Building a wildfire business case for biomass harvesting

Following the 2023 record-breaking year of extreme wildfires across Canada, the topic of how to best manage wildfires came to the forefront for many organisations within Canada’s forest products sector, as well as all levels of government.

One organisation that has been actively researching ways to mitigate the risk of these extreme wildfires is FPInnovations, a private, non-for-profit research and development organisation with expertise in the pulp and paper industry, forest operations, wood products, and bio-sources products sectors.

Over the past year, FPInnovations put together a special team, which his part of its Technical Assessment Research Group. The team is comprised of two groups that traditionally didn’t work closely together. One group is the forest operations researchers comprised of foresters, technicians, scientists and biomass supply experts. The second group are FPInnovations’ wildfire operations experts, working on fire behaviour, detection, suppression and resilience.

Those two groups came together to form a working team focused on wildfire risk reduction through the utilization of woody biomass and landscape strategies to mitigate wildfires. The scope of their research includes the evaluation of operational practices and forest management strategies to mitigate wildfire impacts on fibre supply to meet the existing and emerging fibre demands; while also adapting to existing and new markets and climate change.

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Source: Canadian Biomass
Image credit: FPInnovations