Canada — British Columbia

What is here

British Columbia, on the west coast of Canada, holds roughly a quarter of the world’s remaining temperate rainforest. Old-growth Sitka spruce, western redcedar, Douglas-fir, and western hemlock stretch from the inland Walbran Valley on Vancouver Island, up the central and north coasts of the mainland, into the Great Bear Rainforest, and through the inland temperate rainforest of the Selkirk and Cariboo mountains. Some of the largest individual living trees on Earth grow in this province — cedars in their fifteenth century, spruces a hundred metres high, and Douglas-firs near the regional structural maximum.

The province also has a forestry industry that for most of the 20th century treated those forests as a near-infinite resource. Most of the easily-accessed old growth on Vancouver Island and the lower mainland was cut. Most of the inland temperate rainforest was logged. What remains is concentrated in places that were too steep, too remote, or too contested to harvest profitably — and as access has improved, those last places have become the front line.

The 2020 Old Growth Strategic Review

In 2019 the BC government commissioned an independent review of provincial old-growth policy, led by two professional foresters, Garry Merkel and Al Gorley. Their report, delivered in April 2020, was unusually direct. It found that the province’s assertions about how much old growth remained were misleading: the official totals included substantial areas of low-productivity old forest at high elevation that no industry had ever wanted to log, while the productive, large-tree old growth that defines the public’s mental image — and that drives most of the carbon and biodiversity value — was much rarer than headline numbers suggested^[1].

The report made 14 recommendations. The first three are the structural ones: shift the management framework from sustaining timber yield to sustaining ecosystem health; engage Indigenous nations as full partners (not consultees) in decisions on their territories; and immediately defer harvest in the most at-risk old-growth ecosystems while a new framework is built^[1]. The provincial government formally accepted all 14 recommendations.

What has actually happened since

What followed has been a partial, slow, and contested implementation. In late 2021 the province announced “deferral areas” covering about 2.6 million hectares of at-risk old growth, on which logging was paused while First Nations were consulted on permanent management. In practice, deferral required the agreement of the relevant First Nation, and not every nation has agreed; the actual deferred area, two and a half years after the announcement, is materially smaller than the 2.6 million hectares originally announced^[2].

Independent analysts — Sierra Club BC, the Wilderness Committee, the Ancient Forest Alliance — track the gap between what was announced and what is on the ground using satellite imagery and provincial harvest data. Their consistent finding is that productive old-growth forest continues to be harvested in many of the supposedly-deferred areas, and that the rate of loss has slowed but not stopped^[3][4][5]. The province disputes some of the methodology of those analyses; the disagreement is real, public, and ongoing.

Fairy Creek

Fairy Creek is a small watershed in the unceded territory of the Pacheedaht Nation on southwest Vancouver Island. In 2020 and 2021 it became the largest civil-disobedience event in Canadian history, with more than 1,000 arrests during a year-long blockade against the planned harvest of one of the few remaining unlogged productive old-growth valleys on the island. The blockade was contested both between forestry workers and protesters and within Indigenous communities themselves — the elected Pacheedaht council had a forestry agreement permitting harvest; hereditary chief Bill Jones publicly invited the blockaders onto the territory.

What is left of Fairy Creek as old growth is now provincially deferred. The campaign drew the international attention to BC old-growth that the Strategic Review had drawn the policy attention. Whether the deferral becomes permanent is a function of the long Pacheedaht negotiation now underway, which is a function of the province’s willingness to fund Indigenous-led stewardship over harvest revenue.

Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park

The Carmanah and Walbran valleys, also on southwest Vancouver Island, are an earlier and more successful version of the same fight. After several years of campaigns and blockades in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the BC government created Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park in 1995, permanently protecting most of the remaining productive old growth in those valleys^[8]. The carbon, biodiversity, and structural value of what was protected has been documented for thirty years. It is the strongest single example in BC of what the political case for permanent protection looks like when it succeeds.

The Great Bear Rainforest agreement

The Great Bear Rainforest is the temperate-rainforest coast of central and northern BC mainland, roughly 6.4 million hectares from the northern tip of Vancouver Island to the Alaska panhandle. After two decades of First Nations leadership, environmental-NGO campaigning, and direct industry-to-Nation negotiation, the province, the federal government, twenty-six First Nations, and the forestry sector signed the Great Bear Rainforest agreement in 2016. About 85% of the forest is now protected from industrial logging; the remaining 15% is harvested under ecosystem-based management standards developed jointly with Coastal First Nations^[6].

This is the example. It is not perfect — some communities feel they got too little, some forestry operations feel they got too little — but it is the largest area of temperate rainforest brought under durable protection by negotiation in the modern era, and it was led by Indigenous governance from start to finish.

Tla-o-qui-aht Tribal Parks

On the west coast of Vancouver Island, the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation runs Tribal Parks across most of its traditional territory, including Meares Island. The Tribal Parks Guardians programme — trained, on-the-ground, Indigenous land managers — is one of the longest-running and most-cited examples of Indigenous-led forest stewardship in Canada^[7]. Meares Island in particular has been protected from industrial harvest since 1984, when the Tla-o-qui-aht declared it a Tribal Park in defiance of the province’s harvest plans — an early version of the kind of declared sovereignty that the province now negotiates around.

Who works on this and how to join

Sierra Club BC, Ancient Forest Alliance, and Wilderness Committee are the three province-wide environmental organisations actively campaigning on old-growth protection. Each publishes maps and analysis; each takes volunteers, donations, and public-comment letter-writers^[3][4][5].

Coastal First Nations — Great Bear Initiative is the umbrella for the nine First Nations on the central and north coast that signed the Great Bear Rainforest agreement and continue to manage it^[6]. Their work is the model.

Tla-o-qui-aht Tribal Parks publishes a Guardians programme that accepts volunteer applications and visitor-fee contributions^[7]. If you visit Vancouver Island, paying the visitor fee at Meares Island is the most direct contribution most readers can make.

BC Government public consultation. The province periodically opens public consultation on its old-growth strategy, deferrals, forest-act revisions, and specific forest-management plans. The map’s headline action for Canadian visitors links to the active consultations when one is open.

The longer view

British Columbia’s old-growth situation is the most-watched test case in the developed world for whether a wealthy, modern, science-literate jurisdiction can re-orient its forest economy to protect the small remaining fraction of forest that cannot be replaced. The province has done unusually serious science (the Strategic Review), produced an unusually concrete plan (the deferrals and the Great Bear agreement), made unusually public progress (Tla-o-qui-aht, the Great Bear), and continued, in parallel, to harvest old growth under contested deferral arrangements. All of these are happening at once.

Whether BC ends up the example the world cites for “how the protection of old growth was achieved” or the example the world cites for “the moment we knew and still didn’t stop” depends on the next decade of provincial decisions. As of 2026, the trajectory is unclear, the public attention is real, and the Indigenous leadership is unusually strong. This is, to a real extent, a place where individual public engagement still moves the dial.