With Canada warming at twice the rate as the rest of the world, the UN climate talks confirmed that we are expected to cross the critical 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold. Scientists understand this should be avoided at all costs. In the near term (2021-2040), they do not expect that nations will meet the 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius targets.

Climate change is causing pervasive and potentially irreversible impacts on ecosystems and people. Of the anthropogenic contribution to atmospheric CO2 since 1870, 26% is due to emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. It is now accepted that actions that avoid emissions from the land sector, especially forests, and maximize removals of greenhouse gases are critical if the goals of the UNFCCC Paris Agreement are to be achieved.

We will never fully understand ecosystems or how much they can be put under stress before they collapse. Science gives us some direction and we need to translate that understanding into practice while leaving room for error in the face of uncertainty. Forestry is a major driver in the shift of British Columbia’s, and Canada’s forests from carbon sinks to carbon sources.

While wildfires may make up the largest part of that shift - logging, slash burning, and the production of short-lived wood products are significant contributors to forests being the single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions of any economic sector in BC. Clear-cuts and tree plantations are also highly flammable and increase wildfire risk and cause large, intense wildfires.

Per capita emissions in BC are historically amongst the worst in the world. B.C. emitted 68.5 megatons in 2018 as part of B.C.’s official emissions in the provincial greenhouse gas inventories. But it doesn’t include emissions caused by logging from roughly 250,000 hectares of forests each year. In 2018 the Province put “forest management” emissions at 237 megatonnes and went through its entire 29-year carbon budget.

80 percent of which occurs so BC can export forest products to support economic growth in China, Japan and the USA. The USA and China are the planet’s worst emitters. Japan is fifth on that list. Over the last two decades, the once great carbon sink has steadily drained away. It's now gone. The balance of the forest has tipped to emitting CO2 instead.

During the 1990s, Canada's managed forest removed an average of 160 million tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) per year from the atmosphere. The tipping point occurred when the green line plunged past zero and turned red. In 2019, our managed forest released an average of 24 MtCO2 per year into the atmosphere during the 2010s. For scale, that's five tons of CO2 per Canadian per year — double the emissions from all our passenger cars and trucks.

Such a huge new flood of CO2 into our already destabilized climate is bad news. Bad news for Canada's plans to use forest “offsets" to green-light extra fossil fuel burning and for our logging industry's plans to continue selling their wood as a climate-safe and climate-sustainable carbon product.

In an effort to bolster the collapsing carbon sink, Ottawa announced a "Two Billion Trees" initiative. It’s needed, but pales in comparison to the scale and pace of the problem. 

Scientists predict that increasing temperatures and changes in weather patterns associated with climate change will drastically affect Canada’s forests in the near future. With the rate of projected climate change expected to be 10 to 100 times faster than the ability of forests to adapt naturally.

Local seedlings used to be best adapted to the climate conditions of the site. However, with a rapidly changing climate, these local populations may not be able to adapt quickly enough, and while well-established adult trees can often withstand increased stress, seedlings are highly vulnerable. 

The carbon harvested from the forest is exempted from Canada's carbon tax and from Canada's climate pollution targets. Their wood products have been viewed as "carbon neutral", giving them a marketplace advantage over alternatives that lack a free CO2 cleanup. But the climate doesn't care if the excess CO2 piling up in the atmosphere comes from ancient plants, like coal, or from living ones, like logged wood.

In fact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says burning wood is even more climate polluting than burning coal, per unit of heat. Roughly a third of the wood logged in Canada gets burned for fuel. Carbon in dead wood will remain out of the atmosphere much longer than if it is chipped, turned into pellets, and burned as biofuel.

Researchers have calculated that ending deforestation and degradation by allowing mature forests to keep growing could enable forests to take up twice as much carbon. Live and dead trees, along with forest soil, hold the equivalent of 80% of all the carbon currently in Earth’s atmosphere.

Like so many of the planet's great ecosystems, Canada's managed forest is suffering from aggressive land use combined with human-created climate impacts.

