In Short : Canada’s logging industry is consuming forests crucial for mitigating climate change. This situation likely underscores the challenge of balancing economic activities with environmental preservation and highlights the importance of sustainable forestry practices to maintain ecological balance.
In Detail : A study finds that logging has inflicted severe damage to the vast boreal forests in Ontario and Quebec, two of the country’s main commercial logging regions.
Canada has long promoted itself globally as a model for protecting one of the country’s most vital natural resources: the world’s largest swath of boreal forest, which is crucial to fighting climate change.
But a new study using nearly half a century of data from the provinces of Ontario and Quebec — two of the country’s main commercial logging regions — reveals that harvesting trees has inflicted severe damage on the boreal forest that will be difficult to reverse.
Researchers led by a group from Griffith University in Australia found that since 1976 logging in the two provinces has caused the removal of 35.4 million acres of boreal forest, an area roughly the size of New York State.
While nearly 56 million acres of well-established trees at least a century old remain in the region, logging has shattered this forest, leaving behind a patchwork of isolated stands of trees that has created a landscape less able to support wildlife, according to the study. And it has made the land more susceptible to wildfire, scientists say.
Though Canada claims to hold logging companies to high standards, scientists involved in the peer-reviewed study, which was published in the academic journal Land, said their findings show that the country allows unsustainable practices that have deeply degraded the forest.
Scientists not involved in the study said it provides a groundbreaking understanding about what decades of commercial logging has done to the boreal forest, which refers to northern woodlands made up mainly of evergreen trees.
“This is the first time that we have this kind of a clear view for two of the largest provinces in Canada,” said Christian Messier, a forest ecology professor at Université du Québec à Montréal, who was not involved in the study. “I think the approach, the methodology, was the most novel aspect of this paper.”
Under Canada’s forestry standards, logging companies can clear vast areas of all trees and vegetation and are required to replant the land or demonstrate that the forest will naturally regenerate.
But, scientists say, without the thick bark of older trees, younger trees are more vulnerable to wildfire, and logging companies typically replant species more suitable for the timber industry rather than those resistant to fire.
“The Canadian government claims to have managed the forest according to the principles of sustainable forest management,” said Brendan Mackey, the study’s lead author and a professor and director of a climate research group at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. “But its notion of sustainability is really tied to maintaining and maximizing wood production and ensuring the regeneration of commercially desirable trees. That has a lot of implications for biodiversity.”