Document Actions
1. The Challenge
The Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change asserts with very high confidence that most of the recent global climate change is due to human activities; the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, and agriculture have caused increased releases of ‘greenhouse gases’. Most recently, the role of emissions from deforestation and land degradation (e.g., logging) has been better understood by the international community with a corresponding recognition that reducing these emissions is a key component of an integrated climate action strategy.
Logging old-growth forests and converting primary forests into industrially-managed forests releases huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year in BC: 72.7 megatonnes in 2007 alone, according to the BC’s Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report released this summer. Even heavily discounting this figure to take into account carbon that may be stored in lasting wood products, it would appear that our status quo approach to forest management in BC is a losing proposition from a carbon stewardship perspective.
And logging presents a further blow to forest ecosystems: Ecosystems that are fragmented and degraded, simplified or stressed by human activities are much less resilient to climate change than intact, functional, natural ecosystems (e.g., less equipped to survive infestations, support native species and withstand increased disturbances such as severe weather and fires). Enhanced protection of natural ecosystems is thus essential to give native species of plants and animals a fighting chance in the face of climate change.
Unfortunately, BC’s forest tenure system was designed in a much earlier era to encourage large-scale industrial exploration of our forests. There is an urgent need for British Columbia to take a hard look at the science and to reassess our land use choices in the face of climate change.