Gary Bull

• BScF, MF, PhD
• Professor at University of British Columbia

Tree improvement programs can improve forest management by increasing timber yields in some areas, thereby facilitating conservation of other forest lands. In this study, we used a meta-analytic approach to quantify yields of alternative white (Picea glauca (Moench) Voss) and hybrid spruce (Picea engelmannii Parry ex Engelmann x Picea glauca (Moenc...

Willingness to pay (WTP) for payments for environmental services (PES) can be temporarily reliable if contingent valuation (CV) studies are embedded in an accurate survey population, yield low measurement errors, and are based on a correct assumption of no change in sociodemographic factors affecting buyer preferences. These pre-conditions are assu...

We use an innovative approach to improve the effectiveness of smallholder afforestation programs by psychometrically segmenting a population based on preferences for the market and non-market values of trees. 202 randomly selected smallholders in Nicaragua were presented with nine discrete choice experiments of possible afforestation contracts with...

Numerous inter-governmental conservation initiatives have failed to halt the loss and degradation of forests. This paper explores the role of policy processes in developing and delivering desired future forest outcomes that meet both global environmental goals and the needs of local forest users. There is a clear disconnect between global commitmen...

Eco-certification is one solution to the common problem of verification of delivery of services in payment for ecosystem services (PES) schemes. Certification incurs costs, which may limit uptake, so it should be able to benefit users of certified services for it succeeds. In part to inform a project targeting expansion of the Forest Stewardship Co...

Spatially explicit wall-to-wall forest-attributes information is critically important for designing management strategies resilient to climate-induced uncertainties. Multivariate estimation methods that link forest attributes and auxiliary variables at full-information locations can be used to estimate the forest attributes for locations with only...

Academic research on smallholders’ forestland-use decisions is regularly addressed in different streams of literature using different theoretical constructs that are independently incomplete. In this article, we propose a theoretical construct for modelling smallholders’ forestland-use decisions intended to serve in the guidance and operationalizat...

Forest policy-making can be dramatically enhanced by implementing computer based decision support systems (DSS) during the development phase. While stakeholders usually agree on general policy objectives, the best course of action for achieving them is often unclear. Forest DSS can support the assessment of alternative forest policy frameworks with...

This study examines opportunities and challenges of applying certification of forest watershed services to a payment for watershed services (PWS) scheme. The certification has potential to mitigate the problem of incomplete information in a PWS scheme, but necessary enabling conditions remain untested, including stakeholder support. To examine stak...

An expansion of Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification to forest ecosystem services (FES) is a potential tool to improve FES management. Certification of FES in bundles is an expected strategy because it could decrease trade-offs among FES, increase forest owners' incomes, and reduce certification costs per FES. However, there is insufficie...

The forest sector in British Columbia (BC) has faced a number of challenges over the past decade. In response to some of those challenges, the government has invested in forest genomic tools. Marker-assisted selection (MAS) is a biotechnological tool that flags desired traits on the genome. This tool may assist tree breeders with the early selectio...

The potential development of a Canadian forest-based bioeconomy requires an assessment of both fibre availability and associated marginal supply costs. To a large extent, the bioeconomy is expected to rely on wood fibre made available through primary products, sawnwood and pulp production processing streams. Therefore, it is important to understand...

The scope of Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification, a market-based mechanism targeting sustainable forest management, could be expanded to certify delivery of a range of forest ecosystem services (FES). To assess the feasibility of such an undertaking, we examined market demand for FES certification based on the benefits and costs applicab...

There are many studies indicating the linkages of Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) forest management certification to forest ecosystem services (FES). The primary focus of the research was the FSC system's impacts on FES management. What is unique about this study is that it evaluates the adaptability of key FSC stakeholders in terms of their abili...

The forest inventory of an actively managed forest estate in the Coast Forest Region of British Columbia was used to investigate the potential of fluctuating harvest levels to produce carbon credits. Fluctuating harvest levels allowed the target harvest level to fluctuate between the baseline and a starting target harvest level (set at a lower leve...

The field of forest genomics is rapidly expanding, and many new potential uses of the genetic information gained are being developed [1]. Some of these uses are primarily economic in nature, such as increasing the growth rate of trees and increasing yields for woody biomass, or producing trees with more desirable physiological or wood characteristi...

