Old growth logging has increased, but it's not too late to stop it!

Old growth logging isn’t just ‘still happening’ in BC, it’s actually happening more.

A study came out in November assessing the state of the forests in BC since the NDP government committed to the 14 recommendations of their very own old growth strategic review 5 years ago to see how effective these policy changes were…and the findings were pretty disheartening.

For starters, logging has continued to target the most at-risk, big-treed forests, with logging rates higher in those increasingly rare and ecologically valuable forests than other, less-endangered forest types.

Of those forests, of all that the BC government had identified as highest-risk and recommended for deferral, logging was 4 times more likely to occur than in lower-risk, lower-value forests.

The BC NDP tells another story however, saying that they’ve protected over 368,000 hectares of old growth forest since 2021…but what that figure leaves out is the fact that much of that was a result of processes already underway by the time they got around to protecting it. This study found that at most, less than 2% of the new protections for the most endangered forests that have taken place since 2021 are a result of this new policy.

Despite big talk and promises of an ecologically minded shift in the way we do things in BC, the draft Biodiversity and Ecosystem Health framework remains unfinished, conservation progress is glacially slow, and the province continues to backslide on environmental and ecological issues to prioritize timber supply and privatized profits.

There is still hope to turn things around, but it involves all of us getting involved! There are avenues towards protecting the last of these amazing forests and transitioning the industry away from old growth to create a better future for us all, everything from enacting the remaining recommendations to using 30 by 30 commitments to create policy changes, but we need to push our representatives to take those actions, so check out this link to contact your rep and help make this reality a good one!

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