Forest fires burn hectares of forest, which has an impact on the calculation of forest potentials. Each hectare of burned forest reduces the forest potential by about one to two cubic metres, not for one year, but for 75 to 100 years. The millions of hectares of forest that have burned in recent years therefore represent a loss of millions of cubic metres of forest potential, that is, wood volume that will not be harvested in future years. That's huge.
In Quebec, where approximately 20 million cubic metres of wood are harvested each year, forest potential is down by about one million cubic metres. This means that 5% of the forest potential has gone up in smoke—no pun intended—for a long time to come.
In the past, provincial foresters, such as those in Quebec and British Columbia, did not factor in the effect of future forest fires when calculating forest potential. Today, they are required to take forest fires into account, knowing full well that, due to climate change, we don't know where fires will occur, but we do know they will occur and will have a negative impact on forest potential. Foresters predict this impact and reduce forest potential even before a fire occurs.
In short, repeated forest fires have a very significant impact on harvesting potential.