New Brunswick Green leader David Coon is calling a report on the state of the province’s forests “self-serving and incomplete.”
The province released the long-awaited State of the Forest report on Thursday after seven years of delays. The document outlines the inventory and development of the province’s forests, as well as their the composition, ownership and usage.
But Coon says he finds the report severely lacking.
“It’s extremely disappointing because it doesn’t really at all describe the state of the forest on Crown lands. It’s very self-serving because largely it just describes the forest management system that the government has had in place,” he said.
“I think most New Brunswickers, particularly those in rural New Brunswick who see the kind of degradation that forest management system has brought about will also be very disappointed by this report.”
Natural resources minister Mike Holland says the report is a high level overview of the forest makeup and more details on health and management strategies will be coming in subsequent reports this fall.
“It is not a document that talks about objectives or management strategies and we’ve been, simultaneous to the State of the Forest Report, working on those and in the near future we’re going to be making presentations (with) the data of what we have for raw material and here’s the objectives that we expect from it and here’s the management strategies in order to accomplish those,” he said.
“So it’s very important to put the State of the Forest report in the context of what it is and that is data and information. Quite simply a reflection of what we have as it relates to forest in the province of New Brunswick.”
Holland says the province is committed to returning to an annual release schedule for the report that will give an idea of how the province’s forests are changing over time.
But Coon questions the commitment of the province to detailing the actual health of forests, saying that New Brunswickers deserve an in depth look at how ecosystems are being impacted by current forestry practices and climate change.
“I checked the U.S. Forestry Services indicators for forest health and they’ve got 11 or so science based indicators, none of which are being used in this report or anything comparable,” he said.
“It’s pretty obvious that this was written to serve a particular purpose to support the current approach to forest management that’s degrading our forests.”
Coon decried the lack of data on various forest types and ecosystems. He said that data from the Atlantic Canada Conservation Data Centre shows that over two thirds of the 100 different forest types found in the province are at risk.
According to the report the province’s forestry industry contributes about $1.5 billion to the economy each year. It also says that 1.5 per cent of Crown land is logged each year and clearcutting accounts for 70 to 80 per cent of the harvest on those lands.