There’s an elephant in the Quebec forest! A furtive species that eludes officials

It is there, huge and omnipresent, but our governments and the forestry industry seem to prefer to ignore it. It’s the elephant in the room…

Did you know? Quebec’s furtive elephant (from the Carbonaceous family) is concentrated mainly in old-growth forests, areas without industrial footprints, and vast wetlands where it accumulates in large quantities. Fragile and firmly rooted in the ground, this elusive creature does not tolerate industrial activities very well. Yet, despite its vital role in the global climate, it is simply not declared in official records.

Erroneous calculations that grant immunity to the forestry industry

Yes, you might have guessed, the elephant in the room is the carbon of our forests, and especially the carbon emitted by logging. Currently, the forestry industry can cut down millions of trees in our public forests, but the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with this felling are simply not included in the GHG reports in Quebec or Canada. Despite a large climate footprint, the forestry sector currently enjoys immunity from emissions calculations that unfortunately are not representative of the carbon that is actually released into the atmosphere.

According to the most recent studies,¹ logging in Canada releases an average of over 90 million tonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere each year, a number comparable to the emissions from the country’s agricultural sector. However, year on year, the national inventory report on forest sector GHG emissions² shows negative levels of GHG emissions,³ obscuring the tens of millions of tonnes of carbon released into the atmosphere by the forestry industry.

As part of annual GHG inventories and declarations to the United Nations, countries must differentiate their natural forests from those so-called “anthropogenic” forests (affected by human activity). In Canada, a decision was made to exclude carbon flows from natural forests due to large fluctuations in emissions from natural disturbances (fires, insects, etc.). However, when assessing its anthropogenic forest, Canada decided to include the entire commercial forest (more than 226 million hectares), rather than only assessing the areas where human intervention took place each year.⁴ The country therefore includes huge swaths of mature forests available for harvest in its annual calculations that have not yet been touched by the industry. As these forests actively capture carbon, the industry’s real climate footprint is masked by natural sequestration of forests. This approach causes a dishonest distortion in calculations that allows the forestry industry to accelerate the climate crisis with impunity.⁵

But what really happens when we cut down forests? 

Trees are among our best “machines” to capture carbon from the atmosphere. While forest carbon is found throughout vegetation (from roots to leaves), more than 70% of it accumulates in the soil and the layer of organic matter that covers it. The older our forests are, the more carbon they store.⁶

Entering the forest with heavy machinery, building roads, removing trunks and branches, trampling and turning over soil—all of these activities release large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, either directly in the forest or through burning for energy use or the decomposition of forest products in landfills. In Quebec’s boreal forest alone, more than 8.2 million hectares of old-growth forests have been cut down in the past 50 years,⁷ an area equivalent to more than 160 times the island of Montreal. The scarcity of old-growth forests caused by widespread logging, coupled with an increase in the frequency of wildfires, disrupts the carbon cycle primarily by impacting forests’ ability to capture carbon.

As a result, our forests are getting younger and contain increasingly less carbon. According to federal government inventories, the ability of Canadian forests to act as carbon sinks has been declining since 1990, with an average decrease of 30 Mt CO₂eq sequestered each year due to logging and the regeneration of our forests.⁸ It will take decades to recapture the lost carbon, forming a kind of “carbon debt” that only accelerates climate change. Yet we have reached a point where we can no longer take on more debt with GHG emissions, which should instead be reduced.

While we are in a race against time to reduce our GHG emissions and avoid exceeding the catastrophic warming threshold, felling forests without properly accounting for the impact of logging on the climate seems like a good way to cut the branch we are all sitting on.

