Forest Degradation: Canada’s Skeleton in the Closet
Read through the Government of Canada’s annual “State of Canada’s Forests” report, or materials prepared
by the country’s logging industry, and you’ll notice that something
seems to be missing. There is not a single mention of “forest
degradation.” Instead, government and industry focus on Canada’s low
deforestation rate—the process by which forested land is converted to
urban space, farms, roads or other infrastructure. But forest
degradation—a change in forest conditions after disturbances like
clearcutting that result in a loss of overall biomass and species
diversity—is the skeleton in the closet when it comes to Canadian
forests, especially its vast boreal forest.
by the country’s logging industry, and you’ll notice that something
seems to be missing. There is not a single mention of “forest
degradation.” Instead, government and industry focus on Canada’s low
deforestation rate—the process by which forested land is converted to
urban space, farms, roads or other infrastructure. But forest
degradation—a change in forest conditions after disturbances like
clearcutting that result in a loss of overall biomass and species
diversity—is the skeleton in the closet when it comes to Canadian
forests, especially its vast boreal forest.
The omission is surprising. In its assessment reports, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) cites deforestation and forest degradation as the two largest contributors to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions in the forestry sector. As Canada likes to point out,
it has made significant progress on the former, reducing annual
deforestation from 156,000 acres in 1990 to 84,500 acres in 2014. That’s
good news, but by focusing on deforestation, Canada and its forest
industry are taking advantage of public awareness of the issue—which is
prevalent in the tropics and poorer countries—to hide the ball on
practices that may be having similarly severe ecological impacts.