“We will be planting the least number of trees that we have in the past 40 years, at a time when there is an absolutely massive need for investment in replanting,” Macdonald said.

At the moment the forests in B.C. have already suffered with one million destroyed by forest fires and an additional 15 million by pests (largely the mountain pine beetle). This year the government is planning to plant 190 million trees, which is down from 225 million in a typical harvesting year. The biggest planting year in B.C. was in 1989 when a further 300 million trees were planted. Next year the number of trees planted is expected to decline further to 175 million.

According to Bell the majority of the planting is as part of reforestation obligations by logging companies harvesting Crown land. At the moment there is a two year lag between logging and replanting so the current planting decline reflects the downturn in the industry set off by the collapse of the US housing construction market.

The government’s pine beetle and fire reclamation programme has a budget of $42 million this year, with $400 million allocated over the next five years. So far 20 million trees have been planted this year. Bell this programme, called Forests for Tomorrow a ‘good, solid programme’.

To bring attention to the issue the Western Silviculture Contractors Association has launched a website at www.forestfacts.ca. In 2008 the association says that there were 6,000 tree planters working in B.C. and Alberta this year that number fell to 4,000 despite the widespread fires and beetle epidemic.

Unfortunately Bell said that the solution to the pine beetle epidemic wasn’t as simple as just replanting the affected areas.

“What we’re finding is stands that were killed 10 or 15 years ago have developed a relatively large understory, and that understory offers greater potential for the mid-term timber supply than going in, taking down the dead pine that’s left, damaging the understory that was in place prior to that, and replanting,” Bell said.

“The chief forester’s office has done a lot of work on this, and we analyze each stand individually before making a decision on whether to allow the stand to remain and the understory to survive, or knocking it down and replanting. And that’s what the Forests for Tomorrow program are all about.” He concluded.

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“The ability to produce energy, fuel and chemicals from wood fibre, along with forests’ capacity to sequester carbon from the atmosphere, will change the nature of the game for Canada’s forest products industry,” the report says. Moreover, with its huge forest lands, “Canada has the potential to become a bio-energy and bio-product powerhouse.”

To view this on a small scale you need only look at what is happening in Alberta’s forests. Nearly all of Alberta’s mills are involved in bio-energy in one way or another. They are either producing biofuels such as wood pellets and fire logs from residual bark, chips and sawdust or electricity in cogeneration facilities like Valley Power.

At the moment it is hard to gauge whether bio-energy will ever be more than a sideline to lumber and pulp revenue streams. At present the economics don’t support trucking waste from logging operations to the mill and power plant and this becomes more of a consideration when taking into account the stands damaged by the mountain pine beetle infestation. With each passing year the stands become more degraded and unsuitable for milling, but they could be turned into energy if the prices supported it.

Producing energy by burning wood waste is considered carbon neutral because the carbon that the tree consumed in its life time is released back into the atmosphere and the same thing happens when a tree is left to rot in a chip pile on the forest floor. While factoring in transportation is a concern a study conducted by the University of Toronto concluded that the wood-fired electricity reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 78% over natural gas and 91% compared with coal.

Of course an additional opportunity for forestry in the bio-economy requires looking beyond the forest products for the trees. Forests provide a service that is being increasingly monetized, carbon capture. Living trees produce oxygen and capture carbon dioxide, essential to reversing generations of rising atmospheric carbon emissions.

So instead of harvesting trees Alberta forest companies are now working with Climate Change Central, a not-for-profit agency, which is supported by the government as well as the oil and gas industry. They have come up with various projects to increase the carbon uptake by forests. The key one being the planting of trees on land that are degraded, such as marginal farmland and decadent stands on Crown land. Another suggestion has been to fertilise healthy working forests in order to speed up tree growth and therefore carbon absorption in return for more carbon offset credits.

Despite this the new bio-economy is not a replacement for the lumber and paper based economy but rather a complementary, revenue enhancing addition.

“I don’t think it will ever take the place of traditional forest products. I think that what we are seeing is an evolution of the forest industry,” says Drayton Valley Mayor Hamdon. “There’s so much of the tree right now that is wasted. There’s so much that can and should be used.”

Forestry Update is sponsored by Greenwood Management. For more information on investing in Forestry please click here