The limited relevance of forest products in “saving the climate” 

As you will see in industry ads and hear in speeches by certain ministers, cutting down trees is now a fantastic way to fight climate change. The argument is simple: there is carbon in wood, so let’s cut wood to store carbon in forest products. However, while some long-term forest products do offer an advantage over other materials that are more damaging to the climate (e.g., concrete, steel), the majority of forest products only store carbon for a short period of time and then release it and contribute to climate change.⁹

In Canada, more than half of forest products (54%) are short-lived products, such as pulp and paper products (e.g., toilet paper, cardboard cups, etc.) or firewood.¹⁰ According to the half-life times established by the IPCC, after four years, 75% of the carbon contained in these products is re-emitted into the atmosphere (100% in the case of firewood), often in the form of methane in landfills. This greenhouse gas is 25 times more potent than CO₂.¹¹

If we really want to use wood for the benefit of the climate, let’s make an honest calculation of the footprint of its entire life cycle, from harvest to landfill, and make science-informed decisions. There is an elephant in our forest, and it is high time that our governments turn their attention to it.

¹ Bysouth et al. (2024) High emissions or carbon neutral? Inclusion of “anthropogenic” forest sinks leads to underreporting of forestry emissions. Front. For. Glob. Change, Volume 6| https://doi.org/10.3389/ffgc.2023.1297301 

² Utilisation des terres/foresterie/forêts qui restent des forêts selon le jargon onusien 

³ ECCC. 2023. National inventory report : greenhouse gas sources and sinks in Canada. https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.506002/publication.html  

⁴ Bysouth et al. (2024) High emissions or carbon neutral? Inclusion of “anthropogenic” forest sinks leads to underreporting of forestry emissions. Front. For. Glob. Change, Volume 6| https://doi.org/10.3389/ffgc.2023.1297301 

⁵ Shingler, B. 2024. Why scientists say Canada’s logging industry produces far more emissions than tallied. CBC News. Jan 16^th 2024.  https://www.cbc.ca/news/climate/canada-logging-emissions-1.7081906

⁶ Watson, J. E. M., T. Evans, O. Venter, B. Williams, A. Tulloch, C. Stewart, I. Thompson, J. C. Ray, K. Murray, A. Salazar, C. McAlpine, P. Potapov, J. Walston, J. G. Robinson, M. Painter, D. Wilkie, C. Filardi, W. F. Laurance, R. A. Houghton, S. Maxwell, H. Grantham, C. Samper, S. Wang, L. Laestadius, R. K. Runting, G. A. Silva-Chávez, J. Ervin, and D. Lindenmayer. 2018. The exceptional value of intact forest ecosystems. Nature Ecology & Evolution 2018 2:4 2:599–610. 

⁷ Mackey, B.; Campbell, C.; Norman, P.; Hugh, S.; DellaSala, D.A.; Malcolm, J.R.; Desrochers, M.; Drapeau, P. Assessing the Cumulative Impacts of Forest Management on Forest Age Structure Development and Woodland Caribou Habitat in Boreal Landscapes: A Case Study from Two Canadian Provinces. Land 2024, 13, 6. https://doi.org/10.3390/land13010006

⁸ Environnement et Changement climatique Canada – Rapport d’inventaire national du Canada 1990–2016, tiré de Société pour la Nature et les Parcs du Canada. 2019. DES « SOLUTIONS NATURE » POUR LE CLIMAT : Six étapes pour lutter contre les changements climatiques et la perte de la biodiversité au Canada. https://cpaws.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/CPAWS_FindingCommonGrd_report_FR_v4.pdf  

⁹ Moreau, L., Thiffault, E., Kurz, W. A., & Beauregard, R. (2023). Under what circumstances can the forest sector contribute to 2050 climate change mitigation targets? A study from forest ecosystems to landfill methane emissions for the province of Quebec, Canada. GCB Bioenergy, 15, 1119–1139. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcbb.13081  

¹⁰ Chen, J., Colombo, S.J. & Ter-Mikaelian, M.T. 2013. Carbon stocks and flows from harvest to disposal in harvested wood products from Ontario and Canada. Climate change research report CCRR-33, Science and Information Resources Division, Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources. 

¹¹ IPCC 2014. 2013 Revised supplementary methods and good practice guidance arising from the Kyoto Protocol, Hiraishi, T., Krug, T., Tanabe, K., Srivastava, N., Baasansuren, J., Fukuda, M. & Troxler, T.G. (eds.) IPCC, Switzerland.