Divided land base and overlapping forest tenure in Alberta, Canada: A simulation study exploring costs of forest policy

The forest planning environment in Alberta is complicated by multiple forms of forest tenure and by an arbitrary division of the forest into separate softwood and hardwood land bases. The area within and surrounding the Alberta-Pacific Forest Industries Inc. Forest Management Agreement (FMA) area exemplifies the problem, with a large number of independent forest products companies operating in the area. We model 17 sawmill operators and the Alberta-Pacific pulp mill trying to simultaneously satisfy their mill feedstock requirements from a forest.We examined the inefficiencies introduced by this tenure system using Tardis, a computer simulation model incorporating access development, timber harvest, and regeneration. We examined two scenarios: one representing the business-as-usual case where the 18 forest products companies are operating independently, and one where the forest is managed by one company that harvests timber and delivers it to each of the mills.The costs of the present tenure arrangements are, we believe, substantial enough to warrant a thorough re-examination of forest policy and tenure arrangements in Alberta, specifically with respect to land base designation and overlapping tenures. Key words: forest tenure, simulation modelling, timber harvest scheduling, policy analysis