RE-Forest: Sustainable Forestry and Wood Products
Introduction
The North American forest management and wood products sector is caught in a destructive cycle. Past forest management practices, fluctuating demand for wood products, poor environmental practices, and the decline in the number of operational mills and railroads have created overstocked, high-density forest stands. Consequently, the wood products industry struggles to access steady supplies of quality timber. These issues threaten the economic stability and well-being of forest-based communities. Moreover, increased stand densities create higher fuel loads and ladder fuels, causing larger and more severe wildfires that further reduce available timber resources. Breaking this cycle requires understanding what healthy forests and wood products businesses actually need.
Healthy forests maintain ecological balance through natural processes including fire, disease, and succession. Effective forest management works with these processes rather than suppressing them. When we align human use with natural forest dynamics, we achieve both ecological health and economic productivity.
A continent-wide forest-to-market strategy can restore forest health while strengthening forest economies. Mill viability and comprehensive forest management both require the right logistics: trucks for local delivery, rail for moving excess material to distant markets. This integrated approach, linking harvesting, logistics, processing, and manufacturing will revitalize forest economies while generating revenue streams that fund restoration and watershed health.
RE-Forest, the Sustainable Forestry and Wood Products Initiative, facilitates federal and state agencies, forest businesses, and local communities in establishing an intelligent continental strategy, applied regionally and locally. With complete consideration of resource availability, marketplace dynamics, and end-to-end value chains, stakeholders can develop effective Action Plans for each level of forest, business, and community ecosystem.
Components of all Continental, National, State/Province, and Local Action Plans:
- Multi-layer GIS mapping of forests, logistics infrastructure, woods products companies, and political jurisdictions
- Forest recovery and treatment plans
- Optimal harvesting-to-processing plans for multiple value streams
- Stakeholder roles and participation plan (who is doing what)
- Transportation and logistics plans
- Equipment plans
- Month-by-month expense and revenue plans
- Sustaining organization and governance design
