By Gordon Hamilton, Vancouver SunPublished: Thursday, March 13, 2008
In Indonesia, tropical forests are being levelled and replaced with palm oil plantations to produce eco-friendly biofuel.
And in North America, research shows a forest that grows for 80 years to biologic maturity locks up less carbon than one harvested every 40 years on an economic rotation where the carbon is stored in building products.
It's like saving the planet by destroying the forest, a paradox that speakers at a Globe 2008 session said Thursday highlights the need for clear rules on accounting for carbon in the post-Kyoto world.
"If you get too far along in your carbon accounting, it gets counter-productive," warned Avrim Lazar, president of the Forest Products Association of Canada. Lazar said the question of the values forests are managed for is crucial in the climate change debate. "If you just manage for carbon storage, you are missing the point. You should also manage for biodiversity, for wildlife values, for wilderness values. "The best thing you could do for storing carbon would be to have tree farms right across the boreal, turn them into newspapers and hide them in the basements in big stacks. "You have huge sequestration, you've got continual gathering of CO2 out of the air in the tree farms. Fire is addressed and you have the world's best sequester. It's not what we want. We want to harvest the natural forest in a way that doesn't decrease the carbon storage but also respects biodiversity."
Chris Elliott, Pacific region vice-president for the World Wildlife Fund, said deforestation for bioenergy is a big concern.
"Bio energy is very fashionable, there's a great peak of interest in it. But all that deforestation in Sumatra is actually for establishing oil palm plantations and some of that palm oil is now entering the global markets as use for biodeisel as a kind of green product. From a biodiversity and from a climate balance point of view that is extremely harmful."
Elliott said Asia Pulp & Paper, which recently purchased two pulp mills, a sawmill and timber tenure in B.C., is the main company involved in deforestation in Sumatra.
"We believe in holding global companies accountable to global standards. They can't duck and hide behind the fact that environmental regulations might be lower in Indonesia than in Canada. As they become more present in Canada, they will certainly find environmental groups challenging them on some of those issues."
The WWF has partnered with the Canadian forest industry to achieve a goal of harvesting, manufacturing and consuming forest products without adding carbon to the atmosphere.
Lazar laid out details of the plan at the Globe panel, saying it's an initiative "almost strangely bold," for his industry.
"We committed to try and reach carbon neutrality without purchased offsets by 2015. We think we can get there. We're not quite certain. It's a stretch goal but it's also a statement of attitude."
Both panelists said that the thorny issue of carbon accounting - deciding what counts as an emission and what counts as storage and sequestration - has yet to be settled.
Lazar said credibility is crucial to the initiative. Mimicking the acronyms that are commonplace at Globe, Lazar said FPAC has adopted the NBS rule - no B.S. - in its approach to carbon accounting. The drive for carbon neutrality will examine carbon-in and carbon-out from the forest to the landfill.
Elliott said the collaboration is still in its early stages.
"We have some very strong experience here in Vancouver with one of the FPAC members, Catalyst Paper. We have worked on a similar project with them over the past five years," he said in an interview. "They have been able to reduced their greenhouse gas emissions by 70 per cent through a combination of using biofuels and increasing energy efficiency in their mills.
"But what we are are looking at here with FPAC is broader and more ambitious. We are looking at management in the forests, management in the mills and then the whole product life-cycle."
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