems and forest industry jobs? We may soon find out. Ben Parfitt is a resource policy analyst with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, and a longtime investigative writer. This story was originally published in Policy Note.
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