Three years after a landmark report, it’s logging as usual in Nova Scotia’s forests | Unpublished
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Unpublished Opinions

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Vancouver, British Columbia
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National Observer is a new publication founded by Linda Solomon Wood and an award-winning team of journalists in response to the close relationship between the oil industry and media in Canada, and the urgency of climate change. National Observer focuses on news and in-depth reports on under-covered Canadian stories in the area of climate, energy, and related culture, business and politics. It was launched in May 2015 by Observer Media Group (OMG), which also owns Vancouver Observer.

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Three years after a landmark report, it’s logging as usual in Nova Scotia’s forests

December 2, 2021

A 2018 report by William Lahey was supposed to serve as a sustainability roadmap for Nova Scotia’s forestry industry, but three years later, the author says clear-cut logging and sub-par forestry practices still abound.

Lahey, who is president of University of King's College in Halifax, was commissioned by the province to evaluate the forestry industry and recommend changes. However, an evaluation from Lahey this week on what has been achieved so far shows little progress.

Although there is some “good faith” planning going on at the government level, Lahey told Canada’s National Observer that so far, nothing has changed on the ground. Five of 45 recommendations have been implemented from the initial document, which is often referred to as the Lahey Report.

Recommendations that have been implemented include licensing of Crown land to the Mi’kmaq Forestry Initiative and goals for the implementation of an ecological forestry model in a new piece of provincial legislation, the Environmental Goals and Sustainable Prosperity Act (EGSPA), which was passed in October.

In Lahey’s initial report, he calls for existing Crown land to be divided into a triad forestry model, which puts forests into three sections: production forest, protection forest, and “the ecological matrix.” It would see some forests completely protected from logging and others logged at different rates depending on age and other factors. The “matrix” category would have forests with mixed protection and logging.

Read the rest of the article at the National Observer >>