New Report Reveals Protection of Ontario’s Intact Boreal Forest Critical In Fight To Stave Off Global Warming
TORONTO – Failure to change logging practices and protect Ontario’s intact boreal forest will dangerously accelerate climate change, Forest Ethics announced today in a new cutting edge report. The report, Robbing the Carbon Bank: Global Warming and Ontario’s Forests [pdf], details how logging the intact boreal forest is escalating carbon dioxide levels and increasing global warming.
Robbing the Carbon Bank represents the first comprehensive attempt to expose the impacts of logging Ontario’s intact boreal forest on global warming. The report is expected to increase pressure on the Ontario government to deliver on its promise of protecting Ontario’s Boreal forest through planning prior to developing in the north, and through setting aside key areas of Boreal forest as both carbon storehouses as well as habitat of critical declining species such as caribou.
“Protecting our Boreal forests must be a key component of any government climate plan,” said ForestEthics’ Strategic Director, Tzeporah Berman. “Logging forests in Canada releases more greenhouse gases than the use of all of Canada’s passenger vehicles. We need to stop this wholesale looting of our common carbon bank if we want to mitigate global warming.”
The report’s findings include the following:
- Logging in Ontario releases an estimated 4 Mt C (15 Mt CO2) per year, or 19 tonnes of carbon per hectare.1 That is roughly equivalent to the carbon emitted from all light-duty gas-powered trucks in the province and 7% of Ontario’s total GHG emissions.
- Canada’s boreal forests store a whopping 47.5 billion tons of carbon -- 7 times the entire world’s fossil fuel emissions- a giant carbon bank account.
- According to the Stern report, released in Britain in November of 2006: “Action to preserve remaining areas of natural forest is urgent.”2
“As Premier McGuinty has noted, our economic future is tied to our ecological prosperity,” said Berman. “Through strong environmental leadership we can capture growing green markets for forest products and protect our climate, air and water for our children and grandchildren.”
The report advises the immediate:
- Protection of forest ecosystems in Ontario’s boreal forests with a priority on intact, old forests and critical species habitat such as caribou range;
- Implementation of ecologically sound land use planning (LUP) processes that honour aboriginal rights and account for global warming prior to development;
- Growth of recycled and re-used wood and paper products;
- Development of longer harvest rotations for optimal forest age for forest carbon storage, and use of less intensive harvest techniques to protect soil carbon stores; and the reduction of opportunities for fires in forest ecosystems;
- Introduction of carbon-sequestering forest management practices on second growth forests.
1Environment Canada. 2006. National Inventory Report: Greenhouse Gas Sources and Sinks in Canada 1990-2004. Submission to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. April 2006 Advance Copy.
Logging in Canada releases on average 33 Mt of carbon (122 Mt CO2) into the atmosphere each year, which is equivalent to 16 percent of Canada’s total GHG emissions. Ontario’s share of that is an estimated 12.3 per cent, or 4 Mt C (15 Mt CO2) per year (19 tonnes of carbon per hectare). Ontario’s annual GHG emissions are 203 Mt C02 therefore logging is equivalent to 7 percent of Ontario’s total GHG emissions. According to current IPCC 2003 methodology, emissions from forest management comprise all the CO2-C contained in harvested roundwood and harvest residues. All carbon transferred out of managed forests as wood products is deemed an immediate emission.
2Stern, N. et al. 2006. Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change.
