to support the development of a Community Wildfire Protection Plan, as well as subsequent grants for fuel treatment pilot projects and op-erational fuel treatments (75% from UBCM if beetle-affected lodgepole pine was involved; otherwise 50%). However, the Strategic Wildfire Prevention Program Initiative didn’t directly address the need to add value to forest fuels, as recom-mended; it only provided a partial subsidy for treatment. With treatments ranging in cost from $1,000/ha to more than $20,000/ha, the initial fund of $40 million didn’t result in much more than 40,000 ha treated out of an estimated 1.8 million ha that needed treatment. Some of the material was removed from treat-ment sites and used in the bioenergy industry, provided that a user was sited close to the op-eration. The rest was treated on-site through grinding, pile-and-burn, or broadcast burning. On the tenure reform side, the province cre-ated several special licenses providing access to small quantities of biomass. This was initially a small-scale salvage licence for dead lodgepole pine, and eventually, an interface licence en-abling a municipality to treat all species but in small volumes. New clean air legislation is also making small quantities of biomass available because the forest industry is no longer allowed to burn slash piles. Unfortunately, none of these fixes deal with the necessity of providing sufficient access to predictable quantities of biomass feedstock so that an investor could be encouraged to build a bioenergy facility such as a thermal heating plant or wood pellet plant. With small treat-ment units of low-value material, there is little economic incentive for municipalities and businesses to pursue a bioenergy solution to the problem. So with federal and provincial fuel treatment grants drying up and local gov-ernments struggling to balance their budgets, movement on wildfire hazard reduction has come to a halt. a new apprOach An initiative that focuses on local governments directly managing the WUI around each of their communities is being championed by the southeastern British Columbia communities of Cranbrook, Kimberley, and St. Mary’s Indian Band, as well as the Ktuanxa Nation Council Society and the Rocky Mountain Trench Natu-ral Resources Society. The proposed solution will not only add value to the material and pro-vide access to feedstock, but will also reduce the need for fuel treatment subsidies in many cases. An economic and fire behaviour analy-sis would determine the appropriate width of the WUI buffer needed to develop biomass-to-energy industries capable of aggressively re-moving the fuel hazard from the forest. Within this WUI buffer would be sufficient biomass volume to develop both small-scale thermal heating projects as well as large-scale bioenergy products manufacture. The buffer would also contain large volumes of traditional sawtimber, which is more valuable on a volume basis than typical bioenergy material, but which is often needed to offset the harvest cost of biomass. This solution would require a change in the current tenure system, as the WUI buffer would need to be taken away from existing ten-ure holders and put under direct management by the municipality or First Nations Band. To date, the provincial government has been quick to declare that all the fibre in the province is under long-term tenure and there is none avail-able to local governments for the development of biomass energy. Instead of creating new ten-ures, they are relying on a passive approach to Canadian BIOMASS 17
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