To adapt to climate change, the forestry industry must “do more with less,” according to Minister Maïté Blanchette Vézina, who has committed to working on a reform of the Quebec forestry regime starting this summer.
In interview with The duty On Thursday, the Legault government representative in charge of Natural Resources and Forests announced her intentions to “quickly” table a bill to modernize the Sustainable Forest Development Act. Since 2013, it has governed the use of harvests and the sharing of wooded lands in Quebec.
“We want to have a forest that remains resilient to climate change, that can remain resilient for current generations, but also for future generations,” said Mr.me Blanchette Vézina, whose idea for legislation emerged at the end of the Discussion Tables on the Future of the Forest, earlier this year.
These consultations, held with the forestry and silvicultural industry, First Nations, researchers and environmental groups, allowed the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forests (MRNF) to produce a summary report, which will be published this Friday. Inside, the findings are clear: Quebec’s exploitable territories must be better managed by focusing, for example, on private forests, on resource optimization and on climate change adaptation measures, demanded a large part of the groups consulted.
Maïté Blanchette Vézina assures that these recommendations have not fallen on deaf ears. The elected CAQ member, who also proposed this spring a modernization of the Mining Act, will draw inspiration from it in the development of the new legislative framework governing forests.
“I want to make sure we do a good analysis. We are going to plan to do this analysis this summer, she said. I won’t give a precise timetable, but know that I want to do things as quickly as possible. »
Without revealing the content of her bill, the Minister of Forests suggests greater flexibility for the industry in the development of wooded lands. “The law currently tells us that we must have a development that is ecosystemic. And that requires reforestation with the species that are present,” she noted.
“On the North Shore, for example, we have a very large majority of conifers. This forces reforestation with conifers. But conifers are much more vulnerable to forest fires. So, there is a way to adjust the species, to carry out adaptation silviculture,” she exemplified.
“More with less”
After a year 2023 marked by forest fires – 4.3 million hectares of forest razed, according to the Society for the Protection of Forests against Fire – an expansion of cultivable areas is difficult to envisage, according to the minister. Instead, she calls for an “increase in productivity per hectare”.
“The goal is to do more with less. We have targets for protecting biodiversity and protecting the territory that we want to achieve as a government,” she recalled on Thursday.
In its brief submitted this year as part of government consultations, the Forest Study Centre, which brings together 80 experts from around ten Quebec universities, suggested “developing on defined and limited portions of the territory, close to inhabited areas and processing plants, a […] intensive management” of forests. An idea that the minister welcomes with interest.
“This is one of the solutions that are being considered,” she said.
In its summary report of the consultations on the future of the forest, the MRNF notes significant disagreements on a potential “intensification” of forest production within public lands. “Some are very favorable to this approach, while others are completely against it,” it says.
According to Mme Blanchette Vézina, part of the solution could therefore lie in an increase in production in private forests, which represents approximately 8% of the forest territory in Quebec. [On pourrait] “Having a private forest business environment that is also easier to supply the factories,” she said, hinting at “positive” effects for the industry.
The reopening of the Sustainable Forest Management Act will also be an opportunity to “rethink the network of multi-use paths”. These passages, traced in public forests, have become a scourge for the herds of forest caribou still in the wild because they facilitate the passage of predators, several groups pointed out during the Discussion Tables. The latter also plead for the closure of unused paths “in a context of restoration of certain wildlife habitats”.
An inevitable reform, according to Quebec
Mme Blanchette Vézina does not beat around the bush: an update of the laws governing forest use is essential. Without a review of the regime, “what scientists tell us is that there would be an increase in fires, hazards related to insects, which can occur and have harmful effects on the health of our forests,” she stressed on Thursday.
In the long term, these upheavals would have negative effects for everyone, even the industry, she said.
“I see a decline in forest potential,” added the minister. “We really want our forests to adapt to climate change, and I think there are real fears if we don’t make these changes.”
