Alberta Announces Five-Way Plan to Increase existing Forestlands Usage

Alberta has announced a five-way plan to increase by 13% the usage of existing forestlands. The five plans include: 1) quickly getting burned forests back into production. 2) Awarding unallocated portions of approved through a bidding process. 3) Making better use of harvest waste. 4) Working with companies to make the best use of their allocation. 5) Using natural seedlings. To that end the province announced on Thursday (10/8) that some of the unallocated timber it would be making available is 51,000 cubic meters of deciduous annual allowable cut located about 70 kilometers northwest of Grande Prairie. Brock Mulligan, Associated VP of Alberta Forest Products Association (AFPA) has indicated that the AFPA’s full support. Mulligan went onto say that “These (scientific) advances really allow us to up our game on the sustainability side and, at the same time, also have more productive forests.”