One number works as the economic dial for a wide stretch of the British Columbia Interior, and it is up for renegotiation. The current allowable annual cut in the 100 Mile House Timber Supply Area sits at 967,805 cubic metres of timber a year, and B.C.’s Ministry of Forests opened a public consultation on June 25, 2026 that will help set the next one, with comments accepted until Aug. 25, 2026. For a district where mills, logging contractors and haulers live off that allowance, the stakes are a decade of harvest levels.
The machinery is statutory. “According to Section 8 of the Forest Act, the chief forester must determine an AAC for each TSA and TFL (tree farm licence) in the Province of B.C. at least once every 10 years”, the timber supply analysis behind the review notes, and the same law covers 34 tree farm licences and 37 timber supply areas province-wide. Officials noted that a determination is an independent, professional judgment built on four inputs: technical forestry reports, First Nations consultations, public input, and the government’s social and economic objectives. “Public feedback is a part of every AAC decision and is an opportunity for communities to provide input, which will be considered during the AAC determination”, the ministry’s June 25 bulletin said. “Information gathered in this review will be used by the chief forester when determining a new allowable annual cut (AAC) for the 100 Mile House TSA,” the report reads.
The land in question is roughly 1.24 million hectares of the Cariboo region, run by the district natural resource office in 100 Mile House, bounded by the Fraser River to the west, Wells Gray Provincial Park and the Cariboo Mountains to the east, the Williams Lake timber supply area to the north and the Kamloops timber supply area to the south, with 100 Mile House, 108 Mile Ranch and Clinton as its main communities. The territory spans more than 30 First Nations, four of which, the Tsq’escen First Nation (Canim Lake Band), the Stswecem’c Xget’tem First Nation, High Bar First Nation and the Whispering Pines/Clinton Indian Band, sat on the working group that shaped the discussion paper; every one of the 30 Nations has been invited to weigh in. On the land itself, “Approximately 68 per cent of the AFLB (48 per cent of the total TSA area) is available for timber harvesting,” the analysis states, out of a productive-forest base it puts near 71 per cent, and “The dominant tree species in the TSA are Douglas-fir, spruce, and lodgepole pine.”
Data shows how sharply the dial has already moved. The cut was set at two million cubic metres between 2014 and 2017, an artificial high for salvaging beetle-killed timber, then came down to one million from 2018 through 2024, with actual harvests staying under the cap in every year but 2018 and only 500,000 cubic metres a year permitted in live trees. Wildfires have since eaten at the base the numbers rest on: 109,000 hectares burned in 2017, 8,000 in 2018 and 81,000 in 2021.
The forward view in the analysis is the sober part. It points to a sustainable harvest of 702,000 cubic metres a year for the next nine decades, running to 2113, before the cut is projected to climb back to 1,288,000 cubic metres a year, with an allowance of 50,000 cubic metres of dead pine through 2033 while the last beetle-killed wood still counts. Two sensitivity runs frame the uncertainty: if the last decade of fire activity repeated itself, the sustainable figure would fall to 440,000 cubic metres a year, and if licensees used whole trees rather than sawlogs alone, more than 300,000 cubic metres a year of additional biomass could theoretically move.
The company-by-company and nation-by-nation arithmetic now goes to the chief forester. Residents can send comments by email or post to the 100 Mile House Natural Resource District until Aug. 25, and the determination that follows will fix the region’s timber dial, and with it a fair share of the local economy, for the next ten years.
Sources
- Inviting residents of 100 Mile House to comment on timber supply review
- 100 Mile House timber supply impacted by wildfires | Abbotsford News
