What is also painfully obvious is that conducting harvesting and road construction 5 times over the next 300 years creates 5 times as much Carbon as does doing this once! A fact that the forest industry and compatriots (i.e. some UBC faculty!) studiously avoid mentioning. These numbers need to be added to the graph.
I have spent a lot of time travelling through Interfor's TFL 8 and associated operating areas in the Boundary TSA and, over their ownership period of the last 12-15 years of the Boundary forests, they have continually created extensive and very large clearcuts and built thousands of kilometers of roads and via their operations have significantly degraded these (OUR) forests. Over this time they have created many NSR areas and, as per a recent FREP report, degraded the south block---comprising ~ 1/2 of their TFL-8-- so that the majority of the riparian areas situated therein are NOT PROPERLY FUNCTIONING!
The following summary statement from Section 5.1.1 Riparian/stream condition: not properly functioning of this report states that:
"The Boundary Creek watershed was the largest in this
study, with 21 sub-catchments sampled within the
assessment polygon. Overall, the entire watershed was
ranked as not properly functioning for the riparian/
stream assessment, mainly because of the very high
levels of human-caused riparian disturbance across the
watershed (Table 6). Forestry was identified as the main
development activity upstream in all but one of the sub
catchments, where agriculture was dominant, and there
are more than 100 road crossings over streams in the
watershed. The total proportion of the watershed affected
by development was estimated by the assessors at 56%
using aerial imagery and spatial layers."
In Diane Nicholl's recent TSR AAC Determination for this TFL she made absolutely no allowances for:
The degraded condition of these riparian areas as indicated by the FREP report.
The increased areas of NSR
Climate change and---
Cumulative Effects on the landscape --even though a comprehensive CE analysis report of the entire Boundary TSA was recently been completed.
And, as usual, she included her pathetically impractical statement that it would be inappropriate for her to use either common sense or logic to apply the precautionary principle and reduce the AAC to a more sensible, safer and sustainable level. And this even though the Boundary area experienced a catastrophic flood in 2018 causing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of damage and leaving hundreds of very distraught homeowners whose homes have since been confiscated by the City of Grand Forks with some compensation for such taking.
And yet the AAC was maintained at it's past level and hence Clearcutting continues unabated across the landscape thus ever increasing the risk of more watershed damage and devastating floods. In spite of all the dikes that are being built around the city of Grand Forks it may still incur future flood damage.
Several years ago large sums of money were spent doing "Watershed Restoration Work" in the Boundary area to address riparian degradation caused mainly by logging and road building. Much of this money was used to create in-river and in-stream rock and log structures to deflect water away from eroding banks. Now--- many of these structures have fallen apart and are the cause of ever more bank erosion. See attached pictures of three log structure deteriorating in the Kettle River. The road located to the right of the pictures has since been washed away and is no longer accessible. Some entity has dumped several loads on the edge of the road in the hopes that---as the bank erodes--these rocks will fall into the river and ---hopefully stop the erosion. Fat to no chance of this happening. The next road in the path of river is the main highway between Kelowna and Rock creek--Hwy 33. We'll see what happens over the next few years.
The picture of the degraded creek depicts a typical stream reach that is downstream of TFL-8!
Unfortunately, the above scenarios are very sad examples of what is happening across BC---with such happenings aided and abetted and inherently supported by the Chief Forester of the day who continually approves AACs that are unsustainable and pose an ongoing threat to the future well-being of BC. We depend on our forested landscapes for virtually every facet of ecosystem services that these ---OUR---forests provide. Without our healthy, properly functioning forests we are doomed to experience ever more unnatural disasters occurring everywhere across BC.
Greater conservation of forests is needed to mitigate climate change
in Journalism: Loss of carbon sequestration capacity
Posted
"The Boundary Creek watershed was the largest in this
study, with 21 sub-catchments sampled within the
assessment polygon. Overall, the entire watershed was
ranked as not properly functioning for the riparian/
stream assessment, mainly because of the very high
levels of human-caused riparian disturbance across the
watershed (Table 6). Forestry was identified as the main
development activity upstream in all but one of the sub
catchments, where agriculture was dominant, and there
are more than 100 road crossings over streams in the
watershed. The total proportion of the watershed affected
by development was estimated by the assessors at 56%
using aerial imagery and spatial layers."