Protection for B.C.’s Inland Temperate Rainforest

The Inland Temperate Rainforest, in British Columbia’s interior, is one of the rarest rainforests on Earth. Many of its ancient cedar trees have endured since the end of the Roman Empire, but today this globally significant ecosystem is suffering a death by a thousand cuts from clearcut logging — and it needs your voice to help save it.

In the midst of dual climate and biodiversity crises, B.C.’s Inland Temperate Rainforest provides habitat for threatened wildlife, stores and sequesters huge amounts of carbon, and provides clean water and wildfire protection for local communities. We need it, and it needs us.

Here, you can still walk the well-worn paths of B.C.’s southern mountain caribou, which have evolved to survive in the deep snows that are key to the rainforest’s year-round moisture. It’s also home to flying squirrels, bull trout, rare and unique lichens, wolverines, grizzly bears and birds, like the migratory Vaux’s swift, that depend on old-growth hollows.

Permanently protecting old and ancient stands in the Inland Temperate Rainforest will preserve a priceless ecosystem, safeguard a future for mountain caribou, and help save countless other wild animals. Add your voice to the campaign for protection by sending a message today.

Old growth slated for logging in B.C.'s Inland Temperate Rainforest. Photo: Bailey Repp

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To: David Eby, B.C. Premier

CC:
Ravi Parmar, B.C. Minister of Forests
Randene Neill, B.C. Minister of Land, Water and Resource Stewardship
Tamara Davidson, B.C. Minister of Environment and Parks
Christine Boyle, B.C. Minister of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation

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Dear Premier Eby,

CC: Minister Neill, Minister Parmar, Minister Davidson & Minister Boyle

I am calling on your government to take action for British Columbia’s Inland Temperate Rainforest and deep-snow caribou.

B.C.’s Inland Temperate Rainforest is a vast, rugged and globally unique ecosystem that spans multiple mountain ranges and is home to many species of plants and lichen that only exist in this rainforest. This is a place where scientists are still discovering new species.

Historically, the vast majority of the forests in this ecosystem were old growth. Today, most of those old forests have been converted into young forests, primarily through logging. The wet interior cedar-hemlock rainforests of this region are the ecosystem’s crown jewel. But these same cedar hemlock rainforests are being systematically logged at an alarming rate.

At the same time, we’ve lost eight deep-snow caribou herds in the last two decades. These caribou herds are the canary in the coal mine for ecosystem health in the Inland Temperate Rainforest. As industrial disturbance and old-growth logging continue, caribou populations decline and localized extinction risk increases.

If your government does not chart a new course for the Inland Temperate Rainforest, we risk losing some of the most biodiverse, carbon-rich temperate rainforests in the world, as well as deep-snow caribou, rare lichens and plants.

That’s why today, I’m calling on your government to take the following actions:

1. Cease all old growth logging in the rainforest of the interior cedar-hemlock wet and very wet subzones.
2. Cease logging in provincially defined core habitat for deep-snow caribou.
3. Permanently protect old and ancient rainforest and core caribou habitat in B.C.’s Inland Temperate Rainforest.
4. Minimize the total area of roads and cutblocks to a maximum of 12% early seral forest (<40 years old) in matrix range. 
5. Develop atmospheric benefit sharing agreements to enable First Nations to sell carbon credits, offsetting resource revenue sharing agreements. The revenues of these atmospheric benefit agreements for keeping old and primary forests on the landscape likely outweigh or equate to similar revenues generated through current forest revenue agreements. Currently about 8-10% of resource revenues go to Indigenous Nations. In provincial atmospheric benefit sharing agreements, 80% of the annually calculated atmospheric benefits produced go to Indigenous Nations.

Sincerely,