B.C.’s deeply indented, island-dotted coastline covers more than 25,000 kilometres (15,500 miles) from Washington State north to the Alaska panhandle.
Much of the Coast Forest Region is remote wilderness yet most of B.C.’s 4 million residents live in the southwest corner of the province, which includes the cities of Vancouver and Victoria.
The forest industry built B.C.’s coastal economy, and remains the number-one industry today. The allowable annual cut in the region has dropped from 27.8 million cubic metres in 1980 to 20.1 million cubic metres in 2001, and is expected to continue to drop until the middle of this century due primarily to changes in the wood supply and forest practices, and to the fact that more land was set aside to create parks and protect the wide range of forest values.
The region covers 16.5 million hectares (40.8 million acres), including 10 million hectares (almost 25 million acres) of healthy and abundant forest land. It has one-quarter of the world’s coastal temperate rainforest.
95 per cent of B.C.’s land base is publicly owned. One of the few exceptions is on southeastern Vancouver Island, where about 800,000 hectares (2 million acres) are privately owned.