Potential scenarios for the forest bioeconomy are heavily reliant on price assumptions; in particular, any abrupt changes in prices have a profound impact the relevancy of any sector analysis. The objective of this paper was to demonstrate a new forest sector approach for incorporating price uncertainties in order to improve our assessment of inves...

China faces health and environmental problems associated with the use of agricultural chemicals, including pesticides. While previous studies have found that risk aversion affects pesticide use in China, they have focused primarily on commercial cotton farmers. In this study, we consider the case of smaller, semisubsistence and subsistence farmers...

Most residents of Canada's 300 remote communities do not have access to natural gas and must rely upon higher cost and/or less convenient heat sources such as electric heat, heating (furnace) oil, propane, and/or cord wood. This research sought to determine the techno-economic feasibility of increasing biomass utilization for space and hot water he...

The forests of British Columbia have been managed for thousands of years to provide a range of products and services. For the Nuxalk people of Bella Coola, BC, their forests were used to: build homes and canoes, act as a transportation system (grease trails), and provide material for clothing, fuel and cultural/artistic needs. These forests also pr...

The forest industry is a major player in the provincial economy, provides a significant contribution to government revenue, and accounts for 3% of British Columbia's GDP. However, with the reduction of housing starts in the US in 2006, the economic crisis of 2008, a steady decline in newsprint demand, and the Mountain Pine Beetle epidemic, the prov...

Quantitative research on household participation in the Payments for Environmental Services (PES) programme remains scarce. This paper aims to determine the key factors influencing household participation in a PES programme in Mozambique. Questionnaire-based quarterly surveys were conducted with 290 randomly selected households. We used the instrum...

Forest genomics is a relatively recent research field and is often poorly understood both by the public and forest managers. Genomics in forestry, an expansion of forest biotechnology, seeks to develop generalized technologies for use in industrial plantations and/or natural forests as well as within process optimization, product development and in...

This paper uses the inventory of three actively managed forest estates located in the Coastal, Central Interior, and Northern Interior forest regions in British Columbia to estimate the cost to produce Carbon credits ($ per Carbon credit) when the harvest is reduced below the baseline level. The financial analysis was conducted over a range of disc...

The forests of British Columbia have been managed for thousands of years to provide a range of products and services. For the Nuxalk people of Bella Coola, BC, their forests were used to build homes and canoes, act as a transportation system ( grease trails), and provide material for clothing, fuel and cultural/artistic needs. These forests also pr...

Success in conserving and managing forests depends upon effective governance mechanisms that are transparent, participatory and accountable. It also requires tools to allow different policy actors to evaluate effectiveness at multiple scales: local, regional, national and international. Faced with the urgency of combating deforestation and forest d...

This paper uses the inventory of two different actively managed forest estates located on the Coast and Interior forest regions in British Columbia to analyze the potential of alternate forest management practices to sequester and store Carbon while achieving a range of management objectives. Strategies that increase growth rates (fertilization and...

The globalization of production and trade has contributed to the rise in complex global value chains where the reach of state regulation is limited. As an alternative, private regulation, developed and administered by companies, industry associations, and nongovernmental organizations, has emerged to safeguard economic, environmental, and social su...

Partial equilibrium models are used extensively in the forest sector to predict the effects of national policies and economic shocks on sector activity, especially trade. Models are made up of four components: supply, demand, processing, and international trade. We focus on the processing component. Processing component costs are commonly represent...

Fuelwood is generally assumed to be a commodity in the development literature, thus overlooking the possibility of catering to niche markets that could potentially be served more efficiently. Identifying and better catering to niche market segments through product differentiation can play an important role in increasing the income of those involved...

The world's forests are a major source of material and fuel, a vast reservoir of biodiversity and they also provide valuable ecological services such as hydrological cycling and carbon sequestration. They play an important role in carbon accounting schemes under the Kyoto Protocol and the UN Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Fo...

Forest carbon management is rapidly evolving in British Columbia. The province is perhaps the most active jurisdiction on this front in Canada as it seeks to meet the requirements of its new suite of greenhouse gas legislation, regulations , and policies that influence the management of forest carbon. This report provides an update since 2008 on Br...

