On October 24, 1994, the government of British Columbia announced a Land Use Plan for the Cariboo-Chilcotin region. This Land Use Plan doubled the Protected Areas where commercial timber harvesting will not be permitted to 12 per cent of the Cariboo-Chilcotin.
Eighty per cent of the region was dedicated to the commercial resource land base within the following zones:
• Enhanced Resource Development Zone (40 per cent)
• Special Resource Development Zone (26 per cent)
• Integrated Resource Management Zone (14 per cent)
The remaining eight per cent of the regional land base is Private/Settlement lands.
The Land Use Plan includes broad management objectives for each zone and specific targets for some resources. For example, a timber management target was defined for the Special Resource Development Zone: "the forest industry will have access to 70 per cent of the timber from the productive forest land base averaged over the zone." An implementation process will establish detailed objectives and the remaining targets for each resource in each zone in early 1995.
Until this plan is fully implemented and practices are adjusted in the field, the timber supply impact of the Land Use Plan cannot be measured. This Timber Supply Review will be used as the foundation for determining the actual impacts of the Land Use Plan once it is implemented. The next Timber Supply Review will be based on experience with the Land Use Plan gained during the implementation period.
There are similarities between the information used in this Timber Supply Review and the Land Use Plan:
• some overlap exists between the new Protected Areas and the areas where harvesting has not been occurring under current practices and that were deducted from the land base for the timber supply analysis
• considerable overlap exists between the objectives for the Special Resource Development Zone and the practices that were analyzed for the special management zones in the timber supply analysis
A new initiative promoted by the Land Use Plan is the establishment of targets for timber resource enhancement. This was not considered in the timber supply analysis.
For this Timber Supply Review, the Land Use Plan provides the chief forester with an expression of government’s commitment to achieve the Crown’s social and economic objectives for the region and the Quesnel Timber Supply Area.
Implementation of the Land Use Plan has already started. If it becomes apparent that the Plan has modified the timber supply to such an extent that the allowable annual cut is no longer consistent with the plan, the chief forester is prepared to reassess the timber supply and to redetermine the allowable annual cut based on Section 7 of the Forest Act. The chief forester is also prepared to investigate the possibility of implementing other more expedient procedures under the Forest Act to adjust the allowable annual cut if necessary.
It may be possible to assess the timber supply impacts of the Land Use Plan in the Quesnel Timber Supply Area before the maximum five-year period required by the Forest Act.
