Leading environmental organizations and a government watchdog say Canada’s emissions accounting methods inaccurately portray the forestry industry’s emissions as net-negative and gloss over the climate impact of industrial logging, which represents more than one-tenth of Canada’s total annual emissions.
“Canadians kind of are given the impression that industrial logging on a large scale is carbon neutral and the whole policy framework for the government seems to be based on that false assumption,” Nature Canada campaigner Michael Polanyi told CBC News. “In fact, it should be treated as a high-emitting sector and be required to reduce its emissions.”
But the Government of Canada is not transparent about its logging emissions, Nature Canada and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) say [pdf] in a joint report. The organizations worked with respected climate researcher Matthew Bramley to “piece together the net emissions attributable to industrial logging,” spread out “across myriad government sources.”
Forestry Emissions Match the Oil Sands
Ottawa did release emissions estimates in its 2023 National Inventory Report (NIR), which detailed annual emissions up to 2021. It showed that emissions for the category of Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) constituted a net sink that stored 9.1 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) and lowered national emissions by 2.4%.
But Bramley’s calculations, which focus more closely on industrial logging, find that Canadian forestry generated 73 megatonnes of emissions in 2021, making up 11% of the country’s total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for the year, almost equalling emissions from the entire province of Quebec, CBC says.
The discrepancy arises because “Canada reports the ‘net flux from managed forests and resulting harvested wood products’, a category that encompasses dynamics and management practices beyond what is reasonably attributable to industrial logging and, as a result, downplays the sector’s climate impact,” states the joint report.
Polanyi said forestry emissions must be calculated separately. But other experts are not certain forestry can be separated out from the rest of land use, CBC says.
“The argument of the forest management community is that forest management is much more than logging,” said Werner Kurz, a scientist who leads development of Canada’s forest carbon accounting system. “We’re including in our reporting the emissions and removals associated with all aspects of forest management,” including fire suppression and other forestry-related activities.
Bramley, on the other hand, excluded emissions from the conversion of forest land to other uses, left out the creation of new forest land or afforestation, and restricted his estimates to “forest land remaining forest land” where trees are replanted or allowed to naturally regenerate after logging. He used Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) data to identify emissions and carbon storage that can be attributed to logging, “namely: carbon taken out of the forest through logging and emitted from harvested wood products, minus the carbon stored in long-lived wood products and carbon sequestered by trees regrowing after logging,” Polanyi explains in an Ottawa Citizen op-ed.
“The result was shocking: GHG emissions associated with logging and wood use were approximately 75 megatonnes in 2020, matching emissions from all of Canada’s oil sands operations, and making logging one of the highest emitting sectors of Canada’s economy.”
A ‘Huge Imbalance’
The organizations add that the government’s GHG accounting uses a biased treatment of emissions and removals from natural disturbances. “They’re taking credit for a significant amount of greenhouse gas removals from regrowth after wildfires—about 80 megatonnes in 2021,” said Polanyi. “That’s causing a huge imbalance, and it’s basically masking the climate impacts of logging.”
Then the impact of wildfires on carbon stored in trees is misleadingly represented because, although the government reports the carbon stored from the regrowth, the NIR does not report the emissions from the wildfires, the joint report states.
For example, the inventory still reports carbon stored in “Mature Stands of Natural Disturbance Origin,” or trees that have reached a harvestable age after regrowing from lands cleared by disturbances like wildfire. For 2021, the government credited these lands with sequestering 79 megatonnes of emissions, even though it never reporting the emissions from the same events that cleared those lands in the first place.
The NIR says the variability of wildfires can obstruct outcomes from forest management, so its reporting method is meant “to better capture the emissions and removals more closely linked to land management and to better inform stakeholders in the forest sector.”
The NIR method is not the federal government’s only approach to tracking forest emissions and storage.ECCC directs readers [pdf] to Natural Resources Canada’s State of the Forests Report for a “full accounting of natural disturbances and the carbon balance in managed forests,” which includes emissions from wildfires and other natural disturbances in its estimates.
“In any given year, depending on the area of natural disturbances such as forest fires, insect outbreaks, and windthrows, Canada’s forests will either be a source of GHGs or a sink of atmospheric carbon,” this report states. “Data from 2020 suggest that overall, the forests were a minor source of GHGs of about 3.5 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent because of a relatively small amount of area burned.”
The NIR’s accounting methods have several outcomes that undermine effective climate policy, the Nature Canada-NRDC report adds. Not only does the representation of logging industry emissions add to the burden on other sectors by exempting forestry from addressing its emissions. It also “leads to counterproductive policy decisions that fail to consider the actual climate cost of clearcut logging and the full value of protecting carbon-rich primary forests.” Calculating emissions in this way also fails to create incentives for sustainable logging practices, thereby threatening Canada’s standing in global markets where other countries are taking more proactive measures.
Watchdog Bolsters Report Conclusions
Last month, the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Jerry DeMarco, bolstered the arguments in the joint report, writes CBC.
The commissioner’s audit stated that “greenhouse gas effects of forests were not effectively communicated to support decision making and accountability.”
While Canada did meet international reporting guidelines, the audit cited specific concerns, CBC says. Emissions from the logging industry were not reported separately, frequent recalculations kept changing the numbers, and there was weak oversight of emissions projections.
Like Nature Canada and NRDC, the auditors reported a “lack of transparency about the effects of human activities on forest emissions,” partially driven by the failure to clearly report on sector-specific emissions.
“In our view, sector-specific reporting, as is done for the oil and gas industry, would support the development of effective policy measures to reduce emissions from the forestry sector,” the watchdog said.
