Sustainable Forestry | Slocan Integral Forestry Cooperative | SIFCO

SLOCAN INTEGRAL FORESTRY COOPERATIVE

HELPING TO FOSTER COMMUNITY & ECOLOGICAL HEALTH

SIFCo is a non-for-profit community forest cooperative
located in the West Kootenays of British Columbia Cananda.

Our goal is to be a leader in bioregionally based Climate Change adaptation, sustainable forestry practices, community resiliency, ecosystem based management and economic diversification.

We use the platform of Community Forestry to think beyond the border of our tenured lands (35000 acres) and participate in the creation of a truly resilient bioregion and community.

We are very aware of the challenges that we are currently facing as a human family and are actively building the foundational framework for resilience at a bioregional scale.

This includes Landscape Level Wildfire Protection Planning using the best available science. We are also beginning the process of empirically reconstructing the historical range of variability in the land base to better predict what is coming our way.

We are imagining a future where ecosystems are able to withstand rapidly changing conditions and doing the work today to exponentially help our land base be more and more resilient.
This work includes the considerations of all values associated with complex ecosystems.

Our aim is to provide our community with the opportunity to manage, sustain, and enjoy the benefits from local forest resources and from the forest that surrounds us.

Keeping jobs and profits local, and supporting local entrepreneurs with opportunities and a variety of forest-based raw materials, are integral components of our management plan.

TO READ MORE ABOUT OUR APPROACH TO FORESTRY CLICK HERE

WILDLAND URBAN INTERFACING

The point at which crown land meets our towns and villages is known as the Wildland Urban Interface.

The ecologically sensitive management of these areas has become a primary focus of SIFCo.

For a number of reasons we are witnessing a prolific build up of fuels on our forest floors. Couple this with changes in our climate, and the threat of forest fire becomes very real and a great concern.

Our vision is to be pro-active in creating protective boundaries at the landscape level, known as landscape level strategic fuel breaks, so as to prevent unnecessary damage to the places where we reside if a wildfire were to occur.

We achieve this by implementing five different Wildfire mitigation treatments types to our tenure.