A headline on the front page of yesterday’s USA Today caught my eye: “Climate plan calls for forest expansion”. I thought, “didn’t Canada already go down this road?”
Turns out Canada already has plenty of forest, so they weren’t attempting forest expansion but rather examining the assumption that lots of forest helps suck carbon dioxide out of the air. What they found, at least for the Canadian forests, was a bag of mixed results in the past and a high probability (based on computer modeling) of those forests emitting more carbon than they take in for the immediate future.
“The forecast analysis prepared for the government… indicates there is a probability that forests would constitute a net source of greenhouse gas emissions,” a Canadian Environment Ministry spokesman told the Montreal Gazette. From the Canadian Forest Service’s own web page on the issue:
Each year, the managed forest becomes a sink or source depending mainly on the extent of the area affected by fire and insects. Projections therefore required assumptions about the area that could be affected by fire and insects based on scientific and historical information, as well as the current conditions of the forest. But because the extent of future fires or insect infestations cannot be predicted with certainty, the model was run hundreds of times using different scenarios of the future to estimate the likelihood of the managed forest being a sink or a source.
…the analysis showed that there was a greater than nine in ten chance of it being a source in 2008–2012.
I’m hoping that, at the very least, the monitoring provisions in the bill are worded properly to make sure we avoid paying for forests that are actually carbon sources.
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