EDITORIAL: Reforesting Climate Disturbances Part II
by Dirk Brinkman

The first major public climate disturbance reforestation program in Canada is BC’s Forests for Tomorrow (reported on page 5). An optimist may read $53 million (20,000 ha/year) for 20 years as a one billion dollar commitment, but a pessimist would see that 2008’s commitment of $40 million is less than half the $93 million projected in 2005 for 2008. Even the optimist’s one billion over 20 years has dwarf standing in the global pantheon of reversing deforestation. At the Bali Climate Conference, Norway committed over half a billion dollars a year to halting tropical deforestation in order to use the credits to become carbon neutral. With a climate action framework, BC’s public climate disturbance expenditure program might grow into a commitment such as Norway’s. Program area dollars might also stretch, if the private sector could innovate its delivery.
The challenge of restoring large scale ecological degradation is not new. BC’s MPB catastrophic devastation is unique in that 78% (nearly a billion m3) of BC’s pine will disappear in less than a generation. Australia cleared 250 million hectares for agriculture in a dozen generations, and as a result of overgrazing and more recently urban development, devastated ecosystems and critical habitats. To stretch the state’s limited budget for restoring endangered species habitat, New South Wales Ministry of Environment and Climate Change recently launched a Biodiveristy Banking and Offsets Scheme www.environment.nsw.gov.au/threatspec/biobankscheme.htm. A similar but smaller restoration scheme in the state of Victoria, inviting private landowners and environmental entrepreneurs to innovate habitat in restoration partnerships, increased biodiversity benefits seven times over results from the same dollars expended through government prescribed and budgeted programs.
Is there a similar opportunity here in BC? More than 500 wetland mitigation banks in the US invested billions of dollars in restoration through innovative environmental entrepreneurs. Wetland banking diversified into streamside banking, conservation banking, grassland banking, and even fish banking. With the Western Climate Initiative, restoration has also been funded by carbon credits in California and Oregon. With Australia adapting market innovation into a publicly funded British constitutional system, it is time to see these concepts in Canada. 
BC has also signed onto Oregon and California’s Western Climate Initiative. Carbon goals could stimulate innovation through a Climate Disturbance Restoration Bank and secure additional funding. Making Forests for Tomorrow (FFT) a carbon investment trust may secure long term funding. As BC’s 35th reforestation fund in as many years, FFT requires protection from economic downturns, which are perhaps as inevitable as global warming. 
The Minister of Forest & Range has modified BC’s “deforestation to reforestation” ratio indicator reducing the area deforested to areas ”suitable for FFT planting”. More fully displaying the magnitude of the staggering effect MPB is having on the forest and its dependant communities may help secure federal government co-funding. It is irrefutable that MPB is a climate catastrophe outside of BC’s management control and federal co-funding of the restoration is appropriate. More important still is a new federal climate action framework for the forests so that all programs can harness their future climate benefits.
Local community mayors such as Christ’l Roshart of Lillooet are demanding governments mobilize now and not wait 20 years. Delays clearly risk increasing the public burden because as more standing dead decays the unsalvageable area will increase. Delaying site preparation also increases the risk of huge wildfires in MPB stands. 
It is scale and uncertainty that are MPB’s biggest problems. Solving these big problems will be easier within national and provincial carbon market trading mechanisms and climate disturbance banking trusts, which can harness environmental entrepreneurs to stretch limited dollars. The seven billion dollar program announced by the small country of Norway is possible because it is a part of the robust international peer review and bioethics of the Bali Climate Action Plan. Canada cannot continue, as it did at Bali, obstructing international climate negotiations, when in doing so, it obstructs solutions to urgent problems at home like MPB. 
While governments have to proceed with caution, the pine beetle epidemic knows no such constraints. BC is to be applauded for its commitment to joining the rearguard action of the Western Climate Initiative of Oregon, California, and other US states. Now let’s take the next bold step and harness that climate framework to launch a climate restoration initiative that matches MPB’s epic scale.