Managed to death: How Canada turned its forests into a carbon bomb
thebulletin.org
thebulletin.org
However, the worst of the forest fires this year were in pristine untouched forests in areas experiencing extreme weather as predicted by scientists. Many were basically impossible to fight.
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/21/1188618934/canada-wildfires-a...
‘Canada is the second-largest country in the world, and almost half of that is forest," Barber said. "A lot of that forest is remote, untouched wilderness, and it's very difficult to manage wildfire in those areas where there is no road access or any of the infrastructure needed to support firefighting activity."’
The satellite mapping analysis led by Peter Potapov, an associate professor of geographical sciences at the University of Maryland, showed that over 104 million hectares of the world's remaining intact forests — an area about the size of Ontario — were degraded between 2000 and 2013. Such forests are considered degraded when they are broken up or fragmented into smaller pieces that are no longer the same kind of ecosystem. Sizer called the amount of degradation a "shocking number."
Canada accounts for 21% of global degradation
"Canada is the country with the largest share of intact forest degradation in the world. It's No. 1 on the list," Sizer said.
https://www.globalforestwatch.org/blog/people/partner-post-f...
In Canada, logging is the single biggest driver. 60 percent of the degraded areas (129,487 km2) were inside of forest tenures allocated to companies for logging. Petroleum and natural gas development, including oil and gas facilities, pipelines, wells and seismic lines, was a distant but significant secondary driver, responsible for 6 percent (13,344 km2) of the reduction.
https://theconversation.com/the-future-is-uncertain-for-our-...
The issue at stake is not so much the loss of forests, but rather, the loss of intact forests, i.e. forests where no harvesting activities have ever taken place. ... Canada ranks third in the world for the rate of loss of its intact forests.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, much of Canada’s intact boreal landscape consisted of forests that had not burned for centuries. These are often referred to as “old growth” forests.
As far as the forester — whose main objective is to harvest wood — is concerned, allowing a forest to age amounts to a loss of wood. That’s because it is more efficient to cut forests early and frequently in order to take advantage of the strong growth of young trees. As a result, since the beginning of the industrial era, most harvesting of intact boreal forests has targeted old-growth forests with the objective of replacing them with younger forests. This drastically reduces the surface area and connectivity of old-growth forests. While they originally formed large continuous clumps, the old-growth forests that remain in managed areas now form small clusters separated from each other.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/sfu-old-grow...
Logging industry targeted B.C. old-growth forests for more than a century, SFU study finds
Ken Lertzman's paper shows between 1860 and 2016, 87 per cent of logging took place in old-growth forests
https://news.mongabay.com/2022/09/british-columbia-delays-pr...
In 2020, the NDP released optimistic estimates claiming that of BC’s 57.2 million hectares (221,000) square miles) of forest, some 23% (13.2 million hectares, or 51,000 square miles) of what was still standing was old growth.
Using that same data, Price, Daust and Holt distinguished vulnerable, tall old growth in rich ecosystems from stunted, sparse old growth on rocky, alpine mountainsides and forest bogs in unproductive ecosystems. Their findings were alarming: Less than 1% of big treed old growth remained in BC as of two years ago, or roughly 400,000 hectares (1,544 square miles) scattered in ecosystem fragments along the province’s coast and interior.
Reduced Moisture Retention: In primeval forests with a diverse canopy and understory, vegetation layers can help retain moisture. This moisture can act as a natural barrier to fire spread. In smaller and less complex forests, where these moisture-retaining layers might be lacking, the absence of this protective moisture can make the forest more susceptible to ignition and rapid fire growth.
Drying Effect: Wind can accelerate the evaporation of moisture from vegetation, soil, and other materials on the forest floor. In smaller and less complex forests, where there might be fewer layers of vegetation to provide shade and retain moisture, the drying effect of wind can be more pronounced. This makes the forest and its potential fuel sources more susceptible to ignition.
