Canada has long promoted itself globally as a model for protecting one of the country’s most vital natural resources: the world’s largest swath of boreal forest, critical to combating climate change.
But something new study Using nearly half a century of data from the provinces of Ontario and Quebec – two of the country’s top commercial logging regions – it reveals that logging has inflicted severe damage on the boreal forest that will be difficult to reverse.
Researchers led by a team at Griffith University in Australia found that logging in the two provinces has caused the removal of 35.4 million acres of boreal forest since 1976, an area roughly the size of New York State.
Although nearly 56 million acres of well-established trees at least a century old remain in the region, logging has destroyed this forest, leaving behind a patchwork of isolated stands of trees that has created a landscape less able to support wildlife wild, according to the study. . And it has made the area more susceptible to fires, scientists say.
Although Canada claims to maintain high standards for logging companies, scientists involved in the peer-reviewed study, published in the academic journal Land, said their findings show the country allows unsustainable practices that have profoundly degraded the forest.
Scientists not involved in the study said it provides groundbreaking insight into what decades of commercial logging has done to the boreal forest, which refers to northern woodlands made up mostly of evergreen trees.
“This is the first time we have such a clear vision for two of Canada’s largest provinces,” said Christian Messier, a professor of forest ecology at the Université du Québec à Montréal, who was not involved in the study. “I think the approach, the methodology, was the most innovative aspect of this article.”
Under Canadian forestry standards, logging companies can clear large areas of all trees and vegetation and are required to replant the land or demonstrate that the forest will regenerate naturally.
But, scientists say, without the thick bark of older trees, younger trees are more vulnerable to fires, and logging companies typically replant species more suited to the lumber industry rather than fire-resistant ones.
“The Canadian government claims to have managed the forest according to the principles of sustainable forest management,” said Brendan Mackey, lead author of the study and professor and director of a climate research group at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. “But his concept of sustainability is actually linked to maintaining and maximizing wood production and ensuring the regeneration of commercially desirable trees. This has many implications for biodiversity.”
Canadian officials did not directly respond to questions about the study’s findings, only providing a written statement that broadly cites the country’s efforts to preserve the boreal forest.
This policy focuses on “conservation, recreation, habitat, water quality, economic development and the relationship that Indigenous peoples have with land and forests,” says the statement by Carolyn Svonkin, representing the Canadian Minister of Energy and of natural resources.
Peter Wood, a professor of forest resource management at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who was not involved in the study, called its findings “shocking,” adding that they highlight “what is at stake as we focus our logging on some of these older, more intact areas.”
The enormous, ecologically vital boreal forest extends across North America, northern Europe and Siberia, but the largest portion is found in Canada.
In addition to being an important natural habitat for many animals and plants, the boreal forest traps enormous amounts of carbon dioxide which contributes to climate warming. The world’s boreal forests are estimated to contain a total of 703 gigatons of carbon in trees and soil. The world’s tropical forests, by comparison, store about 375 gigatons of carbon.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who took office eight years ago with a pledge to aggressively address climate change, has long promoted Canada’s boreal forests as essential to the world’s well-being.
“Canada is home to one of the largest continuous forests in the world and we have a responsibility to protect it,” Trudeau said at the 2021 United Nations climate summit. “We have seen the impact of rising global temperatures: they have risen two times faster in Canada than in other parts of the world, in those forests. We have the responsibility to be its custodians.”
To conduct the boreal forest study in Quebec and Ontario, the researchers obtained publicly available inventories of trees harvested in the provinces and linked them to maps and satellite images to create a detailed picture of the cumulative impact of logging.
“This study clearly shows that where logging has occurred, there are key forest features that have not returned,” said Jennifer Skene, climate policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which helped fund the report’s research.
Replanting land after cutting down older trees produces younger forests that are ecologically compromised, Professor Mackey said. They contain less carbon, are generally more vulnerable to disease and insect infestation, and are poor habitat for the many animals and plants that depend on old forests to thrive or, in some cases, survive.
As part of the study, Professor Mackey and other researchers examined the effects of logging on large groups of woodland caribou, animals that require large areas of older forest and are affected by human disturbance. Forest roads, for example, make it easier for predators to hunt caribou, the researchers said.
Of the 21 herds studied by researchers in the boreal regions of the two provinces, 19 were at high or very high risk of becoming unable to support their populations.
While in other parts of the world deforestation or the removal of trees for uses such as agriculture and livestock farming has become a serious threat, in Canada the challenge is different.
“There has been no deforestation in this sense,” Professor Mackey said. “But there has been a high level, ecologically speaking, of forest degradation.”
“You still maintain forest cover and you could still maintain forest in terms of land use over time,” he added. “But you have degraded some aspects of its ecological quality.”
And most ecologists see the degradation as a consequence of the kind of large-scale logging that is almost the universal method of logging in Canada.
“Forest degradation is the most important metric for Canada because it really captures more of what’s really happening,” Wood said. “Canada has downplayed the impact of the forestry industry.”