Carbon Sequestration and Storage

Our mountainous and forested ecosystems of coastal British Columbia have a mild and moist climate and are home to some of the tallest trees in the world.

These old growth forests are incredibly important to carbon storage and biodiversity. This is important because it controls processes that regulate climate change.

The trees in this region store the highest amount of plant carbon (more than 5.5 kg of carbon in every square metre, on average) compared to other landscapes. That’s 1,000 tonnes of carbon per hectare, more than what is stored in the tropical rainforests of the Amazon.

Like a carbon bank, accumulating carbon in soil, trees and organic matter over millennia within the layer of humus or rich forest soils, anchored by networks of symbiotic roots, fungi and microbes on the forest floor.

Forest scientist Dr. Susan Simard measured rich soil in Fairy Creek that reached an entire meter in depth. In comparison, the soil layer in a nearby second-growth forest was only 33 cm. And at a third-growth seedling plantation, only 4 cm of soil remained.

About 70% of the carbon stored in trees and earth is lost when these forests are logged. Some regrowth does occur during each logging cycle but the cyclical peaks in biomass typically do not return to pre- logging levels. 

As forest patches are fragmented by industrial logging, the area exposed to edge effects from average 25% less biomass carbon. More faunal complexity helps carbon storage and sequestration. 

Large old growth trees that are in so-called “Maintenance Mode” (not growing as fast as young trees) still put on more wood through carbon sequestration than the young fast-growing trees. For carbon sequestration, size does matter. Trees and plants are the best natural CO2 storage systems and best nature based solution to climate change and global warming that we have. 

We like to imagine that climate change will eventually be solved via grand mobilizations of futuristic technology. Scientists are racing to build machines that pull carbon from the air, powered by cables, servers and gas cylinders.

But billions of needles and leaves already do that - day in and day out. Through the magic that is photosynthesis, trees build themselves from almost nothing, transforming sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water into millions of tons of biomass—approximately half of which is pure carbon, locked safely away from the atmosphere. Old trees, by virtue of their age and size, can hold far more carbon than anybody else.

This “technology” and the hundreds of tons of carbon locked away in their massive trunks works year-round, runs on solar power, and creates all of this from thin air. We have no technology that could do this. The DNA on this landscape has done this. Essentially for free, our forests remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and have a much greater TIME VALUE now and in the crucial next three decades than anticipated.

If Teal Jones had performed as well in the first 8 months of 2021 as did other coastal logging companies, the carbon emissions associated with its logging would have been approximately 692,000 tonnes higher than they were. (See the methodology we used for this calculation.)

That’s roughly equivalent to 70 percent of the emissions attributable to annual cement production in BC, and it’s equivalent to taking 150,000 typical passenger vehicles off the road for a year in BC.

For decades we’ve been planting trees in hopes of reducing carbon pollution. Watch Beverly Law and her groundbreaking research with Oregon State University’s Department of Forestry to see what we can learn about forest carbon sinks in the Pacific Northwest forests of Oregon .

With the disappearance of glaciers leading to the disappearance of streams and reduction of mighty rivers, ecosystems are mere shadows of what they were only a few years ago. With temperatures reaching 50 degrees Celsius it is endangering the survival of both plants and wildlife.

Mean warming due to land cover change may explain as much as 18% of current global warming trends, exerting an influence on warming at the local scale by altering rainfall and water availability. Everywhere on this planet, the optimal temperature for photosynthesis is 21 degrees Celsius. – land temperature. Plants regulate their environment by orienting and releasing aerosols to maintain photosynthesis.

Below that temperature plants can slow down and close down to retain hydric cell environments and maintain life, until conditions to restart return. Above that plants are stressed to retain the necessary hydric conditions for photosynthesis and cellular integrity. All around the world trees and forest ecosystems are showing signs of heat stress, which is part of a global forest dieback.

