A former forestry minister called them ‘quite transformational.’ Do they live up to the hype?

Zoë Yunker Yesterday The Tyee

Early in the pandemic, as protests at Fairy Creek were beginning to brew, B.C. made a bold promise: it was embarking on a “paradigm shift” that would prioritize healthy ecosystems over harvesting trees.

The province then offered up a round of stopgap measures, called old-growth deferrals, designed to tide forests over while it worked out a new forest management system.

By fall 2021, B.C. was finally ready to launch a major plank of its new planning regime.

Called forest landscape planning, the new system inserts a level of First Nations and B.C. government oversight where there was none, creating regional tables to inform how logging happens on the ground. It’s also the first provincewide land planning process crafted in the wake of B.C.’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act.

Former minister of forests, lands and natural resource operations Katrine Conroy called the approach “quite transformational” during a 2021 press conference unveiling the news.

Does Conroy’s assessment hold up?

So far, B.C. has initiated 15 forest landscape planning processes across the province, including four “pilot” plans that were intended to inform the planning processes that followed them.

None of the 15 forest landscape plans, or FLPs, are yet complete. And they don’t have the power and legal might to make change in the ways some had hoped.

“There’s not as much teeth in it as we would have expected,” said Florian Bergoin, natural resources manager for Nazko First Nation, which is currently involved in Quesnel’s new forest planning process. “There were a lot of unmet expectations from the nations on what the FLPs could be.”

Notably, the plans can’t create protected areas, and what they can do remains a grey area within government and outside of it.

“I think a lot of people are confused,” said Eddie Petryshen, a conservation specialist with Wildsight, which works to protect biodiversity and encourage sustainable communities.

Petryshen says the new plans have been pitched as the solution to a lot of issues. But he says he questions whether the plans are really equipped to address the challenges they face.

B.C.’s forested ecosystems are becoming increasingly threadbare, and in some regions particularly hard hit by development, they’re on the verge of collapse.

In that context, B.C.’s forest landscape planning system “is sort of like moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic,” said Jessica Clogg, executive director and senior counsel with West Coast Environmental Law.

“There’s certainly no guarantee that you’ll be actually protecting what’s needed.”

How are the forest landscape plans supposed to work?

To understand how the plans fit into the sometimes byzantine world of B.C. forest policy, imagine a set of nested dolls, where the biggest doll on the outside determines the shape of the ones inside.

When it comes to planning what happens on the land, the biggest “doll” in this metaphor is B.C.’s strategic land-use planning system, legally emboldened to determine what kind of activity will happen where. The regional mega-plans developed within the strategic land-use planning system define the shape of the smaller, more detailed planning systems nesting below them. For example, they can prescribe how much wildlife habitat or old-growth forest to maintain on the landscape.

Forest landscape plans fall under a category of smaller, more targeted plans that tell the forest industry how to follow the contours of the plan above them.

When all is said and done, B.C. will be home to an as-yet unknown number of regional mega-plans, potentially holding around 70 forest landscape plans within them.

The province hasn’t given itself a clear deadline to complete the transformation, but it indicated the process should be complete between 2029 and 2031.

In the meantime, most of B.C.’s forests are still managed under the previous forest stewardship plans, which have substantial problems: they’re written solely by forest companies and the foresters they hire, and they don’t require companies to tell government where they plan to log. Instead, government signs off on broad commitments, which, according to a government-commissioned review, are often too vague to measure or confirm.

B.C.’s new forest landscape plans add a new layer of oversight to that troubled process.

They’re developed between government, industry and First Nations, with some public input, and provide more opportunities for nations and government to tell companies how they should operate. For example, the plans can require companies to make their cutblocks smaller or to cut trees more selectively than B.C.’s standard clearcut approach. The plans will last for five to 10 years, with an option to extend.

Companies will then develop their own “forest operations plan” in response, which will outline how they’ll conform with the new forest plans and, importantly, indicate where they’ll log over the next five years.

“This is the way of ensuring that government is the landlord of the forest again,” said former minister Conroy in the 2021 press conference.

The limits of forest landscape plans

Because the new forest plans are a smaller nested doll in B.C.’s land planning system, they’re constrained by the higher-level land-use plans above them.

In addition to not being able to create protected areas, the forest plans also can’t create a new zoning system to define where and how development can take place, as recommended by the province’s Old Growth Strategic Review Panel. The plans also have no power to limit development in other sectors that affect forested ecosystems, such as pipelines.

