Media Release: Spin-filled Announcement Reveals BC Government’s Failure to Ensure Net Gains in Old-Growth Logging Deferrals

November 3, 2022 Ken Wu

**An ancient redcedar cut in the Caycuse Valley in 2021 on southern Vancouver Island in Ditidaht territory. Photo by TJ Watt**

Yesterday, the BC government released new and misleading statistics about old-growth logging on the one year anniversary of its science panel’s recommendations that logging should be deferred on millions of hectares of the most at-risk old-growth forests in BC. In November of 2021, the province’s independent science panel, the Technical Advisory Panel, recommended that the rarest, grandest, and oldest fraction of the remaining unprotected old-growth forests in BC, totalling 2.6 million hectares, be deferred from logging, while the province developed new management policies and legislation based on its Old-Growth Strategic Review panel’s recommendations.

Toronto Star: Mosaic defers logging of old-growth on Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii

April 7, 2022 Ken Wu

British Columbia’s largest private landowner, Mosaic Forest Management, is halting logging in nearly 100,000 acres of old-growth forest for the next 25 years.

The forestry company announced the deferral on March 16 and said it’s transitioning to a carbon credit program, which is expected to generate several hundred million dollars in revenue.

CTV Vancouver Island: B.C. defers logging in additional 1.7 million hectares of at-risk old growth

April 1, 2022 Ken Wu

British Columbia's forests minister says the province has worked with First Nations to defer logging across more than a million hectares of at-risk old-growth forests, an area greater than 4,100 Stanley Parks.

Vancouver Sun: Environmental group gives guarded support for company's B.C. old-growth forest plan

March 26, 2022 Ken Wu

Mosaic Forest Management, which oversees the private lands of logging companies TimberWest and Island Timberlands, announced the deferral last week along with intentions to finance the plan through a carbon credit program that is expected to raise several hundred million dollars by 2047.

The National Observer: Conservation cash vital to securing B.C.’s old-growth deferrals

January 17, 2022 Ken Wu

A new conservation foundation is working to provide Indigenous and other land-based communities with funds to protect endangered ecosystems and build economic alternatives to the logging of at-risk old-growth forests.

It’s unjust and impractical to expect communities that rely on revenue from activities such as forestry, ranching or resource extraction to bear the financial burden of shifting their local economy on their own to protect areas for the benefit of all, said Ken Wu, chair of the recently established Nature-Based Solutions Foundation (NBSF).

Case in point is the current old-growth deferral process underway in B.C., where the provincial government has asked First Nations to consider putting logging on hold in at-risk old-growth forests but hasn’t offered any compensation to do so, said Wu, also executive director of the Endangered Ecosystems Alliance.

Rochelle Baker, The National Observer, Jan 13th, 2022

The Ricochet: ‘A calculated strategy:’ B.C. logging deferral fails to protect old-growth, say critics

December 8, 2021 Ken Wu

Temporary deferral of logging in some B.C. forests leaves First Nations stranded, and may be too little, too late for the province’s ancient ecosystems

by Chen Zhou, originally published November 7, 2021.

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