The wood chip-fuelled KVV8 combined heat and power plant in Stockholm heats 190,000 residences and generates enough electricity for 150,000 electric vehicles, with lower air pollution emissions intensity than a natural gas furnace/Holger.Ellgaard

Jamie Stephen

August 24, 2023

Who is Canada’s largest greenhouse gas emitter and air polluter? One could be
forgiven for guessing an oil sands producer or perhaps a coal-fired power plant owner. In fact, the organizations competing for this year’s dubious distinction of Canada’s largest emitter of both GHGs and air pollutants are the Governments of Canada, Quebec, Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia.

How so? Far and away Canada’s largest net source of GHG emissions this year is forest fires. Natural Resources Canada estimates a release of 1,400 million tonnes (Mt) of CO2 already and the fire season is nowhere near its conclusion. This is more than double Canada’s total reported 2021 GHG emissions. As for air quality and lung health, wildfires are unquestionably Canada’s number one source of air pollution. So, who is liable? Ninety-four percent of Canada’s forests are publicly-owned. Forests in Canada are a public asset and long-term management of them is a government responsibility.

Canada is home to 9 percent of the world’s forests, with an estimated 318 billion trees. That is 8,000 trees per Canadian. If GHGs are valued at $170/t CO2e, as the Government of Canada plans for 2030, the wood in Canada’s forests has an asset value of $7.5 trillion. This is almost $190,000 per Canadian or $760,000 for a family of four – roughly the same value as a “typical” home in Canada.

Rule of thumb says to budget 1 percent of your home’s asset value for annual maintenance. For a $7.5 trillion asset, this would be $75 B. But what do Canada’s governments spend maintaining their largest, most valuable carbon asset – forests? Instead of 1 percent, around 0.001 percent. The result of this lack of investment in maintenance is obvious. Between 2000 and 2020, Canada had a net forest carbon loss of 4,000 Mt CO2. Or $680 B. This year’s emissions take the figure to a whole other level, with an annual deficit of $250 B. If we believe a tonne of CO2 in the atmosphere has a cost of $170, we must also believe these extraordinary figures.
Does it have to be this way? Are forest carbon losses an unavoidable consequence of climate change? The truth is that, yes, climate change increases the risk of wildfires. But a lack of investment in forest carbon asset maintenance is the real culprit. Addressing the problem of forest carbon loss requires action – human intervention.

As the world gets hotter, the need for human intervention in forests goes up, not down. Forest protection – complete elimination of human activity – simply will not work to maintain carbon stocks. We already have the evidence: Canada’s national parks, the epitome of protection, have become a net source of GHG emissions.
To improve the health of its forests and reduce GHG emissions, Canada must implement Climate-Smart Forestry. This means making forest management, forest operations, and forest-products decisions that value carbon. Climate-Smart Forestry takes into consideration not only the carbon impacts of our actions, but also the counterfactual of inaction. For example, elimination of timber harvest would result in increased use of high-carbon alternatives, such as cement and steel in building construction or plastic in furniture and consumer products. This is the product counterfactual.

The demand for materials is still there and eliminating the lowest carbon source of supply – wood – makes no sense. In addition – and this is the in-forest counterfactual – the carbon stored in most of Canada’s boreal forest trees has a very high likelihood of release at some point in the coming decades due to wildfires or natural death. By producing solid wood products, we can lock up that carbon for centuries instead of losing it to the atmosphere.

Climate-Smart Forestry takes into consideration not only the carbon impacts of our actions, but also the counterfactual of inaction.

