Forestry

After years of conflict that featured blockades and market boycotts, environmental groups and the forest industry have finally agreed on what can be logged and what must be protected in B.C.’s Great Bear Rainforest. A detailed plan has gone forward to the provincial government and 27 First Nations that reside in the area. If approved by those entities, it will lead to the protection of 70 per cent of the land base in a rugged coastal region that covers 6.4 million hectares on the mainland coast.

Many of us think of B.C.’s forests as important carbon sinks, absorbing carbon from the atmosphere and helping mitigate climate change. However, according to new provincial data quietly released on a government website, B.C. forests are now approaching a full decade as a carbon source rather than a carbon sink.

Although British Columbia is covered by some of the most productive carbon-storing forest ecosystems on the planet, B.C. forests have been releasing more carbon than they sequester since 2003.

When commercial logging began in B.C. about 150 years ago, stands of coastal Douglas fir covered 135,000 hectares of land along the Georgia Strait on the mainland coast, on southeast Vancouver Island and on the Gulf Island. Today almost all of that towering forest has been logged. “We are down to the last one per cent,” says Devon Page, an Ecojustice lawyer who thinks we have cut enough Douglas fir, a tree so iconic it appears on the logo of the B.C. Forest Service.