Expedited funding from the Forest Enhancement Society of British Columbia will aid the forest industry and environment.
Nine successful proposals in the province’s Interior including two in the Cariboo Chilcotin will be receiving grants to recover wood waste that will be used for a variety of purposes including chips for pulp, wood pellets, and hog fuel for bio-energy and cants.
“We invited applications for projects around wildlife habitat and wildfire risk reduction and some other topics,” said executive director, Steve Kozuki.
“One topic area of focus was around carbon and helping B.C. and Canada meet our climate change targets under the Paris Agreement. One of the ways that we can improve the carbon scenario in forests is increasing utilization of the woody piles left over after harvesting that otherwise would be slashed burned, and by utilizing them we avoid the carbon emission from the fire and also potentially displace the fossil fuel either here in B.C. or somewhere else in the world so it’s a form of green energy.”
Receiving expedited funding is West Chilcotin Forest Products Ltd. that will recover over 54,000 cubic meters of fibre west of Williams Lake for chips for pulp, and Cariboo Chilcotin Rehabilitation Ltd. that will recover more than 227,400 cubic meters for wood pellets.
Kozuki said there are other applications in the evaluation phase that will be announced later this spring.
“This first round is just the projects that we wanted to approve quickly because of the opportunity to do the operations, to do the timber harvesting this winter,” he said.
“A delay in approval would have meant that we would have lost that opportunity.”
(Editor’s Note: Listen to Kozuki talk about how the nine fibre use projects will remove 1.13 million cubic metres of fibre from the landscape)
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