Robbing the carbon bank

The Ontario Provincial government has enormous opportunities for action in the arena of forests and global warming: first to protect the province’s forest carbon banks and then to manage our natural heritage to cool the Earth and build a sustainable economy. [...] The public is already keenly aware of the effects of industrial logging on the “lungs of the Earth” and is demanding an end to mismanagement of the province’s natural storehouses of carbon and biodiversity. [...] The World Resources Institute has developed maps of the world’s carbon in forest ecosystems (figure 1), which clearly demonstrate the global importance of Ontario’s carbon storehouses17: Figure 1: World Forest Carbon Concentrations The Value of Ontario’s Boreal Forest Ecosystems The carbon stored in Ontario’s Boreal forest provides an ecosystem service in terms of climate regulation that can be va [...] The preliminary results of the most recent Canadian carbon cycle model by Canadian scientists report that the average annual net absorption of carbon by Ontario’s Boreal region (forests and peatlands) was estimated to be 13.4 million tonnes (Mt) of carbon (49.2 Mt CO2) per year between 1994 and 2003 (0.23 tonnes of carbon per hectare).20 The spatial distribution of the net carbon uptake across the [...] For the first commitment period, and in accordance with the reporting guidelines, it is assumed that carbon in harvested biomass is released when the trees are removed from the ecosystem."26 Impacts of Logging and Fire on Carbon Stores The impacts of logging on Canada’s forests are very severe from a global warming perspective.