New NASA map shows why B.C.’s coastal rainforest is globally unique and needs protection
This week NASA released a map that enables us to compare tree height in B.C.’s coastal forests to other forest regions of the world. This is the first time we’ve been able to make these comparisons on a global scale. Two things immediately come to light.
First, much of the world’s forests are gone. Second, with the exception of a small region in Asia, there is no other place on the planet where trees grow anywhere close to the height that they reach along the Pacific Northwest - 70 metres and more. A closer look also reveals that the Asian region belongs to the subtropical part of the world where trees grow much more quickly and don’t need hundreds of years to reach this height.
NASA undertakes this kind of mapping to gather better information about biomass and carbon storage above ground. Similar information for below-ground carbon storage shows that B.C.’s coastal rainforest region stores record high amounts of carbon in its soils. In many sites the above- and below-ground carbon storage combined amounts to more than 1000 tons of carbon per hectare.
However, destructive logging practices like large clear cuts in temperate rainforest cause a massive loss of carbon storage. The emissions from decomposing slash and exposed soils continue to be released for decades before younger trees get close to the annual sequestration capacity needed to neutralize the ongoing emissions.
The latest available data shows that the annual net emissions from forests of the Pacific Maritime region alone were 28 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2007, more than 40 per cent the official annual carbon dioxide emissions of the province. Despite the enormous contribution of destructive logging and poor forest management practices to B.C.’s emissions, there is no plan in place to reduce these.
The B.C. government has set the laudable goal of achieving zero net deforestation by 2015, but as an isolated measure this policy will likely not have any significant impact to stop further degradation of B.C.’s forests. For example, the provincial inventory report shows that carbon dioxide emissions from deforestation are three million tons while the net emissions from provincial forest lands that remain equal 52 million tons.
One of the main reasons why the provincial forests continue to lose carbon storage and species disappear is because we continue to convert old-growth to second-growth, particularly in places where not much old forest is left, like Vancouver Island. Click here to read Sierra Club BC's report on the state of B.C.'s coastal temperate rainforest.
With the exception of the Great Bear Rainforest, there is no policy in the province to set aside rare old growth forests in order to protect the globally unique carbon storage and species diversity found there, not even in regions that are below critical extinction thresholds.
Without a policy to ensure protection of rare old growth forests there is a risk that the goal of zero-net deforestation becomes a red herring, allowing B.C. to continue the impoverishment of biodiversity and biomass of our unprotected forests. This would essentially translate into the loss of the remaining dark green areas in the Pacific Northwest corner of the NASA world map where trees have grown tall, only to be replaced by the lighter green of young second-growth plantations.
A multimedia presentation by the UK government shows that global forest cover of our planet has been reduced from 50 per cent to 30 per cent over the course of the last 8,000 years. Deforestation and degradation of the world’s forest have caused a loss of 120 billion tons of carbon. In comparison, the current total annual release due to human activity is about 7 billion tons of carbon.
Global data from the first half of 2010 indicates that this year will become the hottest year since temperature recording begun.
There is no solution without a paradigm shift in the way how we manage our forests. It is not a coincidence that the international policy term for addressing emissions from the forests is “Reduced Emissions form Deforestation AND Degradation” (REDD). The B.C. government has set a goal addressing deforestation. Now it’s time to also address degradation. This is the bigger issue in our part of the world where trees grow higher and older than almost anywhere else on the planet.
