| JUST WHAT VALUE DO WE PLACE ON OUR FORESTS What are forests worth? What is the value of Sunshine Coast forests to you and your communities on this Coast? The answer is normally formulated in terms of the value of timber products and the jobs and economic spinoffs created in producing these products. Forest management has therefore been centered upon maximizing these timber products. B.C. governments facilitated laissez faire access to unending virgin forests and then, mandated by the Sloan Commissions, moved to the timber sustainability forestry presently practiced in B.C. A new ecological economics approach to valuing the presently unquantified services of natural systems to humans promises to accelerate the emerging evolution past timber sustainability to ecosystem sustainability management for B.C. forests. A team of scientists lead by Robert Costanza has published a study in the May 17, 1997 issue of the magazine Nature entitled THE VALUE OF THE WORLD'S ECOSYSTEM SERVICES AND NATURAL CAPITAL. The study emphasizes that ecological services and natural capital are essential to human economies which could not exist without them, but the study also moves forward to develop an economic appreciation of ecosystem services to existing economies. Costanza's team has quantified the global economic importance of seventeen ecosystem services ranging from gas (oxygen-carbon cycle) and climate regulation, to food and materials production. Their preliminary calculation of global value of ecosystem services is between 16 and 54 trillion dollars US per year (most of which is not accounted for by markets). Global gross national product is approximately 20 trillion dollars. Furthermore the study finds that temperate forests produce $302 worth of services annually per hectare of which less than $25 is timber related products. (This is an average of all temperate and boreal forests; West Coast rain forest will undoubtedly have both a higher annual service value and a higher value for timber.) The authors repeatedly describe their study as a preliminary attempt at quantifying ecosystem services. They expect that economists will increase their estimates of ecosystem value as better quantifying tools are developed. What is the importance of this study to forestry in B.C., in particular to the Sunshine Coast? First of all, up until now the overwhelming economic importance of forests has been for timber production. Forest management has been timber management. Non-timber human uses such as recreation and water regulation have at best been only a marginal constraint upon timber management. Multiple use, IRM, and the NDP CORE attempt at enfranchising preservationists as stake holders have each been a marginalized attempt at constraining timber management. Their negative effects upon timber production economic activity could not be justified in a society that places a heavy priority on economic values. When it becomes common knowledge that each hectare above us on Mt. Elphie (and in the valleys back of Jervis) supplies us with $300 a year worth of services, of which only $25 is timber production, people might well begin to question the total dominance of timber management. Secondly, timber management in B.C. remains sustained yield (timber sustainability) forestry continuing a fifty year old plan to systematically redesign forests into timber crops. Arguments against this liquidation-conversion redesign of forests have been limited to aesthetic considerations, practical arguments about elimination-conversion practicalities (falldown, NSR lands, quality of second growth timber, etc.) and a dawning suspicion that the fifty year old plan was bad reductionist science that just maybe forests were more than tree crops and that tree crops might not be harvestable in perpetuity. Most of the old growth forest on the Sunshine Coast has been converted from old growth to tree crops. As economic valuation of full ecosystem services is developed and refined, the relative values of tree crop services versus old growth supplied services will be quantified. Since timber is less than one tenth of the total value of forest ecosystem services, redesign of forests for timber might be costing us a great deal of money. Finally, perhaps the greatest value of the Costanza team study is as an educational tool to awaken a general public almost completely immersed in an economic universe to the importance of healthy, functioning ecosystems. Environmentalists, struggling to convey to the public the very real but nebulous non-timber value of forests, now have a powerful tool in their attempts to stop the systematic liquidation of old growth forests. We are one giant step closer to a forestry whose primary purpose is protecting the health, integrity and function of B.C. forests. JUST WHAT VALUE DO WE PLACE ON OUR FORESTS What are forests worth? What is the value of Sunshine Coast forests to you and your communities on this Coast? The answer is normally formulated in terms of the value of timber products and the jobs and economic spinoffs created in producing these products. Forest management has therefore been centered upon maximizing these timber products. B.C. governments facilitated laissez faire access to unending virgin forests and then, mandated by the Sloan Commissions, moved to the timber sustainability forestry presently practiced in B.C. A new ecological economics approach to valuing the presently unquantified services of natural systems to humans promises to accelerate the emerging evolution past timber sustainability to ecosystem sustainability management for B.C. forests. |