Clear rules required for carbon accounting in post-Kyoto world
Gordon Hamilton
Vancouver Sun
Friday, March 14, 2008
In Indonesia, tropical forests are being levelled and replaced with palm oil plantations to produce eco-friendly biofuel.
And in North America, research shows a forest that grows for 80 years to biological maturity locks up less carbon than one harvested every 45 years and turned into building products.
It's like saving the planet by destroying the forest, a paradox that speakers at a Globe 2008 session said Thursday highlights the need for clear rules on accounting for carbon in the post-Kyoto world.
"If you get too far along in your carbon accounting, it gets counterproductive," warned Avrim Lazar, president of the Forest Products Association of Canada.
Lazar said a key question in climate change discussions should be: What are the values that govern forest management?
"If you just manage for carbon storage, you are missing the point. You should also manage for biodiversity, for wildlife values, for wilderness values.
"The best thing you could do for storing carbon would be to have tree farms right across the boreal [forest], turn them into newspapers and hide them in the basements in big stacks.
"You have huge sequestration, you've got continual gathering of CO2 out of the air in the tree farms. Fire is addressed and you have the world's best sequester.
"It's not what we want. We want to harvest the natural forest in a way that doesn't decrease the carbon storage but also respects biodiversity."
Data on the carbon-reduction benefits of fast harvest rotations were provided by Bruce Lippke, president of the Consortium for Research and Renewable Industrial Materials, which has conducted research into the total carbon footprint of wood products.
Chris Elliott, Pacific region vice-president for the World Wildlife Fund, said deforestation for bioenergy is a big concern.
"Bio-energy is very fashionable; there's a great peak of interest in it. But all that deforestation in Sumatra is actually for establishing oil palm plantations and some of that palm oil is now entering the global markets as use for biodiesel as a kind of green product. From a biodiversity and from a climate balance point of view that is extremely harmful."
Elliott said Asia Pulp & Paper, which recently purchased two pulp mills, a sawmill and timber tenure in B.C., is the main company involved in deforestation in Sumatra.
"We believe in holding global companies accountable to global standards. They can't duck and hide behind the fact that environmental regulations might be lower in Indonesia than in Canada. As they become more present in Canada, they will certainly find environmental groups challenging them on some of those issues."
The WWF has partnered with the Canadian forest industry to achieve a goal of harvesting, manufacturing and consuming forest products without adding carbon to the atmosphere.
Lazar laid out details of the plan at the Globe panel, saying it's an initiative "almost strangely bold," for his industry.
Both panelists said that the thorny issue of carbon accounting -- deciding what counts as an emission and what counts as storage and sequestration -- has yet to be settled.
Lazar said credibility is crucial to the initiative. Mimicking the acronyms that are commonplace at Globe, Lazar said FPAC has adopted the NBS rule -- no BS -- in its approach to carbon accounting.
The drive for carbon neutrality will examine carbon-in and carbon-out from the forest to the landfill.
Elliott said the collaboration is still in its early stages.
"We have some very strong experience here in Vancouver with one of the FPAC members, Catalyst Paper. We have worked on a similar project with them over the past five years," he said in an interview.
"They have been able to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 70 per cent through a combination of using biofuels and increasing energy efficiency in their mills.
"But what we are are looking at here with FPAC is broader and more ambitious. We are looking at management in the forests, management in the mills and then the whole product life-cycle."
ghamilton@png.canwest.com
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment