Modeling Public Forest Land Use Tradeoffs on Vancouver Island

Because forestry accounts for about 10% of British Columbia’s economy and 95% of B.C.’s total land base is publicly owned, forest land use policies are important to the provincial economy. In this paper, goal programming is used to examine the economic impacts of a stakeholders’ process for allocating public land on Vancouver Island. Despite including recreational and nonuse bene-fits and tourist jobs, the results indicate likely losses of 4,500 direct jobs (1.5% of all jobs on the Island), a decline in government revenue by 5.5% or $82.5 million per year, and an annual reduction in society’s welfare by some $440 million (constituting 0.5% of provincial GDP).