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There are
aspects of Canada’s forest sink policy
which are very difficult to understand.
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Canada’s
greenhouse gas inventory assumes that when forests are harvested, their
carbon content is released to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Actually much
of the carbon remains in wood products. Our growing inventory of houses
represents a carbon sink not accounted for.
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Canada has
inexplicably chosen not to take into account the carbon sink associated with
wood products. A review of Canada’s GHG inventory suggests emissions might be reduced by up to 150
million tonnes with a change of accounting methodology. That’s a big chunk of
our total emissions of some 750 million tonnes.
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In fact carbon
representing about 40 million tonnes
of carbon dioxide is freely shipped in lumber to the United States every
year. Understandably, no one seems interested in factoring that into our
lumber dispute. That issue is already
incomprehensible.
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To summarize,
the afforestation and reforestation initiatives of Kyoto seem limited by land
and forest growth constraints. They discourage harvesting to allow regrowth
and continuing carbon dioxide removal if there is no sink credit for forest
products. They are thus not
sustainable by the standards of this review.
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