Total volume cut in BC (public plus private lands) 2000-2022

ACCORDING TO THE MINISTRY OF FORESTS, the Timber Harvesting Land Base—the area of publicly owned forested land on which logging can occur—was about 22 million hectares in areal extent in 2022. (This has dropped in 2023 to about 20.3 million hectares due to priority old-growth deferrals). There are approximately 2 million hectares of privately-owned forested land in BC, about half of which is classified as managed forest and subject to the Private Managed Forest Land Act. Since about one-tenth of the loggable forested land is privately owned, we might expect about one-tenth of the volume of trees cut in BC to come from private land. This varies from year to year. For example, in 2020, 9 percent of the cut was on private land. In 2022, that increased to 15 percent. Over the 23-year period covered below, logging on private land accounted for 10 percent of the total volume cut.