There has been a paucity of research on the impacts of small scale Payments-for-Environmental-Services (PES) projects in developing countries. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the household level impacts of a small scale agro-forestry based carbon sequestration project in rural Mozambique. In 2006, questionnaire based interviews were conducted...

This article is a synthesis of the salient topics discussed in the Climate Change Adaptation and Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) Workshop, held at the University of British Columbia, February 14-16, 2011, and lays out a research agenda based on the recommendations for future research that emerged in the workshop. The proposed research agenda is...

Assessing the impacts of cumulative, non-lethal damages to forests poses a particular challenge to forest management planning since cumulative merchantable volume losses are not known until the time of harvest. This paper introduces a model that scales stand-level processes to their large-scale implications by combining elements of growth and yield...

En China, el alto costo de las materias primas y la logística del suministro restringen el desarrollo del sector de la bioenergía derivada de la madera. Este estudio examina la estructura del costo y la logística del suministro para dos lugares de Mongolia Interior: Naimanqi, que posee una central eléctrica abastecida por un bosque de propiedad col...

This qualitative study indentifies how corporate responsibility (CR) practices are diffused to companies, as well as the factors that influence this diffusion process. Forest companies, industry associations, non-governmental organizations, and academics in Brazil, Canada, and the United States participated in this interview-based study. Data emerg...

Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) forest projects are perceived as an attractive way to both help mitigate climate change and transfer income to rural poor. However, to engender participation of small-scale producers, a CDM forest project must offer sufficient incentives, while minimizing their costs of participation, all the while respecting the n...

Overuse of fertilizer and pesticides is a substantial source of water pollution in China, and reducing chemical input use is a government policy objective. Using data on risk aversion from field experiments in the Yunnan Province of southwestern China, we ask how risk attitudes affects farm input choice. Major findings in our paper include: [1] as...

Catalyst Paper Corporation's case study of its Cooled paper revealed the evident carbon efficiency along supply chains that are energy efficient, and who have become preferred suppliers. Supply chains themselves can be reorganized to minimize carbon emissions, and should shift their focus from delivery time and delivery costs to carbon-efficient de...

A mail survey of certified and noncertified forest managing entities (public agencies, forest industry, and nonindustrial private forest owners) in the US Pacific Northwest region (PNW) was conducted to better understand forest practitioners' perceptions related to the degree of change in forest practices. The results of this study reveal that fore...

This paper describes the development and implementation of Cambium, an agent-based forest sector model for strategic analysis. This model is designed as a decision-support tool for assessing the effects that changes in product demand and resource inventories can have on the structure and economic viability of the forest sector. Cambium models aggre...

The "emulation of natural disturbance" (END) is an ambiguous forest management approach that embodies an environmental ethic of "following nature" and the values associated with the nature/culture dichotomy. Given climate change projections, the emulation of natural disturbance or any approach that commits itself to reproducing a snapshot of the pa...

The emulation of natural disturbance (END) is said to be the most promising avenue for implementing sustainable forest management however, there appears to be no consensus as to the meaning of the END. We have interviewed forest scientists across Canada and, with the use of mental models and network textual analyses, created a shared mental model o...

IntroductionTypes of codesGuidelines that promote good practicesLegislated codes that require complianceConclusions

The economic sustainability literature highlights important theoretical and practical limitations when de-veloping economic indicators to assess sustainable forest management (sfm). Since sfm is multi-disciplin-ary, no body of theoretical knowledge can embrace all of its dimensions. There is a significant gap between economic theory and management...

With forest certification on the rise in Canada, a nation-wide mail survey was implemented in 2004 to gain insight into the attitudes of value-added wood products manufacturers towards certification. The majority of firms in this sector (64.8%) were not interested in forest certification, and only 17.6% were involved with forest certification at th...

It is difficult to determine the information required to address sustainable forest management (SFM) issues. In the case of local-level soft law standards, such as third-party forest certification, the information must ensure adequate planning, inventory, reporting, inspection and compliance. It must also serve the practical and strategic needs of...

