Forestry group pleased with spruce budworm funding

Those in Nova Scotia’s forestry sector will likely rest a little easier knowing scientists will be able to continue working on a solution to stop the spread of the destructive spruce budworm.

The federal 2018 budget, tabled Tuesday, proposes investing up to $74.75 million over five years starting in 2018–19 to prevent the spread of spruce budworm. The funding is to be made available on a 60-40 federal-to-provincial and industry cost-sharing basis, allowing academia, industry and others to continue to work together to protect the region’s forests.

Starting in Quebec in 2006 and slowly movingsouth to New Brunswick in the last five years, the most recent spruce budworm outbreak is alreadywreaking havoc in some regions. The threat of an outbreak mimicking the one that decimatedforests in Nova Scotia in the late 1970s and early 1980s is very real, and something experts say could cause a $15-billion negative economic impact in Atlantic Canada.

“There’s a lot riding on this,” said Jeff Bishop, executive director of Forest Nova Scotia. “We’re very pleased that our federal government partners have come to the table with this funding. This is certainly going to give us the best opportunity to take on the pest.”

Whereas the old approach to combat spruce budworm was to focus on treating and salvaging valuable forest stands, a group called the Healthy Forest Partnership, a coalition between Natural Resources Canada, provincial governments in the Atlantic region as well as scientists, universities and industry groups, has been working since 2014 to find a way to contain the outbreak and prevent and contain spreading by treating hot spots. The $10 million in funding for the projectprovided in 2014 has since been used, prompting the Healthy Forest Partnership to request new funding to continue their work for the next four years.

Rob Johns, a research scientist at Natural Resources Canada who is leading the early intervention strategy project with the Healthy Forest Partnership, told The Chronicle Herald last week the group has recently observed positive evidence that their efforts are working.

But even though the research looks promising, Bishop said the funding is a leap of faith on the government’s part.

“It’s not like getting funding to build a rink in that now that we’ve got the funding we know that the rink is going to get built. It’s still a big question mark,” Bishop said. “We’re playing with mother nature to an extent here, but we’re very hopeful.”