Bergoin says those limits pose challenges in Nazko First Nation’s territory — there are big-picture issues the nation’s members want to see addressed.

Nazko territory falls under the ’90s-era Cariboo-Chilcotin Land Use Plan, which, among other issues, set targets for protection but allowed them to be fulfilled by a few individual parks.

“The rest of the landscape is nuked pretty much,” Bergoin said.

The limits of the plan make it difficult to do effective community engagement, Bergoin says. “I can’t just go to the community and say, ’Hey, tell me about forests, but you can’t tell me about wildlife, I only want to know about the spatial arrangement of trees.”

The plans will also likely have different powers and scopes across the province, depending on the higher-level plans shaping them.

“There is quite a bit of variation in this,” said Clogg in an email to The Tyee. For example, a forest landscape planning process might be able to increase the buffer zones around river areas, but might not be able to extend that rule to smaller streams.

Even government seems to be confused about what its new forest plans can do.

Two years after the plans were first announced, B.C. wrote an internal direction note to staff, released through freedom of information laws, warning that “emerging overlaps” between its nested planning processes could ignite conflict and that the plans “could be overwhelmed and sidetracked” into broader conversations about land use that “would be difficult to resolve.”

The note proposed various measures to help satisfy the “grey areas” between its nested planning processes. Forest landscape planning tables could “make recommendations” that would be considered when the land-use plan is back on the negotiating table, and they could suggest temporary deferrals for some critical forests until then too.

In these scenarios, much hinges on updating the province’s long-outdated land-use plans.

While B.C. recently launched a process to do just that, its commitment to the project appears limited. Last year, for example, the province’s website indicated two modernized land-use plans had been initiated, but that information has since been removed. Meanwhile, dozens of outdated land-use plans are still in effect across B.C.

Prioritizing biodiversity

Last year, B.C. announced it would “prioritize biodiversity and ecosystem health throughout the province” through an upcoming framework and subsequent legislation.

But so far its new forest plans are not bound by that priority. Among their listed objectives, the first is to “support the production and supply of timber.”

It would be a logical extension of B.C.’s biodiversity commitment to create a legal requirement that forest landscape plans prioritize ecosystem health, Clogg said.

Instead, B.C. appears to be sending mixed messages.

The province recently tasked new Forests Minister Ravi Parmar with an ambitious logging target, for example. One of his goals, the province said, was to “enable” an annual harvest of 45 million cubic metres — a roughly 30 per cent increase from current levels.

“The fact that you’re establishing an arbitrary number suggests you’re actually not super vested in true forest management. You’re still trying to do timber management,” said Bob Simpson, former mayor of Quesnel

B.C. has also informed forest landscape planning tables that any decisions that would cut timber supply by more than 10 per cent require cabinet approval.

By email, B.C.’s Ministry of Forests said that the province’s upcoming biodiversity framework “recognizes the deep interconnection between the environment and the economy.”

“Many areas have already demonstrated how ecosystem resilience can be prioritized and allow for harvest to continue,” the province’s email added.

When The Tyee followed up to ask for examples of which areas demonstrated the pairing of ecosystem resilience and continued harvest, the province said it could not “detail specific instances due to the ongoing discussions with our community and First Nations partners before these FLPs are finalized.”

Garry Merkel, co-author of the old-growth strategic review that kicked off the commitment to B.C.’s paradigm shift, wants to see more clarity from government on its commitment to biodiversity and ecosystem health. But he says he remains optimistic about the work underway as a training ground to test out forest management that fits with the paradigm shift.

“I’ll characterize it as an experiment at a large scale,” he said.

Merkel cautioned that the tables needed to keep enough critical parts of the ecosystem to work with.

“The first rule of intelligent tinkering is that you have to keep all the parts,” he said.

Nazko’s holistic land - use plan

Despite their limits, Bergoin says B.C.’s new forest plans offer the most substantial provincewide opportunity to shape forest practices with First Nations decision-making at the forefront.

“It’s pretty much the only one we have now as a collaborative process,” he said. “We want to take the opportunity to change things for the better.”

In the meantime, Nazko First Nation, along with many others in the province, are creating their own land-use plan, which captures the nation’s holistic vision for their territory — something B.C.’s siloed processes miss.

So far, Nazko’s land-use plan doesn’t have a clear path to recognition from the provincial government, but Bergoin and the nation are intent on realizing it in every way they can.

“This is what the community wants,” Bergoin said.

https://thetyee.ca/News/2025/02/28/Inside-New-Plans-BC-Forests/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=280225