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Starting the BC forest conversation
Healthy Forests Healthy Communities (HFHC), a forest management advocacy group, has released a draft report recommending significant changes to the way forests are managed in Canada's leading forestry province.
September 19, 2012 By Scott Jamieson
Citing a growing concern among professional foresters and biologists, conservationists, academics, community leaders, forest sector support companies and First Nations that BC forests need greater attention to meet long-term societal expectations, HFHC encourages immediate dialogue around its dratft report, leading to a final report by early 2013.
The Healthy Forests-Healthy Communities: A conversation on BC forests initiative has posted the first draft of a Strategic Action Plan to restore BC’s forest legacy and energize the forest sector. It contains recommended actions for government, forest industry, communities and professionals to address the issues and challenges to achieve a vision for the future BC forest. The recommendations are based on the community and expert input provided during 2011 and 2012 dialogues across BC.
The Plan is presented as a series of nested recommendations to be delivered over 10 years with a focus on long-term stewardship to protect forest sector jobs and deliver the expected goods and services from BC forests. The recommended actions relate to five major areas and include specific “how to” actions.
- Building a Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) infrastructure to guide the management of BC forest lands
- Employing land use, forest management, resource inventories and economic support mechanisms to increase community diversification while building a community forest culture
- Ensuring resource inventories and monitoring and assessments provide reliable knowledge on the state of the forest, its values and its resources
- Conducting forest management treatments to meet local, regional and provincial forest lands visions and goals
- Ensuring a vibrant forest lands research sector to support long-term forest management, community resiliency and forest sector competitiveness
The Plan is intended to generate dialogue among politicians, industry, professionals, communities, First Nations and other interested parties regarding what is needed to ensure BC forest lands will be capable of providing the desired goods and services for the Province, its communities and BC residents, now and in the future.
The entire draft report, including executive summary, is available here.
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