Looking at the socio-economic sustainability of Canada's forests

When we look at how to sustain our forests, we can't simply look at the biological side. Canadians depend on the forest for our economic well-being, our health and our leisure. It also provides food and shelter to countless wildlife species and employment for over 1,600 human communities.

So the social, economic and health-related implications of forestry must be considered if we want to truly keep our forests sustainable for both those living within them and those who turn a profit from them.

To achieve this goal, researchers with the federally funded Sustainable Forest Management Network of Centres of Excellence (SFM), are not only looking at the bio-physical science of developing environmentally friendly ways of managing our forests, but they are analyzing the social, economic, and health-related issues facing forest-dependent communitites.

This involves taking into account the concerns of the general public, the local community and Aboriginal People about sustaining the use of the forest for hunting and food gathering as well as for providing employment opportunities.

SFM researchers working on this theme include anthropologists, sociologists, resource and environmental economists, political scientists, health specialists and geographers.

"Researchers tend to view environmental issues from their own disciplinary perspective, but in the SFMNCE we're moving beyond that," says Dr. Vic Adamowicz, who co-ordinates over 15 projects along the socio- economic sustainability theme. "I think the approach we're taking is the only way we're going to solve environmental problems because they are problems that humans have created and changes in human institutions are required to solve them."

In a recently completed project, SFM researchers helped forge a co-operative forest management plan between the Whitefish Lake First Nation and the government of Alberta. The plan, completed in June 1996, specified how the new partners would make the arrangement work. It established committees, priorities and mandates, and set the course for their managing the forest together instead of one-sidedly.

Cliff Hickey, director of the Canadian Circumpolar Institute and professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, says Whitefish Lake First Nation is the first Indian band to have a Forest Management Agreement — a five-year agreement that gives a group control of where and how much cutting can take place. He calls the plan a historic precedent, since this power had only ever been given to industries before.

The band now works with industry to set a limit for the number of trees that can be cut per year. The band also outlines which areas of forest can and cannot be cut. This allows them to protect both sacred and spiritual land as well as areas good for hunting and food gathering.

"When you live in an area where the resources everybody uses come from, it's your own backyard," says Dr. Cliff Hickey. "Don't you think you should have a say in how it's managed?"

SFM researchers talked to the band, the government and three industries to co-ordinate the plan and get their agreement. Several cutting plans have been arranged between band members and companies and all have been approved so far without any problems from either side.

And other bands interested in such agreements have since followed their lead.

Daishowa Marubeni International Ltd., one of the SFM's industrial partners, recently established a non-governmental agreement with two First Nations bands in the High Level area of Alberta — Little Red River Cree and Tallcree First Nations.

Their agreement takes into account traditional Aboriginal values concerning trapping, cultural and spiritual practices. It covers part of the 30,000 sq. km of northern boreal forest contained in Daishowa's forestry management area and affects over 2,850 First Nation band members.

The company will submit a preliminary joint proposal to the Alberta government by December 1997, followed by a detailed management plan by December 2001.

To help strengthen such agreements, University of Alberta researchers are also working on a project to document the way land is used in the Whitefish Lake First Nation's area. They are creating maps to chart land use, and compiling the maps and information onto a computer database. Graduate student David Natcher is collecting the data by speaking with band members and visiting forest sites. Band members should be able to access the database by spring 1998.

Recently, the department of Indian and Northern Affairs agreed to buy a sophisticated geographical information system identical to the one used at the university for the Whitefish Lake band office so all the land use information collected will be available locally at any time.

SFM researchers are also working in partnership with First Nations bands to examine ways of improving the healthof their communities.

"A lot of research in the past was done by so-called 'experts,' " explains Dr. Nancy Gibson, assistant professor of public health sciences at the University of Alberta. "But we're helping train people in the communities to do research themselves . . . It's a more collaborative approach and it works from both sets of knowledge. It's not just researchers telling the community what's best."

Dr. Gibson, who is supervising students and doing some of the fieldwork herself, says doing grassroots research is best, particularly when dealing with Aboriginal Peoples.

"Sometimes there is resentment towards researchers," she admits. "Without a respectful relationship with Aboriginal communities and without their trust, we have nothing."

During 1997, researchers made preparations and established relationships with a variety of communities who want to examine the health implications of forestry on their community. Fieldwork with one community started in summer 1997 and work in another will begin in 1998.

"It's not an us-and-them thing. We're a team," says Dr. Gibson. "Together, we look at their existing resources, and try to complement them. We're adding to the traditional knowledge-base the community already has through scientific research."

In another project, SFMNCE researchers at the University of Alberta are looking at how people who live in forest-dependent communities are affected by their dependency.

Since summer 1996, researchers have been doing ongoing case studies of eight communities in Alberta, the Northwest Territories, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Quebec and Nova Scotia.

They are looking at social indicators of sustainability in these communities by examining easily available data like: the poverty rate, unemployment rate, demographic stability (in-migration, out-migration and population change), and human capital (measured by years of formal education). These variables will be compared between forest-dependent communities, other rural communities, and all of Canada.

Principal investigator, Dr. Tom Beckley, a resource sociologist for the Canadian Forest Service, says these statistics tell us more about community sustainability than things like family income.

"If you look at the average household income for families living in forest-dependent communities, the figures look quite good," says Dr. Beckley. "But averages can mask the common situation where some households are very well off, while others are just getting by. Our intent is to find out how the benefits of forest dependence are distributed within communities."

Researchers are also collecting qualitative data by doing at least 50 interviews per community. They are even getting community members to do some of them. In Liverpool, Nova Scotia, for instance, they hired three high school students to interview their peers.

"To make the best possible use of our resouces, both socially and economically, we need to understand the needs of the people living in the forest," says Dr. Adamowicz. "They know it well and their traditional knowledge can lead scientists and industries in the right direction towards achieving sustainability."

Dr. Beckley says they want to find out who is really benefitting from the use of the forest. They are examining the opportunity structure for women and youth and looking at how vulnerable communities are and how they can diversify their economy in culturally acceptable ways.

"To be sustainable, a community has to be able to adapt to change," says Dr. Beckley. "Do they have the collective capacity and the creativity to invent another future for themselves?"

The project was inspired by a national effort to select indicators of socio-economic sustainability for timber-dependent communities. Dr. Beckley says his team of researchers hopes to broaden the definition of a forest-dependent community to include subsistence and tourism-dependent forest communities. Their ultimate goal is to build these indicators into local and national processes for reporting and measuring sustainability, which will be of particular interest to policy-makers.

"If communities fail, there's a great cost to society," says Dr. Beckley. "In the mining sector, some fairly large communities with thousands of people and millions of government and private sector dollars invested in them, have eventually failed after the company they relied on closed down local operations."

The Sustainable Forest Management NCE links over 117 researchers from 26 universities, with 11 government departments and 10 companies. With joint financial support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the Medical Research Council, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the NCE funds going to the SFM Network result in an average annual investment of $2.7 million in Canadian research and development.

For more information please visit the SFM Web Site.