Conservation North
-
Posts
6 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Never
-
.jpg.c9527d255645694ff31975b8a58d0fbe.jpg)
The British company Drax is generating electricity for Britons by burning BC’s old-growth forests. A recently logged priority deferral area that Drax received logs from in 2023 (Photo: Conservation North) Prince George and Smithers, B.C. – Amidst claims to the contrary, Drax sourced logs from old growth forests in BC in 2024. In a recent radio interview, Drax representative Joe Aquino claimed that Drax stopped sourcing logs from old growth forests in 2023. However, findings by UK and BC-based environmental groups found that this is not the case. “We were surprised to hear a Drax representative claim that they did not procure old growth logs after 2023. An in-depth analysis shows that this company continued to source logs from old growth as recently as January 2024,” explains Len Vanderstar of the Bulkley Valley Stewardship Coalition. Biofuelwatch UK, Conservation North, and the Bulkley Valley Stewardship Coalition analyzed government data tracking the origin of logs and what mills they ended up in to determine whether or not raw material from old forests in BC, were ending up in the Drax power plant in the UK or being shipped to Japan for electricity generation. The groups’ findings, released last week, showed that throughout 2023, Drax obtained logs and chipped wood from Priority Deferral Areas, which were designated as the rarest old growth forests in the province. Drax continued to procure old growth forest wood for their B.C. mills in January of 2024. An approximately 200-year-old tree in Drax’s Houston mill log deck (Photo: Bulkley Valley Stewardship Coalition) In 2021, the government of B.C. convened a technical committee to identify and map old growth forest types, including the rarest old growth forest types that are at high and near-term risk of irreversible biodiversity loss if they are logged. Many of these Priority Deferral Areas continue to be logged throughout the province by forest licensees. “Drax received 103 loads of logs from companies logging old growth forest in January 2024 that were trucked to their Burns Lake and Houston mills. Thirty-nine of those loads came from blocks that overlapped with Priority Deferral Areas,” states Michelle Connolly of Conservation North. A provincial government data leak last week revealed that the B.C. government was in the process of ‘deleting’ some of these old growth areas identified by the technical committee and allowing business-as-usual logging in them. “We are appalled about the continued logging of priority old growth deferral areas and the fact that the B.C. government has been manipulating the mapping to free up timber, states Len Vanderstar. “What is also upsetting is the fact that these forests are a significant component in carbon capture and should not be used to generate electricity in the name of climate change mitigation..” In 2020, Conservation North documented the issuing of primary forest logging licenses by the B.C. government to pellet companies. In 2022 BBC Panorama and CBC Fifth Estate investigations revealed that Drax was logging old Growth forest and other primary forest in B.C. -
British Columbians take message about impact on BC forests of pellet use in Japan. Connolly and Parfitt in front of a pellet plant Ishinomaki (Photo by Conservation North) Prince George, BC – Conservation North director Michelle Connolly returned last week from Japan, where she and Ben Parfitt, a policy analyst with the BC office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, met with pellet financiers, elected officials and media. The trip was organized and supported by three Japanese environmental groups concerned about the loss of natural forests in BC and climate change. Japan sources more pellets from BC than from any other jurisdiction in the world. Connolly and Parfitt spoke with public and business audiences and media in Tokyo and Sendai about what an expanding pellet industry means for primary forests, and the risks sourcing them from BC poses to Japan. “Forestry interests promote the idea that BC forests are managed sustainably, when they are not. We were invited to Japan to tell the public and key decision-makers about what’s happening to at-risk forests and species in this province,” Connolly said. The Minister of Forests is visiting Japan this week to promote BC wood products, including pellets. Connolly and Parfitt met with biomass financiers Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank, as well as the Sumitomo Corporation, owner of the Pacific Bioenergy plant in Prince George that shut its doors in 2022. The duo and their hosts also met with sustainable investment experts, as well as elected officials from both the ruling party and the opposition. “BC is a high-risk place from which to source pellets. Logging companies have cut down too much forest too quickly. Sawmills, pulp mills and even some pellet mills have closed because too little primary forest is left,” Parfitt told investors and bioindustry officials in Japan. Japan sources large amounts of wood pellets from forests in British Columbia, the southern United States, and Vietnam. In BC, these pellets are made using slash from logging, sawmill waste and, critically, trees logged expressly for this purpose. “Decision-makers, financiers and journalists were scandalized that BC still promotes and subsidizes the logging of primary forest, when other developed countries have banned this practice,” states Connolly. Primary (or natural) forests are forests that have never been industrially logged. Logging this non-renewable resource is incompatible with BC’s newly-announced ambitions to maintain biodiversity and ecosystem health. Staff from Global Environmental Forum, Friends of the Earth Japan and Mighty Earth Japan, who sponsored the Japan tour, visited north-central BC last year with Japan’s public broadcaster. NHK Japan created this segment on BC pellets, which was part of a longer documentary on “greenwashing”, or presenting a practice as positive for the environment when it’s actually harmful. -
Great investigative reporting by the BBC on DRAX’s destruction of primary forest southeast of Prince George. Reporter Joe Crowley, with assistance from BC’s Ben Parfitt, shows that whole logs from primary forests are being used as feedstock for the manufacture of wood pellets that are then shipped thousands of kilometres to the UK to be burned for generation of “green” electricity in the UK. As Conservation North’s Michelle Connolly says in the video, “That is absolutely insane. There’s no other word for it.” (The BBC video is no longer available but the Fifth Estate covered this issue, too.)
