So many Canadian trees are dying that on balance our forests emit more carbon than they sequester. The Canadian government is trying to weasel out of our CO2 reduction commitments by claiming that CO2 from our trees should not be counted because they are dying due to forest fires and insect infestations, which are not human caused.
This is just plain wrong, for two reasons.
First, climate change doesn’t care where the CO2 came from. The IPCC, in their most recent report, said we must reduce our emissions by 50% within 12 years or we die. Soak that in while pondering the fact that the IPCC has a track record of being much too optimistic. Canada is one of the wealthiest countries on the planet which means our citizens can make do with a lot less of everything and still be better off than most people in other countries. Instead of trying to weasel out of our fair share we should be standing up and reducing far more per capita than other countries.
Second, our trees are burning and being killed by insects because they’re sick, and they’re sick because ground level ozone, which is toxic to all plants, is rising, and ground level ozone is a byproduct of the fossil fuels our civilization burns. So yes, the trees are emitting carbon instead of sequestering carbon, like healthy trees are supposed to do, because of us. Which is yet another good reason to increase our CO2 cuts rather than whining like babies and trying to weasel out of doing the right thing.
Shame on us! I used to be proud to be a Canadian.
For more on how ground level ozone is killing trees, see the work of Gail Zawacki.
Canada’s forests actually emit more carbon than they absorb — despite what you’ve heard on Facebook.
Our managed forest land hasn’t been a net carbon sink since 2001.
You might have heard that Canada’s forests are an immense carbon sink, sucking up all sorts of CO2 — more than we produce — so we don’t have to worry about our greenhouse gas emissions.
This claim has been circulated on social media and repeated by pundits and politicians.
This would be convenient for our country, if it were real. Hitting our emissions-reduction targets would be a breeze. But, like most things that sound too good to be true, this one is false.
That’s because trees don’t just absorb carbon when they grow, they emit it when they die and decompose, or burn.
When you add up both the absorption and emission, Canada’s forests haven’t been a net carbon sink since 2001. Due largely to forest fires and insect infestations, the trees have actually added to our country’s greenhouse gas emissions for each of the past 15 years on record.
Not surprisingly, then, Canada has historically excluded its forests when accounting for its total greenhouse emissions to the rest of the world. We had that option, under international agreements, and it was in our interest to leave the trees out of the total tabulation, since they would have boosted our overall emissions.
But, just in the past couple of years, we have taken a different approach. We are now making the case to the United Nations that things like forest fires and pine beetle infestations shouldn’t count against us, and that only human-related changes to our forests should be included when doing the calculations that matter to our emission-reduction targets.