Environment Canada: Nation's Forests Have Been A Carbon Source Since 2001, Not A Carbon Sink
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For years, some Canadians have hid behind the myth that the country isn’t a net emitter of greenhouse gas emissions because of the presence of such vast forests working as our personal atmosphere vacuums. And up until the last two decades, it is true that those forests had the power to sequester in excess of a hundred megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent each year. But that is no longer the case.
Natural Resources Canada tracks the estimations of carbon released and captured by the managed forest each year — with managed forests accounting for about 65 per cent of the country’s trees. The results: Canada’s forests have not captured more carbon than they’ve emitted since 2001.
This isn’t a small swing in the wrong direction. In 2015, Canada’s forests emitted the equivalent of 231 megatonnes of carbon dioxide. To put that in perspective, all of the people in Calgary emit 18.3 megatonnes. The biggest cause of this shift is what Natural Resources Canada terms “natural disturbances” — fires, pests, disease and increased mortality.
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Mike Flannigan looks at Canada’s estimated emissions and says they are vast underestimations of what is really being emitted. As a professor of wildland fire at the University of Alberta he’s looked at areas outside of Natural Resources Canada’s managed forests and says the same patterns can be seen there but to even greater extremes. Peat bogs are what really concern him. These wetlands can have meters of moss and peat built up over long periods of time and they contain far more carbon than the regular upland forests do. And nearly all of these bogs are found in unmanaged forests, he says, since they don’t have much use in the forestry industry.
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https://thenarwhal.ca/canadas-forests-havent-absorbed-more-carbon-than-theyve-released-since-2001/
