Why This Matters to You

You do not have to care about old trees to care about this. If you live on or visit southern Vancouver Island, two things that affect your summer, your safety, and your bills are tied to how this forest is managed: fire and water.

Fire

Old forest holds water. Its deep shade, thick soil, and big living trees keep the ground and the air under the canopy cooler and damper through summer. When old forest is clearcut and replaced with a dense, even-aged plantation, the result is drier and, for its first decades, more flammable, with logging slash adding fine fuel on the ground.

The science backs the direction of this:

• Soil moisture is one of the strongest predictors of how fast a fire spreads, beating weather alone in recent modelling. Drier ground means faster, hotter fire. [Holden et al. 2025, Geophysical Research Letters.]
• In studied fires, intensively managed young plantations have burned at higher severity than older forest. [Zald and Dunn 2018, Ecological Applications.] Work on the 2019-20 Australian fires and on moist-forest fire regimes points the same way: logging can raise the odds of high-severity fire, and salvage logging after a fire can increase the risk again.

Honest caveat: most of this evidence comes from drier forests, and the Port Renfrew coast is wet rainforest that historically burned rarely. But that exception is shrinking as summers get hotter and drier, forest scientists now say the coast is "not immune," and even Mosaic, the largest private Island manager, called the Island's 2026 fire season elevated-risk. This is a reason to ask how fire risk was assessed before a block was cut, not proof that any block will burn.

And you already pay for fire. B.C. spent about $1.1 billion fighting wildfire in 2023, the most on record, out of public money. That cost never appears beside the timber sale.

Water

The same old forest that resists fire also protects water. It shades streams and keeps them cool enough for salmon, holds soil so it does not wash into the water as sediment, and stores moisture that feeds creeks through the dry months. Strip it, especially along streams, and you get warmer water, more sediment, and flashier flows. For anyone on a creek-fed or community water supply, that is not abstract.

B.C.'s own 2021 economic study of the Port Renfrew area left drinking-water quality out of its accounting entirely, even though it still found protecting old growth was worth about $40 million more to the public than logging it. The water value is real and uncounted.

The simple ask

Before old growth or high-risk forest is logged near homes, water, and recreation, you should be able to see what the decision will cost you: the fire and fuel records, the streamside and road and sediment records, and the full-cost accounting. Right now you cannot. That is the gap this project is about.

See the story, the one-page summary, and the full report. Every figure traces to a source on the sources page.