-
Conservation North joined the community
-
Scientists Michelle Connolly and Dr. Dominick DellaSala in the field obtaining data used to determine the amount of forest carbon in the Interior Wet Belt forests of BC (Photo: Conservation North) Prince George, BC—An international team of scientists have published a new peer-reviewed study on the importance of protecting primary forests in BC’s Interior Wetbelt (IWB) bioregion for the climate. Scientists from the University of Northern British Columbia, Griffith University in Australia, the Conservation Biology Institute in Oregon, Wild Heritage in Oregon and Conservation North were part of the study, which underscores the seriousness of BC’s emissions tied to the logging of old growth forests. The IWB is a vast, largely forested area of 16.5 million ha along the western flanks of the Canadian Rockies and northern Columbia Mountains. The IWB contains rare old growth spruce forests (referred to in other parts of the world as Boreal Rainforest) and the rare Inland Temperate Rainforest. Logging in this ecosystem accelerated from the 1970s to the 2000s. According to lead researcher Dr. Dominick DellaSala: “The region contains under-appreciated carbon stocks that can help Canada meet its climate and conservation targets. In their natural state, these forests constitute an irreplaceable natural climate solution, but we’re turning them into lumber and threatening to turn them into pellets.” The Government of Canada has pledged to protect 30 percent of its lands and waters by 2030 in order to mitigate the climate crisis. The study used data collected in the field, as well as government datasets to estimate how much carbon is contained within unlogged old growth spruce, redcedar and hemlock forests, and how much has been emitted to the atmosphere by clearcut logging. Dr. Art Fredeen, a study co-author at UNBC added, “The Interior Wetbelt contains some of the most carbon dense forests on the planet.” He noted that, “if we summed up all of the carbon from historically logged timber in the IWB it would exceed BC’s total greenhouse gas emissions for 2019, 9 times over. Instead of increasing BC’s carbon debt by further logging old carbon-rich landscapes, we should be conserving them.” Ecologist and co-author Michelle Connolly explains that: “There need to be major forestry reforms that protect carbon-dense old-growth forests, allow degraded forests time to recover the logging-related carbon debt, and improve monitoring of carbon stocks and stock changes. This is what the promised ‘paradigm shift’ ought to look like on the ground.” Dr. DellaSala adds that, “for the very first time, we have a comprehensive assessment of how important BC’s interior rainforests are to the global climate and how much has been lost to logging. In the case of climate change, the forest is worth far more standing than cut down for wood products.” The study reported that nearly one-quarter of the entire IWB has been logged, the majority within the inland rainforest since the 1970s, resulting in live above-ground carbon declining by at least 18 percent. However, this is likely an underestimate because a) government data appear to underestimate the amount of aboveground carbon storage in the most carbon-rich stands, and b) logging has been concentrated in low to mid-elevations (below 2000 m) where carbon density is the greatest. That is, the province is under-reporting logging-related carbon emissions by as much as 75 percent. Ecosphere - 2022 - DellaSala - Estimating carbon stocks and stock changes in Interior Wetbelt forests of British Columbia .pdf The summary above was provided by Conservation North.
.jpg.c9527d255645694ff31975b8a58d0fbe.jpg)
