Canada’s “Managed and Unmanaged Forests”. Screen capture (Source). Comment: I guess if the forests are potentially readily accessible to intensive forestry but we leave them alone, we consider them “managed”. ‘Sure makes the forestry-related GHG balances look better; surely obscures the real impacts of intensive forestry practices on GHG balances.
Government of Canada
Canada’s forest carbon reporting system
“The National Forest Carbon Monitoring, Accounting and Reporting System (NFCMARS) is Canada’s forest carbon reporting system. Its purpose is to estimate forest carbon stocks, changes in carbon stocks, and emissions of non-CO2 greenhouse gases in Canada’s managed forests.”
Critiques
Concerns about Canada’s forest carbon quantification and accounting
Office of the Auditor General of Canada/Environmental Petitions. Summary: This petition raises concerns about how the federal government accounts for carbon emissions and removals from Canadian forests…The petition asserts that wildfire emissions are under-reported, and that the federal government has an overly broad definition of what constitutes a “managed forest.” … Status: Completed – Response(s) to petition received
Canada’s Emissions Accounting Obscures Climate Costs of Logging, Reports Warn
Christopher Bonasia for the Energy Mix, may 9, 2023
Nova Scotia
“New paper out on life cycle #GHG dynamics for different scenarios of forest-based bioenergy in Nova Scotia”
Post on this website, 21Jan 2023
PEI
P.E.I.’s new forestry commission lists 5 ways to modernize how wood becomes energy
Arturo Chang · CBC News. July 20, 2023: The commission offered five recommendations:
– That all biomass supply contracts for the 44 provincially owned buildings should be renegotiated to provide more clarity.
– That there is a clearer definition of biomass in those revised contracts.
– That for future projects, there’s a comprehensive review of the environmental impact of biomass harvesting on the long-term wood supply, including an assessment of the carbon emissions from moving the product from harvest sites to the plant.
– That the government more clearly define the role of public forests as a potential source of biomass for provincially owned buildings.
– That it determines how the forest biomass sector can contribute to the province’s “Path to Net Zero” by 2040.
The carbon costs of global wood harvests
Liqing Peng et al., 2023 in Nature. Related: Just How Good Is Wood? By Mark Harris in Anthropocene Magazine July 24, 2023
Farmers are being paid millions to trap carbon in their soils. Will it actually help the planet?
G. Popkin in Science Vol 381, Issue 6656. July 28, 2023.
What does carbon offset actually mean for US forests?
by Sarah Kuta, University of Colorado at Boulder in phys.org “In a single calendar year, a mature tree can take in roughly 48 pounds of CO2, which remains stored in its woody fibers until some event—like a wildfire, a pest infestation or clearcutting by a logging company—triggers its release into the atmosphere. This natural process is at the heart of the world’s carbon offset industry, in which companies and consumers counteract their CO2 emissions by buying credits from projects that remove or reduce emissions. Carbon offsetting is part of a broader group of so-called nature-based solutions to human-caused climate change. Now, researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder are working to bring more transparency to this fast-growing industry.” Cites this paper: Lilli Kaarakka et al, Managing forests for carbon–Status of the forest carbon offset markets in the United States, PLOS Climate (2023). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000158