Local forestry professionals had their knowledge base grow in forests half a world away.
Thirty-one people travelled from B.C. to Finland, this fall, to get ground truth from their Scandinavian counterparts. B.C. and Finland are both world leaders in forest use and forest husbandry, but have widely different localized practices. This visit included Quesnel’s forestry initiatives manager, Erin Robinson, who reported back to mayor and council on the experience.
There were three main goals of the study visit, she said.
The first was to observe alternative harvesting and land management practices to spot ecosystem health opportunities and interrupt wildfire threats.
“Number two was explore supply chains that enable value over volume,” Robinson said. “That is the new provincial mantra in forestry right now, in B.C., and this involves supply chains with end products that will help reduce waste in the forest. And district heating is part of this.”
The third focus was training and human resource development for machinery and land management practices. In particular, Finland has developed and manufactured harvesting machinery that Robinson described as “nimble” for tiptoeing through the forest as it extracts targeted stems, as opposed to the clearcut methods used in B.C.’s past and present.
Mayor Ron Paull requested photos of these machines, to learn more about how they might work here.
This junket was led by the University of B.C. and dovetailed with Finnish delegations that have been to Quesnel during the past year for knowledge exchanges here in our forestry settings.
“In the training sphere, the knowledge transfer for advancing a training hub here in Quesnel - which we are actually working on with our Finnish partners and the College of New Caledonia, as well as some other academic institutions - is going to help students learn how to operate these types of machines,” Robinson said.
Opportunities were presented like district heating systems, which, in a limited way, are already in use around here in settings like the downtown Prince George buildings connected to the Lakeland Mills biomass burner; the main campus of the University of Northern B.C. has a central biomass furnace; and the on-site kiln and electricity processes of L&M Lumber in Vanderhoof.
Councillor Scott Elliott spoke up and said “I sometimes feel we (in B.C.) are cutting edge on some things, and I think maybe we are, but there are obviously always things we can learn, and this report is great. One thing I want to point out (from the report) is that Helsinki is 92 per cent heated by district heating systems. That is amazing. I think we have a lot to dig into, to try to understand how that is working for them.”
These district heating projects make productive use of forestry waste and otherwise unused industrial heat, while at the same time cutting down on a community’s use of fossil fuels.
Harvesting practices that both maximize the forest’s fibre and reduce the threat of wildfire were also displayed and explained in detail.
“We need to manage our forests differently; the wildfires are a good clue to that,” Robinson concluded.
One key difference in Finland was how strongly urbanites felt connected to the forest industry, as a part of their cultural identity, whereas in B.C. there is a discernible difference in attitudes about forestry between urban residents and rural residents. Robinson noted that Quesnel has forestry initiatives like the community forest and the forestry landscape planning process to bridge that philosophical difference.
“I think the City of Quesnel has a large role to play in this,” Robinson said, with both evolving B.C.’s forest industry and also in how that is communicated.
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