Forest-driven water and energy cycles are poorly integrated into regional and provincial climate change adaptation, mitigation with land use and water management.

This constrains our ability to protect our planet’s climate and life-sustaining functions. Forest, water and energy interactions provide the foundations for carbon storage, for cooling terrestrial surfaces and for distributing water resources. Forests and trees must be recognized as prime regulators within the water, energy and carbon cycles. 

When intact forests are cleared or degraded, there is a reduction in cloud cover and rainfall. Degradation and loss of intact forest can increase the number of dry and hot days, decrease daily rainfall intensity and wet day rainfall, and increase drought duration during El Niño years.

Intact forests have a positive effect on the redistribution of runoff, stabilize water table levels and retain soil moisture by altering soil permeability. These processes interact with physiography to regulate the flow distribution of energy and materials across the land surface and help stabilize slopes, prevent water and wind erosion, and regulate the transport of nutrients and sediments. Non-degraded forests diminish the impact of heavy rain events by decreasing runoff and reducing the negative consequences of climate extremes.

Of the water that falls to the terrestrial surface as precipitation each year, less than a half (39%) comes from the ocean while the majority derives from the land. Most terrestrial precipitation depends on moisture derived from land. They photosynthesize, hold water and drive chemical cycles essential to life.

It is a living biome shaped by its waters and snows that support specialized vegetation which in turn releases the aerosols that give us “mountain highs” and create its winds and rains and microclimates. What happens when these essential elements reach their tolerance limits and disappear?

When logging removes old forest from the landscape, the ancient groves are gone forever. The stands originated under a climate regime that no longer exists. Their canopies modified the microclimate at ground level, buffering the understory from the gradual climate changes that took place during the centuries that they stood.

Even when the macroclimate ceased to be conducive to their growth, the stands survived because of the sheltered environment they created for their roots, soils and understories. There will never again be the climatic conditions that started those old forests, or what they created in their sub-canopies, climate stability and ecological predictability are gone. That’s why First Nation Leaders, Scientists and the global community are calling for an end to all Old Growth logging. These are the last remnants of ancient ecosystems. 

Research shows that climate change turns many of the assumptions that have guided land use planning throughout the twentieth century on their head. We assumed that the world changed slowly. It no longer does.

We also assumed that we could save and preserve static areas of land that would not change for generations to come. Moving forward protected-area targets could be undermined by climate change-driven shifts in ecoregions and biomes. 

Conservation plans based on current geographic patterns of biodiversity may be insufficient to support future biota and natural processes and may fail to afford species access to suitable climates as the Earth warms. 

Dynamic planning means connecting the landscape so that species are provided with the opportunity to move to analog habitats. Parks in BC are physically isolated units because clearcutting has all too frequently been carried out right to their borders.

Biologically, these areas are regionally disconnected by surrounding clear cut operations which have destroyed even the soil fungal networks which would normally provide nutrient avenues for species shifts.

If we are serious about addressing the dangers that climate change poses, we need to restore soil carbon networks and the biodiversity networks that depend on them. 

The overriding concern with climate change alters the social, political and economic priorities. The lead in planning with “Forests, Lands and Natural Resources Operations” can no longer be forestry and the timber industry, but the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change. 

To be serious about assuming that role it needs to be able to map species biodiversity in the parks and ecological reserves beyond the boundaries of conventional institutional thinking and capabilities that are beholden to government and industry.

We need to think differently about geographical boundaries as well as institutional boundaries. The latter requires rethinking the abusive world of institutional privilege. Currently the Chief Forester does not include consequences of climate change as part the determinations for the Annual Allowable Cut (ACC). Long term 250 years projections of timber growth are based on the assumption of a predictable climate. 

The destabilizing consequences of climate change makes these projections false. This reality casts further doubt on the validity of the timber supply analysts’ estimates of future growth and yield. As the science evolves we now know Forests in BC have continually been improving genetically and the complexity of the structures since the last ice age, and present our greatest defence in the midst of global climate change.