Lack of Windbreaks: Primeval forests often have natural windbreaks created by the complex arrangement of trees and vegetation. These windbreaks can slow down the spread of fires by reducing the speed of the wind at ground level. In contrast, smaller and fragmented forests might lack these windbreaks, allowing the wind to move more freely and potentially fan the flames.
Rapid Fire Spread: Wind can carry embers and sparks over longer distances, effectively "spotting" fires ahead of the main blaze. This can result in the rapid spread of fires, even across natural firebreaks like roads or rivers. In primeval forests with a more complex structure, the presence of various vegetation layers can impede the spread of embers, reducing the likelihood of spot fires.
Increased Fire Intensity: Wind can cause fires to burn more intensely by supplying oxygen to the flames and by pushing the fire front faster. In smaller and more open forests, this increased intensity can lead to more destructive fires that burn hotter and spread more quickly.
Drying of Fuels: Wind can accelerate the drying of dead leaves, branches, and other forest debris, making them more flammable. This increases the availability of fuel for fires, making ignition more likely and contributing to the intensity of the fire.
Other aspects:
Forest Structure: Unmanaged primeval forests have a more diverse and complex structure. They typically have a variety of plant species at different heights and stages of growth, creating a multi-layered canopy and understory. This complex structure can slow down the spread of fires by acting as barriers, reducing the availability of continuous fuels.
Fuel Accumulation: In managed, degraded, and fragmented forests, human activities often lead to the accumulation of dead wood, dry leaves, and other combustible materials. These materials serve as fuel for fires, making it easier for flames to spread quickly.
Monoculture Plantations: Some managed forests are composed of monoculture plantations, where a single species is planted in rows. Monocultures lack the biodiversity that primeval forests possess, which means that if the planted species is susceptible to fire, the entire plantation becomes highly vulnerable.
Invasive Species: Degraded and fragmented forests are more prone to invasion by non-native, invasive plant species that can increase the fuel load and alter the fire dynamics. These invasive plants often have higher flammability and can spread fires more rapidly.
Lack of Natural Disturbance: Primeval forests have evolved with natural disturbances like fires, which are often of lower intensity and occur in a mosaic pattern. These natural disturbances create breaks in fuel continuity and prevent large-scale, catastrophic fires. In contrast, fire suppression efforts in managed forests can lead to the accumulation of fuels and more intense fires when they do occur.
Fragmentation: Fragmented forests have smaller, isolated patches of vegetation separated by non-forested areas. This can create pathways for fires to easily spread from one patch to another, as well as limit the ability of animals to move away from the fire, further exacerbating the spread.
Human Activities: Human activities, such as logging, road construction, and agricultural expansion, can alter the natural landscape and increase the risk of fires. Roads can act as fire corridors, and logging can leave behind debris that acts as fuel.
Fire Suppression: Ironically, fire suppression efforts in managed forests can lead to the accumulation of combustible materials over time. When fires are prevented from occurring naturally or are quickly suppressed, fuel loads increase, making future fires more intense and difficult to control.
Climate Change: While not specific to managed forests, the increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires can be exacerbated by climate change. Higher temperatures, prolonged droughts, and altered precipitation patterns can create conditions that make fires more likely to start and spread.
- ChatGPT
Sure, both contain trees, but the plantation is a monoculture, with all the problems that brings. Also, the trees are not allowed to mature - they are harvested as soon as they reach a certain size.
If you removed plantations from the listed forests, people would be shocked. Actual, natural forest? There isn't really all that much of it...
Not mentioning that the old discarded branches from the original logging are left behind to bake in the sun for 2-3 years before replanting which don’t really decay very fast
For the first 10-20 years after logging an old cut block is like a pile of very dry fuel
To be clear, clear cutting is a horrible practice, as is mono-culture planting.
Can you quantify "not really much"? Because I don't think you're correct; I think that Canada has tons of natural forest.
