This summer’s wildfires — on top of ongoing industrial logging — are destroying a vast area of some of the world’s last remaining intact forests in the north of Canada. We all must stand up now to demand action to protect what remains. As a key step, add your name to our Freedom of Information request urging the Government of Canada to reveal the true climate impacts of logging!
In just weeks, wildfires have destroyed an area of Canadian forests the size of Lake Michigan, Lake Ontario, and Lake Erie, combined – more than 3% of all forested areas in our country.
Fires have displaced over 150,000 people in Canada, led directly and indirectly to innumerable deaths, destroyed and disturbed wildlife and their habitats, and caused billions of dollars of property damage and lost productivity.
And the fires have now spewed out more carbon pollution than our entire country emitted in 2021.
Canada’s boreal forest is one of the last remaining intact forests on the planet, and home to more than 600 Indigenous communities. It provides habitat to hundreds of species and billions of migrating birds and stores more carbon than all the world’s known oil reserves.
It is critical to our survival that we protect it.
But ongoing clear-cut logging is destroying large areas of primary forest in Canada – about six NHL hockey rinks worth every minute.
And logging is also a massive carbon emitter: Earlier this year, Nature Canada calculated, based on government data, that logging caused the release of 73 million tonnes of carbon pollution in 2021, equivalent to emissions from the entire province of Quebec.
As this recent MinuteEarth video shows, the federal government is masking the true impacts of logging: by giving industry credit for a massive carbon sink in forests they have never logged, the industry is allowed to portray itself as a carbon-neutral climate solution, when in fact, it is one of the highest emitting sectors of the Canadian economy.
In fact, a recent study published in the prestigious journal Nature found that, globally, industrial logging emits about 4 billion tonnes of CO2 — about 10% of human-caused emissions.
There is also evidence that replanted (often single-species) forests are more at risk of catching fire than diverse, older-growth forests.
Canada needs an emergency plan to protect its remaining primary and old-growth forests.
A key first step would be for the federal government to publicly reveal the true carbon emissions caused by logging – so that effective action can be taken to reduce those emissions, by protecting carbon-rich intact forests.
Click here to add your name to Nature Canada’s Access to Information request that demands the government release the true net logging emissions at federal, provincial, and territorial levels.
Thank you for standing up for forests and our future.
The post Wildfires and Clear-Cut Logging Are Destroying Canada’s Boreal Forests appeared first on Nature Canada.