Team

Neil Hughes, RPF
Program Director, Forestry

t 604.682.4141 ext 224
c 250.898.7341 

 Neil began his forestry training and career in Great Britain, going to Aberdeen University and getting his BSc Hons. in Forestry in 1987 before working in forest management in central Scotland for over seven years.

Since moving to BC in 1994 Neil has worked for WFP and Weyerhaeuser mostly in silviculture and planning roles, with an emphasis on creating innovative solutions to forestry problems brought on by his focus in deciduous management. Dealing with industry, government and First Nations Neil has built a breadth of experience in landscape and stand level management that includes working on new legislation, providing education on forest management topics and working with Provincial specialist groups. His work with red alder over ten years has resulted in not only an exceptional understanding of intensive and extensive management options for deciduous and mixed stands but an ability to look for out of the box solutions to forestry issues. A large component of his work has focused on riparian area management and specialized in finding economic options to fund the work within existing regulations.

Neil is now the Forestry Program Director for Ecotrust Canada where he is working on creating a new business model for forest management in coastal ecosystems which is driven by a value proposition rather than maximizing the timber volume harvested. A major focus is in integrating ecological goods and services into mainstream forest management and as such the role of forest carbon is a critical step. Ecotrust has modeled timber and carbon flows in an effort to find an optimized business scenario to meet multiple objectives on both private timberlands and crown TFLs. An important part of this process is staying current on the rapidly evolving carbon offset markets, the development of new protocols and methodologies and identifying real barriers to implementation of carbon offset management in our forests. Understanding the relationship between extended rotations and improving timber grades and increasing values is an important aspect in Ecotrusts’ work. Neil worked extensively within a MoF/ENGO working group in late 2009 on helping formulate the list of forest activities that should be considered for inclusion in a provincial forest carbon offset strategy.