The rest of the 3.47 million km2 is located in more remote and northern areas and often relatively undisturbed by human activity. Accessibility is the distinction, not if it's a plantation or not.
[1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/16-201-x/2018001/sec-2-e...
Don't forget that trees in Canada grow slowly compared to for example trees in a jungle.
The vast majority of Canadian forests are not plantations and are, in fact, actual natural forest.
In fact, we learned our lessons about "mono-culture tree plantations" in the 80s and a lot of replanting is mixed except in areas that already had naturally occurring mono-cultures.
"Commercial" means that it is privately owned and can possibly be logged. Not that it has been logged and replanted.
Calling large swaths of forest that have never been logged in human history "tree plantations" because they can be legally harvested at some point is, at best, disingenuous.
It seems at first to be making simple point 'logging bad'.
But then makes point that logging pre-1990 was 'carbon neutral', and post-1990 the forest has dramatically switched to producing carbon.
It doesn't make a clear point on how logging from 1990's to present changed to cause more of a problem, or how logging can change to compensate.
So is it the logging?
Then finally makes point that the changing climate has caused forest to not grow back, and/or to be dryer. So hotter dryer climate has impacted forest, not some recent change in how logging is done.
It is a feedback problem.
So it is really the combined cycle, climate change is impacting the forest, so forest is not rebounding from logging like it did in the 90s.
From Article:
"You can see how back in the 1990s, logging extracted about the same amount (brown) as the forest grew back (green). Maybe that could be considered carbon-neutral, depending on the conditions.
But during the 2000s, logging extracted twice as much carbon as grew back. And since then, we’ve been logging a forest that isn’t growing back at all. That isn’t carbon-neutral."
When we replant forests immediately with monoculture of pine/fir/spruce it unfortunately leaves out a lot that a true forest requires and the resulting land will be less ecologically productive and every time the same region is re-logged a good amount of topsoil is lost
Some parts of Vancouver island can be logged cyclically every 25-30 years since there’s so much rain and it’s incredibly warm through the winter
You are hard pressed to find a single acre in southern Canada that wasn’t logged at least once
It’s clear that the industry will not slow production I wonder what it would cost to do replanting properly though e.g. re fill land with a diverse plant selection and mandate a minimum 100-150 years in between cuts
But alas I am not sure
What is a "true" forest? When a forest burns down and regrows, is it still "true"? Do you think that's better than logging and replanting?
Without that it’s more or less a wheat field in ecological terms it’s just a monoculture of trees which actually don’t draw down much carbon until the forest is mature ~200 years or so whenever there’s enough ecological productivity to bury dead trees before they can fully decay
Is it too unprofitable to cut trees selectively, drag/lift those out, leaving the forest as a whole (+ ecosystems in it) mostly in place? Let nature decide which species fill the gaps.
At least this would prevent loss of topsoil.
The title of the original article in the National Observer[1] is "Our forests have reached a tipping point" which is much less editorialized.
This new title implies that the management is the problem when, in actuality, it's the lack of "growth" caused by massive loss due to fire, insect, disease etc. I'm not sure why these losses are worded as a lack of growth in the article.
I'm also unsure why the article is trying to imply logging is the bulk of the problem ... for instance, in 2015, we had the following statistics from Stats Canada[2]
3,470,000 km2 total forest
176,318 km2 insect losses (5.1%, bark beetle being the worst culprit)
38,616 km2 fire losses (1.1%)
7,796 km2 logged (0.2%)
360 km2 converted (0.01%, agriculture, mining, expansion, etc.)
[1] https://www.nationalobserver.com/2023/08/21/analysis/our-for...
[2] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/180314/dq180...
These forests have been logged multiple times over history, and many were replanted with terrible replanting practices.
1. Monoculture, with a focus on economic species. This means that fire-resistant Alder (deciduous) that helps mitigate fires, are not planted.
