As I noted in a July 2023 column, removing vegetation for urban development, spraying herbicides, mowing lawns, and clear-cutting forests destroys plants and the food webs they support. Another column, Forests make rain; we can’t afford to lose them, sums up that issue.
But — even after last year’s massive fires and dreadful air quality – Canada hides the impacts of industrial forestry. We claim that fires are “natural”, not human-caused, so we can’t be held accountable for the resulting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. We say that climate change is the sole cause of forest fires, that climate change is caused by GHGs, and that our own GHG releases are small on a global scale.
Wrong on all counts.
Forestry practices have created huge tracts of fire-prone forests in Canada.
Forestry practices are a major contributor to most of the worst impacts of climate change, including extreme weather disasters such as droughts, floods, and landslides.
Humans start most forest fires in Canada.
Counting human-caused fires, Canada’s GHG emissions are among the world’s highest.
Scientists are calling us out. A 2024 paper published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change notes that Canada’s international reports treat GHG emissions from wildfires as natural, and GHG removals from older forests as human-caused. However, most of these older forests grew after natural disturbances (including fires). Canada then claims that our “managed forests” act as a net carbon sink, offsetting some of the GHGs emitted from burning fossil fuels.
Honest reporting would show that our annual forest sector GHG emissions are roughly equivalent to our energy sector emissions (and that’s not counting last year’s horrendous fire season).
Treating forest loss solely as a GHG issue ignores impacts on the water cycle. Canada’s longest river, the Mackenzie, is drying up. Barges can no longer supply remote northern communities. A Globe and Mail article points out that drought, and a resulting increase in government crop insurance payouts, turned Saskatchewan’s predicted $1 billion surplus for the just-ended fiscal year into a $482 million deficit.
A 2024 scientific paper calls for “targeted rainfall enhancement” to increase water supply in newly reforested areas, and to produce “cascading effects” in adjacent ecosystems. Scientists and policy makers urge a global push to restore ecosystems. We are approaching the halfway point of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, which “aims to prevent, halt and reverse the degradation of ecosystems on every continent and in every ocean.”
While Canada appears to be missing in action, ecological restoration is catching on. It can start with small-scale projects. Neighbors learn from each other. Success breeds success.
Erica Gies (pronounced “Guys”), author of Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge, described the “Slow Water” movement in a recent interview on CBC’s The Current. In drylands, this can be as simple as putting small rocks in a streambed so that water infiltrates when rain does come, instead of running off quickly. This prevents erosion, creates small wetlands, and replenishes groundwater. Streams that formerly dried up each summer now run year-round.
In The Reindeer Chronicles, Judith Schwartz tells stories of regreening landscapes, restoring carbon and water cycles, and repairing weather. She calls ecological restoration “the inverse of apathy and an antidote to despair.” She calls on us to imagine a world renewed in abundance, and cities with “carbon-rich, water-absorbing soils sustaining biodiversity above and below ground.”
Some governments are acting. China’s “Sponge Cities” program is promoting no pavement, less pavement, or permeable pavement, striving for 70 per cent infiltration of incoming precipitation. China’s Natural Forest Conservation Program (NFCP) and Grain to Green Program (GTGP) were among the biggest programs in the world, with ambitious goals, massive scales, huge payments, and potentially enormous impacts.
A 2017 paper, cited over 1,400 times, says the NFCP imposed a complete commercial logging ban in the upper reaches of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, and a prohibition of human activities such as fuelwood collection and livestock grazing to allow regrowth. The GTGP converted cropland on steep slopes to forest and grassland by providing farmers with grain and cash subsidies.
Chinese scientists have published dozens of papers assessing the results. Unwise planting of non-native species reduced water supplies in some areas, but overall, rainfall amounts are increasing.
In our globalized economic system, one country’s restoration efforts can destroy another country’s ecosystems. China’s logging bans generated push-back in areas where forestry jobs were lost. But now China imports more wood from countries such as Canada, contributing to our own forest degradation. Chinese-linked interests also control one of Canada’s largest forestry companies.
Coordinated global action is needed to address the Earth system crisis. In theory, the climate, biodiversity, and desertification treaties that emerged from the 1992 Rio Earth Summit provide a basis for global cooperation. In practice, these treaties function in isolation, and Canada routinely fails to meet its commitments.
Most important, and perhaps most difficult, is the need to reduce the scale of economic activity. The capitalist mantra of endless growth must yield to relocalization, sufficiency, quality of life, and life in harmony with nature.
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