07/28/2026
Behind the Green Veil of Mass Timber Construction:
BC's Forest Industry is Anything but Green
It seems like every day another article, advertisement or government initiative touts mass timber as the future of sustainable construction. It sounds good: wood instead of concrete and steel, a (supposedly) renewable resource, a smaller carbon footprint. But this narrative glosses over the fact that most mass timber built in Canada comes from British Columbia, and in BC, "sustainable forestry" is largely a marketing claim, not a fact.
For those of us residing in British Columbia, the green veil is not a metaphor - it's the regulated industry practice of meeting “visual quality objectives” that most rural residents see through. Drive on almost any BC highway and you'll see it: a thin curtain of trees left standing along the roadside, hiding the clearcuts and the sad-looking tree plantations in various stages of growth that stretch for kilometres behind them. Mass timber's sustainability story is built on this same principle: keep the surface looking green, and count on nobody peering behind that green veil.
The majority of BC's timber harvest in the Interior still comes from primary forests that have never been industrially logged, including trees destined for mass timber. Clearcutting, often termed “clearcutting with reserves,” is by far the dominant harvesting method with recent expert opinions voicing that over 90% of logging on Crown Land is still clearcutting. The areas are then replanted with genetically questionable, even-aged conifers stands, while replanting standards legally obligate licensees to minimize wildfire-moderating regrowth of deciduous tree species . While the resulting plantations are described as forests in regulatory terms, they lack the structural complexity, biodiversity, soil integrity and hydrological function that took centuries to develop in the original ecosystems.
Decades of peer-reviewed research show the consequences. Dr. Younes Alila, a professor of forest hydrology at the University of British Columbia, has found that clearcutting can increase the frequency of catastrophic floods by up to 18 times, with impacts lasting more than 40 years. His 2025 study in the Journal of Hydrology examined cutblocks in BC watersheds (i.e. not theoretical models) and concluded that ongoing forest loss is heightening the risk of floods, drought and landslides - damage that has already cost billions and is projected to grow.
Mass timber producers and the BC government itself point to certification by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) as proof that BC's logging operations are sustainable. The province's own forestry agency, BC Timber Sales, leans heavily on SFI to justify its sustainability claims despite the fact that SFI doesn't even define what "sustainability" means, nor does it assess sustainability across broader areas. In late 2022, a coalition of nine Canadian environmental groups filed a formal complaint with the Competition Bureau, alleging that SFI's certification is both misleading and false. The case is still in progress.
The BC NDP government has accumulated a remarkable record of broken promises on forestry reform. In 2020, its own Old Growth Strategic Review delivered 14 recommendations, all of which were accepted by the government. Five years later, not one recommendation has been fully implemented. A promised endangered species law, committed to in the 2017 election platform, was quietly abandoned; B.C. remains one of the only provinces without one.
Then there is 30x30 - the global biodiversity commitment signed by nearly every country in the world in Montreal in 2022, pledging to protect 30 percent of lands and waters by 2030. Canada signed it. BC committed to it. And forestry is precisely why it is failing in BC: a province cannot credibly claim to be protecting nature while continuing to clearcut natural primary forests at an alarming rate. BC currently protects roughly 15 percent of its land base and at the current pace, BC would not reach 30 percent protection until well into the next century. According to the Wilderness Committee’s February 2026 report The Race to Protect 30%, British Columbia is not on pace to meet its 30x30 commitment. Worse, BC has been padding its conservation numbers by designating millions of hectares open to logging and mining as officially "conserved" — 97 percent of which fail to meet Canadian or international standards of conservation.
The green veil, it turns out, is province-wide policy both on the ground and on the books.
None of this means wood is a bad building material. In the right circumstances, second-growth timber, sourced from forests managed for ecosystem health could be part of a lower-carbon built environment. So until we see the government enacting strong protections for saving what is left of BC's high ecological value primary forest, don’t believe the hype.
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