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Protect the Climate, Create Forestry Jobs
With one quarter of BC's timber supply munched by the beetle, the government wants to set aside reserves for intensive logging. But lighter-touch forestry holds a far better promise for both climate and jobs.
The numbers are in: the Mountain Pine Beetle chomped through 24 percent of BC's mid-term timber supply - a bleak outlook for BC's forestry sector.
To soften the impact on forestry jobs, Minister Pat Bell is proposing to set aside commercial forest reserves for heavy short-rotation logging with laxer regulation.
If implemented, this would further increase BC's emissions - at a time when we are already only a hair's breadth away from the climate tipping point.
Consider this: emissions from BC's forests already tally up to 77 percent of all other sources combined. This is mostly caused by intensive harvesting, which churns up the soils and releases stored carbon.
Right now, the government is not even considering this huge addition to our climate impact. Tucked away as a "memo item" in the latest Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report, the whopping 51 megatonnes of CO2 from forestry is neither counted as part of BC's total nor addressed in our reduction targets.
This data on massive emissions from BC’s forest lands show that we need a paradigm shift in forest management if we want to avoid the worst consequences of global warming.
Improved forest management practices like selective logging and longer rotation allow for more employment than industrialized clear-cutting. Combined with promotion of value-added products and a phase-out of raw log exports we can move towards a truly green forestry sector that provides jobs, carbon sinks and species habitat.
For the sake of both climate and jobs, a provincial plan how to reduce emissions from our forest lands through improved management should be the highest priority.
Read how government buries the fact that logging blows our emissions target.
