July 15, 2020 Jennifer Skene
When it comes to addressing climate change, Canada has a forest-sized blind spot. A new report, The Logging Loophole: How the Logging Industry’s Unregulated Carbon Emissions Undermine Canada’s Climate Goals, from NRDC, Environmental Defence Canada, and Nature Canada outlines a dangerous “logging loophole” in Canadian policy that is allowing the logging industry to escape regulation and scrutiny for its toll on the climate-critical boreal forest. Through enabling the logging industry to unleash unregulated, undercounted carbon emissions into the atmosphere, this loophole is putting at risk Canada’s climate commitments and global efforts to secure a livable planet for future generations.
Industrial Logging’s Climate Impact
The Canadian boreal forest is a global climate linchpin, storing twice as much carbon as the entire world’s oil reserves. This carbon-dense forest, which is also home to over 600 Indigenous communities and treasured species like the boreal caribou, plays a central role in the carbon cycle, making its protection an international concern.
Yet each year, the logging industry clearcuts over a million acres of this forest to make products like toilet paper, newsprint, and lumber. Despite its reputation for sustainability, Canada has the third-highest rate of intact forest loss in the world, behind only Russia and Brazil. In addition to its impact on wildlife, this industrial logging exacerbates global climate change. Logging reduces the forest’s capacity to continue absorbing carbon for years as the trees regrow. It also turns the boreal’s vast carbon vault into a climate liability, flooding the atmosphere with carbon that had previously been locked up in the boreal ecosystem.
Underreported Emissions
Canada reports each year on emissions from its managed forests, using a model that inputs logging data from provinces and industry. Unfortunately, growing evidence shows that this model is downplaying logging’s true climate impact. In addition to the fact that the model employs conservative assumptions about the rate of soil carbon loss and does not incorporate the climate impact of carbon loss from mosses, the model, in alignment with industry claims, oversells how well the forest is recovering following logging.
For years, provinces and industry have claimed that for every tree cut down, another one is regrown. Yet a study from Canadian NGO Wildlands League has shown that, across 27 clearcuts in northern Ontario, an average of 14 percent of the impacted area remains essentially barren, even two or three decades after being clearcut. These “logging scars” are due to logging roads and “landings,” where logs and unwanted logging residue are processed with heavy equipment and stacked, compacting the earth and suppressing regrowth. Because there is no sign that forests will return to these scarred areas before the next logging cycle, they are, for all intents and purposes, deforested.
Canada’s carbon reporting does not account for these logging scars which, assuming the current rate of deforestation continues, by 2030 will have reduced the forest’s climate mitigation potential by a total of 41 million metric tons of CO2. If this trend holds true elsewhere in the boreal, the climate impact will be even greater.
This undercounting, plus an overemphasis on the role of long-lived harvested wood products (HWP) fuels the logging industry’s dangerous claims that it is, in fact, a climate solution.
Regulatory Exemptions
At the same time, the logging loophole exempts the logging industry from paying for its climate impact. Canada has a carbon pricing regime, the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, in place to regulate fossil fuel emissions, but it does not extend to the logging industry. While a ton of carbon will cost the fossil fuel industry C$50 by 2022, the logging industry’s carbon impacts have no such penalty. As a result, the industry is able to offload the social and economic cost of its sizable emissions onto the rest of the world.
The lack of carbon pricing for the logging industry also means there are no direct financial incentives in place to drive climate-friendlier forestry or the protection of carbon-rich intact forests. Unlike the fossil fuel industry, logging is not inherently incompatible with the global target of achieving a 1.5° C future. However, the industry’s practices need to change dramatically to become sustainable. Implementing a price on logging’s carbon impact would propel the industry to adopt these climate-friendlier practices including longer harvest rotations, avoiding intact forests, and ending full-tree logging. Canada could then invest revenue from pricing forestry emissions into other critical climate measures including reversing forest degradation, research and monitoring, and expanding economic alternatives for communities.
Closing the Loophole
Canada is in a strong position to lead on nature-based climate solutions. Its recent investments in Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas and Indigenous Guardians programs were groundbreaking achievements, and Canada should continue to prioritize of Indigenous-led management. This, however, needs to happen alongside a policy regime that actually holds industry accountable and reins in its unsustainable practices.
The atmosphere, unfortunately, does not recognize creative accounting or differentiate between logging’s carbon emissions and fossil fuel impacts. Continuing to sweep logging’s toll on the climate under the rug is perpetuating dangerous industry practices that threaten climate catastrophe. Scientists around the world have called for transformative change to avoid an unthinkable climate future. Industrial logging can align with a sustainable reality, but it, too, needs to transform. Closing Canada’s logging loophole will catalyze that change, ensuring the boreal forest is protected as one of the world’s greatest climate allies.
Jennifer Skene
Natural Climate Solutions Policy Manager, International Program
Originally published by the Natural Resources Defense Council blog – https://www.nrdc.org/experts/jennifer-skene/canadas-logging-loophole-undermines-climate-goals
Protect Our Forest 