Climate change, caribou protection, and Canada's timber supply

Managed forests are a significant contributor to Canada's economic wealth. However, forestry activities increase landscape fragmentation and impact wildlife species, such as Canada's woodland caribou, that depend on large areas of undisturbed habitat. Proposed conservation policies for caribou in Canada aim to retain 65% or more of caribou ranges as undisturbed landscapes, which would help achieve a 60% likelihood of self-sufficiency of caribou populations. This level of habitat protection may require moving some forest areas out of industrial forestry use and into habitat protection. We have assessed the extent to which this level of range protection would affect timber supply to forest mills in Canada at present-day harvest levels. For the six largest Canadian provinces (British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec), we solved an optimization problem that allocated harvest sites across the industrial forestry zone to forest mills at present-day harvest levels with and without caribou conservation and under present and future climate conditions. Retaining 65% of each caribou range area under protection generated moderate timber supply reductions in Quebec and Alberta, with smaller reductions in British Columbia. Sensitivity analyses revealed modest timber supply shortages in Ontario, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba at range retention levels as high as 75%–80%. The estimated timber supply shortages from implementing caribou conservation measures were similar to, or smaller than, those resulting from climate change.