2. Glyphosate bombing. Yes, we aerial bomb our forests with Glyphosate in order to kill of the Alder which fills in much faster than the desired economic species. I bet you didn't know that..
3. Trees were planted WAY to close together. Many of these forests looks like matchsticks, because that's what they are. At the time it was thought that closer-spacing would lead to faster harvesting and more biomass(money), but what you end up with is a giant tinderbox with small trees, TONS of deadfall.
What all this leads up to is way more fire frequency and a MUCH higher fire magnitude. Large healthy trees, with their canopies way about the forest floor, are naturally resistant to fires, even without Alder around. Once the fire reaches the canopy it will spread fast and far, and likely kill the tree.
I'm not sure how providing statistics that dispute the point is "missing the point"...
> These forests have been logged multiple times over history, and many were replanted with terrible replanting practices.
SOME of these forests have been logged multiple times over history. The bulk of forests in Canada have never been logged.
Simple math tells you that, 0.2% * 200 years is still a maximum 40% of the forest and, as the original article points out, we drastically increased logging the past decade. If these forests have been logged multiple times that means it's much less that 40% of the forest is/has been logged. Logging where I grew up is ALL being done on land that was previously logged, not old growth forest and the bulk of that logging is on natural regrowth, not plantations.
I won't argue about the replanting practices since a lot of these are no longer done because of the problems you point out. There are terrible pine plantations where I grew up were the pines are 80 years old but only 6 inches in diameter because of how close together they were planted. There are no new plantations like this.
> What all this leads up to is way more fire frequency and a MUCH higher fire magnitude.
Fire frequency increasing is overwhelmingly caused by climate change. Most of the fires this summer were in unlogged, remote areas.
So, while it is the tip of the iceberg numbers wise, the bulk of the rest should be more fire resistant than what has already burned.
Of course there is a caveat that the major uncontrolled burns have increased the susceptibility of living trees to being burned.
I think this is an important thing to know because it points to some different solutions, like more indigenous land management.
I don't think most Canadians, let alone people outside this country, actually understand what the north is like. We're talking tens of millions of acres of muskeg (peat bog), granite, mostly stunted spruce, lakes, lakes lakes, and mosquitoes, with few to no roads.
In interior BC (where there are also fires this summer, as always), yes, I think indigenous fire keeping and forest floor management through controlled burns could be key.
Fortunately, NPR is more interested in the facts than clickbait headlines:
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/21/1188618934/canada-wildfires-a...
‘Canada is the second-largest country in the world, and almost half of that is forest," Barber said. "A lot of that forest is remote, untouched wilderness, and it's very difficult to manage wildfire in those areas where there is no road access or any of the infrastructure needed to support firefighting activity."’
And I mean, it's not an axe I'd normally have a problem with, maybe. The forestry industry is questionable in many respects. Alberta has a problem with the oil industry dominating everything. BC has a problem with the forestry industry.
But this is a "I have a hammer and now everything looks like a nail" article.
They do have an axe to grind, but it has nothing to do with carbon. The National Observer is very sympathetic to aboriginal communities, and BC forestry industry’s relationship with them could be described as antagonistic and definitely problematic.
To me, this is one of those make shit up on the left to combat shit that’s made up on the right, but in the end, it is all just a bunch of lies supported by small grains of truth.
More than anything the article reads like one big run-on-sentence
There is actually some research on growing fast crops to be immediately buried after harvest as a CCS solution but it’s a Herculean effort for what you get in terms of tonnes of CO2
Of course, calculations like this take the dimmest possible view, in order to be as dramatic as possible. There is undoubtedly room to differ on the details.
It doesn't just get tossed in the trash, though. They do all kinds of things with the off-cut.
Some of it will end up getting burned, but even in that case it's displacing other forms of heat source, albeit less efficiently.
I don't know about the carbon impact of what goes back in nature, some is decomposed by bacteria, some just stay there, some may act as a fertilizer, I don't think it is bad.