A comparison of the world’s boreal forests shows the power of Climate-Smart Forestry to build forest carbon stocks while providing the materials and energy required for a low-carbon society. Canada, Alaska, and Russia have failed to implement Climate-Smart Forestry and see massive carbon losses from wildfires. In contrast, the Nordic countries of Sweden and Finland use a more intensive forest management approach. The results are clear: Canada has fifty times more wildfire and insect pest disturbance per forested hectare than Sweden. Sweden is continuously increasing the stored carbon in its managed forests, having grown the standing timber volume – stored carbon – by almost 40 percent since 1980.
On a per capita basis, the comparison between Canada and Sweden is em- barrassing. Including emissions from the forest, Canadians produce over 24 tonnes of CO2e per person. Swedes? 1.4 tonnes of CO2e per person, or 6 percent that of Canadians.

What is Sweden doing? In a complete rejection of Canada’s forest management model, Sweden harvests seven times the volume per managed forest hectare as Canada. As part of its Climate-Smart forestry approach, Sweden’s foresters plan frequent interventions to thin forests, reduce fuel loading, and contain distur- bance. Yes, to store more carbon in the forests, Sweden — counterintuitively — harvests more trees. Trees need light and space to grow and removing low-vigor, dead, diseased, and dying trees creates space for younger, healthier trees.
A few large trees also hold more carbon and are more resilient to wildfires than many tightly packed small trees.

Unlike Sweden, where three quarters of forests are owned by families and companies, Canada’s publicly-owned forest regime provides little opportunity for the forestry sector to undertake forest carbon enhancement operations, such as fire risk reduction treatments. Canada’s forest products companies are essentially tenants, and just as with housing, landlords don’t expect tenants to pay for major asset improvements. The financial benefits of these cash-negative improvements are accrued by the asset owner – in the case of Canada’s forests, governments.

Why don’t we just replicate what Sweden is doing? Because of markets. Climate-Smart, active forestry generates a large volume of low-quality, low-value wood – biomass. Generally only 1/3 of wood harvested can be converted to solid wood products like lumber. The rest needs a market. Without one, Climate-Smart Forestry operations cannot be implemented and we will continue to experience megafires and their associated GHG and air pollutant emissions.

Sweden and Finland understand the need for markets for biomass. Fully 40 percent of their energy consumption is biomass. Sweden and Finland could not be the lowest carbon developed countries in the world without it. And it is building and industrial heating, which combined are over 60 percent of Canada’s energy consumption, that is the primary market for biomass in the Nordics.
Finland and Sweden also have the cleanest air in the world. Combustion of biomass in a modern combined heat and power (CHP) plant, like the ones located in Stockholm, Copenhagen and Helsinki, reduces air pollutant emissions by over 99.99 percent compared to open burn. In Canada, wildfires pollute our skies while we simultaneously produce GHG emissions and air pollution from natural gas and heating oil. In contrast, Nordic countries ensure low GHGs and clean air by using biomass CHP and district heating networks to heat their cities.

The Nordics are now taking climate action to the next level. Numerous district heating utilities are adding carbon capture to urban biomass CHP plants, resulting in negative GHG emissions. Since trees take CO2 out of the air when they grow, capturing and permanently storing the CO2 emissions from biomass combustion underground results in a permanent CO2 removal from the atmosphere. This bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) presents Canada’s single largest GHG reduction opportunity.

People will say that Canada is too large and our forests too extensive to implement Climate-Smart Forestry. The question must be: Then why do anything at all to reduce GHG emissions? If we aren’t willing to address our largest source of emissions, what is the point of going through all the economic pain, consumer costs, and societal disruption – including political polarization – of the energy transition?

If we do not change course, forests will consistently be Canada’s largest source of GHG emissions and air pollution. But if Canada’s governments finally act on their responsibility to manage their own forest assets by allocating funds for Climate-Smart Forestry operations and encouraging development of biomass CHP and district heating, we can reduce fossil fuel consumption, clear our polluted skies, preserve lives and infrastructure, improve forest health, and — when combined with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) — permanently remove GHG emissions from the atmosphere.

Our governments should leave the “largest emitter” competition to others.

Jamie Stephen is Managing Director at TorchLight Bioresources. This piece is sponsored by the Forest Products Association of Canada.