Whereas 2023 has been the worst wildfire season in BCs history with over 2.2 million hectares burnt, and close to 1 billion spent to combat the wildfires; And whereas in April 2018 the Province received the AbbottChapman report titled Addressing the New Normal: 21st Century Disaster Management in British Columbia whereby recommendation 104 states: Following wildfire events, promptly undertake timber supply reviews to enable industry response and adaptation to a new allowable annual cut, and to allow BC to better understand and respond to impacts on habitat, fibre availability and community stability.; And whereas there has not been a provincial inventory of land base assets since the 2007 fire season; however, within the last 2 years the Province has undertaken several new forest and land based initiatives such as the Old Growth Strategic Review, Forest Landscape Plans, and BC Biodiversity and Ecosystem Health Framework proposals that are being conducted in the absence of accurate inventory data: Therefore be it resolved that the Province of BC immediately defer its current land base initiatives until a comprehensive inventory is conducted after the 2023 wildfire season recognizing that the impacts of wildfire to wildlife habitat, timber, fish, water, First Nations Reconciliation, and community stability need to be examined and prioritized to understand if the current land base initiatives remain in the best interest of the Province.
Ministry of Forests The Forest Analysis and Inventory Branch FAIB of the Ministry of Forests conducts an annual inventory of approximately 3 million hectares of new forest throughout the province. Over the past decade, 32 or 30.9 million hectares of the provincial forest inventory has been updated with new photo-interpreted information. In addition to photo-interpreted inventories, FAIB is developing and implementing new technologies, such as Lidar, to model and enhance inventory attributes across various Timber Supply Areas TSAs in the province. FAIB is also committed to expanding and maintaining a comprehensive network of field sample plots, which are crucial for assessing the accuracy of the forest inventory. It has established and re-measured 8000 ground samples across the province. These include Change Monitoring Plots CMI, Young Stand Monitoring Plots YSM, National Forest Inventory plots NFI, and Growth and Yield Plots GYS. These plots assist in adjusting photo-estimated inventories based on ground data, where necessary. Each year, FAIB updates and projects the provincial forest inventory to account for harvest depletions, natural disturbances, and forest regeneration. This includes updating the inventory to reflect the impact of wildfires. This includes conducting burn severity mapping for all wildfires over 100 hectares in size to ascertain the extent and severity of the damage. In 2023, the inventory was updated to account for approximately 2.8 million hectares of land affected by wildfire. FAIB is supporting the acquisition of Lidar Light Detection and Ranging data for the province and is working with the Provincial Lidar Team which is tasked with the acquisition of 100 million hectares of Lidar data over the next 4 years. The acquisition began in August 2023 and has collected approximately 3 million hectares. Currently, there are 12.5 million hectares of Lidar data that are publicly available. FAIB has prepared the Lidar based Enhanced Forest Inventory for the Boundary TSA and is currently working on other Lidar Enhanced Inventories in parts of the interior of the province, in particular the Interior Douglas Fir zone near 100 Mile House TSA, Williams Lake TSA and Invermere TSA.