Key scientific studies/reports

A growing body of research shows the degradation of forests in Canada.

Industrial logging degrades wildlife habitats

“Our data support the need to limit industrial disturbance within caribou population ranges because caribou may persist even under fire regimes with annual burn rates higher than recently observed if industrial disturbance is absent. In other words, caribou appear resilient to fire even at the most extreme end of our fire history uncertainty.”

Boreal Caribou Can Coexist with Natural but Not Industrial Disturbances

“The Acadian Forest of eastern Canada has shown a pervasive signal of forest degradation since 1985. Since 1985, >3 million ha have been clear-cut, with most of this area now occupied by either tree plantations and thinnings, which are dominated by single tree species, or a mix of early successional tree species. During the same 35-year time period, forest cover remained relatively stable, increasing by a net 6.5%.”

Forest degradation drives widespread avian habitat and population declines

“The American marten is often considered a specialist of old-growth forests and is sensitive to habitat disturbance…In our study, the decline in the proportion of good quality habitat induced by logging, combined with the decrease in marten capture success since 1990, suggests that current silvicultural techniques are detrimental to this species.”

Timber harvest jeopardize marten persistence in the heart of its range

We can’t log our way out of the climate crisis

“…we demonstrate that Canada’s use of the IPCC’s natural disturbance provision creates a dubious anthropogenic forest carbon sink that leads to a bias toward underestimating the GHG emissions directly attributable to the forestry sector.”

Inclusion of “anthropogenic” forest sinks leads to underreporting of forestry emissions

“…ongoing, and probably increased, harvests of wood have major, although often ignored, carbon costs that should be attributed to human activity.”

The carbon costs of global wood harvests

“… under a wide range of assumptions, clearcut-based management of boreal primary landscapes to produce wood pellets to replace fossil fuels in electricity generation will result in net emissions of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere for many decades.”

Forest harvesting and the carbon debt in boreal east-central Canada

Loss of ecological integrity

“While a quarter of BC’s forest area is old, less than 1% includes high-productivity old-growth ecosystems, posing risk to biodiversity, resilience, and carbon storage. Within sites that support high-productivity forests, only 8% remain as old growth, far below the 52% predicted by historic disturbance regimes.”

Conflicting portrayals of remaining old growth: the British Columbia case

“As an agent of disturbance that targets mature and older forests, logging has an additive effect on top of the fires that prevail in much of the boreal region. In other words, harvesting combined with fires has resulted in disturbance rates far above what natural ecosystems have undergone in historical times.”

The exceptional value of intact forest ecosystems

“There is emerging evidence that the remaining intact forest supports an exceptional confluence of globally significant environmental values relative to degraded forests, including imperilled biodiversity, carbon sequestration and storage, water provision, indigenous culture and the maintenance of human health…maintaining and, where possible, restoring the integrity of dwindling intact forests is an urgent priority for current global efforts to halt the ongoing biodiversity crisis, slow rapid climate change and achieve sustainability goals.”

Forest harvesting and the carbon debt in boreal east-central Canada

Failures in current forestry laws, policies and management practices

Other relevant scientific research