Municipal
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What is a Living Forest Community?Where will it work best?
Why is it important for a Municipality to consider this in its Planning?
Triple Bottom Line Benefits
How do we implement this approach?
Preservation vs. Conservation
Media
Who are we?
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Why is it important for a Municipality to consider this in its Planning?
The Smart Growth movement and the advocates of New Urbanism, Eco-Density and Sustainable Development all seek a common goal of reducing the ecological footprint of human settlement. For over twenty years, environmental NGOs and planners have known the "best practices". Recently, the threat of Climate Change has produced a far more urgent resolve towards changing the way that we build on this earth. Now is the time to incorporate the practices of sustainability in the forest sector that can counter the impacts of conventional suburban development.
Much of our existing community planning strategies and regulations, have assumed a fairly stable climactic regime. Given the present and likely future impact of Climate Change, our land use practices and patterns will likely have to be profoundly modified to reflect the new realities of sudden weather swings. How we harvest and maintain our tree canopy will become extremely important to the communities in this region. The stakes are high; worldwide deforestation from clear-cut logging contributes nearly 25 per-cent of annual carbon dioxide releases.Moreover, many in our province are lamenting the lack of sustainability of our present "industrial" model of timber harvesting, especially because many mandated stewardship regulations do not apply to privately held forestlands. While concerns may appear initially to be purely aesthetic, there are longer-term consequences relating to stream protection, erosion, and reduction of habitat and carbon sequestration. Add to this the impact of more frequent and severe weather events and the problem magnifies in its scope and potential for damage.
Additionally, the short-term focus of industrial harvesting and export of raw logs has resulted in diminished resources and the death of a number of communities throughout the province. The smaller mills disappear and the residents watch as the jobs leave and their tax base dwindles.
If we use a triple bottom line analysis on the conventional approach, it can be determined that it is not sustainable. We are not maximizing sustainable jobs and the vaiability of communities, the environment is being degraded and there are negative and destabilizing impacts resulting in a host of ancillary social issues.
In summary we can't continue to utilize our forestland resources as we have done in the past given the inherent lack of sustainability.
