The amount of wood in Canada’s forests has declined relentlessly for decades.
By Barry Saxifrage at the National Observer
According to a new survey by Natural Resources Canada, our forests have lost a total of four billion cubic metres of wood volume since 1990. That translates into the loss of hundreds of millions mature trees. The missing wood is enough to stack more than a billion cords of firewood—or to build around four homes for each Canadian.
Where's the wood going? Logging has been hauling it out faster than Canada’s forests—weakened by decades of industrial forestry and rising climate impacts—can regrow. That imbalance is pouring billions of tonnes of CO2 onto our metastasizing climate crisis. It’s a rising climate threat that our government greenlights by keeping it off our nation’s official climate books.
