By Julia Barnes, Marketing and Communications Assistant
Slash piled: A recent cut along Moose Lake Road near Normandy block in North-western Ontario.
Image courtesy Wildlands League
This is part two of our blog post on the forest fires happening right now in Canada. The impact of these fires have been felt across the continent, mainly in air quality. However these fires are interconnected to many other environmental issues like logging, deforestation and embodied carbon.
In this second part, we continue to chat with some experts who look to shine some light on the complex issue.
“Canada admits to almost zero emissions from forestry,” says Janet Sumner, executive director of Wildlands League.
A report by Nature Canada, Environmental Defence, and NRDC found that Canada is releasing 75 mega-tonnes of carbon dioxide from logging. That’s roughly equal to the emissions from Canada’s tar sands operations and higher than emissions from electricity generation.
However, on paper, those emissions don’t exist.
Rather than reporting direct emissions, as is done for almost all other sectors, the emissions from logging are handled as a “net flux,” combining the effects of natural processes with industrial activity. Canada is giving itself credit for the carbon in forests it doesn’t cut, using that to mask emissions from logging.
The government doesn’t attribute wildfire emissions to the logging industry, but gives the industry credit for carbon stored when a forest regrows after a fire, even if human activity played no part in the forest’s recovery.
There are also a number of problems with the model used by the federal government to estimate logging emissions. It doesn’t account for the carbon released from soils, logging roads, or failed regrowth. It assumes that second-growth forests are the same as primary forests, when in reality, second-growth has reduced capacity to sequester carbon.
Failing to account for the emissions from the logging sector is a glaring omission in Canada’s climate policy. “It’s a huge problem,” says Sumner. “What we don't count, we can't change.”
Canada does not regulate logging emissions because the industry’s climate impact has been downplayed and buried within the “combined net flux” of all managed forests.
Canada also claims to have “no net deforestation”, but Sumner explains there’s a problem with the way Canada monitors forests through aerial imagery.
Canada currently uses a 30 metre resolution which doesn’t show enough detail to pick up the deforestation caused by logging roads, landings, and slash piles. “A 4 to 10 metre resolution would allow you to see how much of the forest is not coming back,” says Sumner.
Drone imagery depicting the impacts of heavy machinery on land.
Image courtesy Wildlands League
To investigate deforestation, Wildlands League studied images from over 290 sites in Ontario where logging roads, landings, and slash piles have caused deforestation. Many of these sites have been left for 30 years, and significant areas have still not regrown.
“It ranged from as little as 10% all the way to 24%, but the average was 14.2% that didn’t come back,” says Sumner.
The initial research involved looking at aerial images and calculating what percentage of the area had logging scars. This was followed up by visits to 27 representative sites. “You could really get a sense of just how much tree regeneration had been smothered,” says Sumner.
Roads covered with aggregate compacted the soil, creating areas inhospitable to plant growth. There were also slash piles, sometimes up to 10 feet high, preventing trees from coming back.
Sumner explains that other measures of forest health aren’t assessed in the study. Factors like thinning or changes in the composition of trees may be important areas for future research.
“We have a growing carbon debt from clear cutting,” Says Sumner. “In Ontario, we're pushing logging to the furthest limit, the furthest away from a mill that we possibly can. It's going into areas that are as carbon-dense as the Amazon.”
The red colour is showcasing forest loss between the years 2000 to 2022.
Image courtesy Global Land Analysis and Discovery
Canada is still expanding logging into new intact areas. “We should stop that immediately,” says Sumner, “We should never open up a new intact area. If logging was truly sustainable, we should be able to keep logging the existing areas and not have to keep expanding.”