This paper examines industrial plantation subsidies' issues and begins to assess the impacts and implications of these subsidies on the global forest. After reviewing the current status of industrial plantations and the types and levels of plantation subsidies in use, key economic and social issues are assessed with the intent of improving the desi...

"Home" may be understood as an intangible concept separate from its material manifestation—the tangible place where one dwells, the house. However, this is not necessarily the way people experience the two concepts of "home" and "house". In daily life, both the experience of the tangible and the intangible dimensions of "home" may be inextricably l...

This study characterizes the log home and timber frame manufacturing sector in British Columbia, with a focus on the potential of utilizing insect-killed wood from the mountain pine beetle outbreak. A mail survey was conducted in the spring of 2003 to assess the industry's status. In 2002, an estimated 200 companies were active within BC using appr...

The majority of the roundwood processed by the highly concentrated forest products industry in Finland is supplied by non-industrial private forest owners (NIPF). The industry's heavy reliance on NIPF roundwood supplies and the NIPF owners’ high dependency on the industry for revenue motivated this study of the spatial fibre flows in regional marke...

In forest management there has been a proliferation of tools, methods and standards for local-level monitoring and information reporting that has made it difficult for forest managers to promote cost effectiveness, efficiency and confidence building in their day-to-day management. This exploratory study highlights the degree to which 22 case studie...

China's forest resources have been and continue to be threatened. The analysis of the various reported statistics, while often conflicting, does indicate significant challenges ahead for the forest to supply the material for industrial, non-industrial, fuelwood and conservation objectives. Given forecasted constraints on domestic fibre supply for a...

Based on the papers contributed to this Special Issue and other studies an effort is made to identify the major policy issues facing the Chinese forest sector. The policy analysis is organized around the so-called ,supply china‘ (from stump to final products' markets). The discussion of policy issues and implications centers on the identified large...

Over 70 % of China's timber product imports are supplied by countries in the Asia Pacific region, and China is the dominant forest product market for many of these countries. Unsustainable harvesting practices, illegal logging, and negative impacts on community livelihoods plague many of these supplying countries. The countries may be divided into...

Value-added wood products consist of a broad spectrum of industrial, structural, and consumer goods ranging from differentiated commodity products like remanufactured lumber to higher value appearance products like furniture, flooring, and millwork. To date, little research has been conducted on forest certification issues as they pertain to the va...

Rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis (Wild. ex Adr. de Juss.) Muell Arg.) plantations in Malaysia are important sources of natural rubber and wood products. Effective management and appropriate policy for these resources requires reliable forecasts of resource availability. However, to achieve these goals, effective inventories are required. This promot...

Rubber trees (Hevea brasiliensis) are important agricultural crops, not only because of the market for natural rubber, but also because they contribute to the Malaysia's overall roundwood supply. The need for effective inventories for rubber plantations was the impetus for this investigation into supplementing traditional methods of ground-based su...

In the 1990s a wide array of non-governmental certification initiatives emerged as a way to promote the sustainable management of resources in sectors such as fisheries and forestry. In this paper, we examine two related questions about these initiatives: how does the institutional design of certification initiatives affect the way science is used...

Investigates the relationship between Landsat TM data and rubberwood stand parameters, and establishes and evaluates models for estimating stand volume and predicting area of rubber plantations in Malaysia. The total sample set of stands was divided into two independent groups: model-building and validation data sets. Regression analyses were used...

The issue of the nature, rate and causes of deforestation is of political significance through carbon accounting under the Kyoto Protocol. There is debate over the underlying causes of deforestation, but the primary causes are well understood. Forests are a major source of woodfuels and reservoirs of biodiversity. Keywords: deforestation; biodive...

During the last two decades, the ecological, cultural and social values of forests have received stronger priority by society. To address the changes in values in a forest products context, major wood and non-wood retailers are being asked to develop a wood procurement policy which defines the sources from which a company or organization will or wi...

This report is linked to the above activities but concentrates on the issues of

From the mid 1990s to the end of 1990s around 15 global wood supply studies were carried out by international organizations, academia and consultant companies (Bazett, 2000; Bull et al., 1998). The studies used different methodologies but all heavily relied on FAO data. Among the studies, the following can be mentioned, e.g. The conventional wisdom...