Barking up the wrong tree in old-growth controversy? The value of young forests compared with old growth is understated, say some experts. (stockstudioX/iStock/Getty Images Plus stock photo)
Nelson Bennett/Glacier Media
In the lead-up to last fall’s announcement that the B.C. government will defer logging on 2.6 million hectares of old-growth forest, the conversation was sometimes muddied with invocations of “deforestation” and climate change as reasons to halt logging of old-growth forests in B.C. Whereas the argument 20 years ago was that West Coast old-growth and primary boreal forests in Eastern Canada should be spared from logging for biodiversity reasons, climate change and the role forests play as carbon sinks has increasingly been cited
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by environmentalists as a reason to make old-growth and primary forests off limits to logging. While there are good scientifically grounded arguments for preserving as much old growth as possible (keeping carbon in the bank), there are equally sound arguments that younger, sustainably managed working forests are better carbon sinks over the longer term. Bigger concerns from a climate change perspective are forest fires, which can turn a forest from a carbon sink to a carbon source overnight, and the amount of wood debris that is wasted in logging operations.
When Canada last week signed a pledge to end deforestation by 2030 at COP26, environmental groups like Stand.earth were quick to point to the pledge in demanding that B.C. deliver on its promise to halt old-growth logging. But cutting down trees to make wood products and replanting the trees that were cut is not deforestation. Quite the opposite: sustainable forestry has the potential to increase forest carbon sinks, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). “A sustainable forest management strategy aimed at maintaining or increasing forest carbon stocks, while producing an
annual sustained yield of timber, fibre or energy from the forest, will generate the largest sustained mitigation benefit,” the IPCC Working Group 3 said in its section on forests. Deforestation is the permanent removal of trees – either through illegal logging or to clear land for development or agriculture – the consequences of which are the permanent loss of carbon sinks. But logging per se is not deforestation if the trees that are cut down are replanted, which is what happens in Canada’s managed forests. One of the benefits of forestry, from a climate change perspective, is that INDUSTRY & TRADES | WINTER/SPRING 2022
