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COFI Convention: Finding innovative solutions to wildfire management

Day 2 of the BC Council of Forest Industries’ COFI 2025 Convention kicked off with a focus on integrated solutions to wildfire, conservation, community safety and economic development.

Keynote speaker John Kitzhaber, former Governor of the State of Oregon, discussed the need for new creative solutions to wildfire, conservation, community safety and economic development during Day 2 of the COFI 2025 Convention.

Kitzhaber is the longest serving governor in Oregon’s history, holding the office for two consecutive terms from 1995 to 2003, and a third term from 2011 to 2015. Before entering the political world, he worked as an emergency medicine doctor in Roseburg, Ore. He was elected to the Oregon House of Representatives in 1978. Kitzhaber was a chief architect of major health care reforms in the state.

“The perspectives that I want to share with you this morning are the product of almost 50 years of engagement in forest policy issues across the region as a private citizen, as a legislator and also as a governor,” Kitzhaber told the crowd. “Sometimes, I think that our efforts to balance that complicated tension between economic and social and environmental values is artificially constrained by our lack of imagination. So, this morning I want you to look beyond the world as it is and try to imagine what it could be.”

Not unlike in B.C., the State of Oregon has been experiencing an increase in large wildfires across the state, both in intensity and frequency. Kitzhaber stated that there are millions of acres of forests across the Pacific Northwest that need thinning and fuel removal to reduce fire risk and to increase landscape resiliency.

“The ability to manage this landscape for multiple values is constrained, not only by the lack of consistent funding, but also by a complex and outdated governance structure that limits the policy solutions,” he said.

Kitzhaber told attendees that forest policy cannot be solved in isolation and needs to include people who may not, on the surface, see themselves as affected directly by how forests are managed. Speaking from the viewpoint of Oregon, Kitzhaber used the high-profile issues of wildfires and homelessness as examples that are at the intersection of natural resource management and the provision of social services.

Oregon is currently facing a significant housing shortage across the region, and over the next 20 years, has a projected need for 550,000 new housing units. Five per cent of those new homes are needed for people who are currently houseless while the other 95 per cent reflect historic underproduction and projected need, Kitzhaber explained.

“This shortage has profoundly disrupted the supply-demand equation, has driven up housing prices 19 per cent over the last year, and this has forced more people to rent, which has created a shortage of rental units, which has driven up rental rates. So, it feeds into this vicious cycle,” he said. “This has created not only homelessness, but chronic housing insecurity for hundreds of thousands of people, and an acute shortage of workforce housing that disproportionately impacts rural parts of our state.”

Kitzhaber stated that chronic housing insecurity triggers a well-documented set of adverse childhood experiences that profoundly undermines the ability of a child to succeed later life and increases the risk of poor cognitive functions, learning disabilities and early adult onset of many chronic illnesses.

“The lack of housing also gets in the way of the effective treatment of behavioural health and substance use disorders as well. This situation costs society literally billions of dollars a year,” he said. “This problem can’t be solved by focusing only on low-income housing, which we often do, and as important as that is, it requires a dramatic increase in housing inventory across the board, including workforce housing and including apartment rate housing.”

Kitzhaber said that by creating a more intentional link between forest and family, it would offer a way to solve the overlapping challenges of housing and wildfires simultaneously as part of an integrated strategy to make the solution space larger in two important ways. The first is rethinking governance structures to view forested landscape as a whole and imagine how to design and harmonize management practices to achieve common goals across the entire landscape, rather than just looking at fragments of it. The second is to reframe the current wildfire and forest debate in a larger context that includes other policy goals and social values and political constituencies who may not, on the surface, be seeing themselves as being impacted in any way by how we manage our forests.

As an example for tackling these challenges, Kitzhaber offered the example of Oregon committing to build 10,000 housing units every year for 20 years while, to the greatest extent possible, using Pacific Northwest restoration fibre, small diameter logs, and other sources of low-value wood from forest health restoration and treatments necessary to reduce wildfire risk and increase landscape resiliency. These units would be constructed to the greatest extent possible with mass timber produced in Oregon and would be built by local and larger housing companies.

“This two-decade financing commitment would serve the same purpose as a long-term forest stewardship, or timber supply contract, to provide the long-term fiscal certainty for private sector businesses to expand mill capacity in certain parts of the state, to expand mass timber production facilities and expand modular housing infrastructure, and invest in expanding workforce training in the forest products industry and in the building trades,” Kitzhaber said. “Let’s assume, for example, that these 10,000 units are mass plywood panelling units at about 1,000 square feet each. It would require somewhere around 70 to 90 million board feet a year. We also know in Oregon that we have 5.6 million acres of landscape that is at very high risk of wildfire, and that to restore and maintain the resilience of this landscape requires active management, including thinning, fuel removal and prescribed burns.

“Restoration harvest can yield between five and 20 million board feet per acre, depending on the stand location and condition. So, if we treated 4,500 to 18,500 acres a year, we would create enough timber to build those 10,000 units. And by viewing the forest landscape as a whole, we can determine where to obtain that fibre in a way that best meets ecological, economic, community and social needs while maximizing climate resilience and minimizing the risk for wildfires.”

Kitzhaber said this “landscape level approach” allows for the reduction of wildfire risks and increases carbon storage in general forest health, and offers “a more rational way, an effective way, to address habitat and biodiversity and water quality across the landscape while providing more sustainability and predictability for the wood products industry and for our rural communities.”

This type of initiative would place forest policy at the centre of a multi-faceted strategy that engages multiple stakeholders of common cause, he noted. Instead of solving strictly forest-related issues such as resilience and forest health, wildfire risk reduction, biodiversity, harvesting, habitat and water, this will help address important societal issues as well.

“We’re also solving for homelessness, for rural economic development, for housing insecurity, for family stability, for a reduction in the generational impact of these adverse childhood experiences, and also for a more effective way to treat behavioral health and substance use disorders,” Kitzhaber said. “In short, by addressing housing supply and housing insecurity using restoration fibre and sustainable timber, we can expand not only the solution space for a more holistic forest policy but also engage new partners from the social service sector, and the education sector, that are now invested in a sustainable way to manage our forests.”

While acknowledging that this is “a big idea,” Kitzhaber believes it is something that should needs to be considered.

“By developing a policy and financing strategy across the region to address the regional housing crisis, using locally sourced wood as part of a more holistic landscape level approach to forest health and resilience, we may be able to offset the cost of these forest health treatments and the cost of subsidizing, at least initially, the low-value wood supply chain and building out a more dispersed processing infrastructure with the billions of dollars of avoided public costs that comes from solving the housing crisis,” he said.

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