Environmentalists say federal tracking of forest health replete with ‘spin’

A coalition of Canadian environmental groups is accusing the federal government of misrepresenting the true state of the country’s forests in its annual accounting of the forestry sector.

The groups allege that Natural Resources Canada’s (NRCan) The State of Canada’s Forests Annual Report puts a positive “spin” on the logging industry and forest health, through selected statistics and the omission of key information.

The groups, which include Stand.Earth, The Sierra Club Canada, the David Suzuki Foundation and the Natural Resource Defence Council, among others, has produced a report of its own, challenging the government’s forestry accounting.

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That report claims Ottawa’s annual review fails to account for logging in old-growth and primary forests, forest degradation, deforestation due to logging infrastructure, declining biodiversity and climate impacts.

Natural Resources Canada’s “information is incredibly biased, it omits key facts, and it really doesn’t give people in Canada an accurate representation of what is happening in forests, which is in effect a dire crisis,” Stand.Earth forests campaigner Tegan Hansen said.

“The government of Canada and provincial governments put forward this idea that forestry in Canada is somehow sustainable and world leading by saying we have such a low amount of deforestation, when in reality we are seeing every year 10s of thousands or more hectares of at risk old growth forest and natural forests in other parts of the country being permanently destroyed.”

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Hansen cited the way Ottawa’s reporting accounts for clear-cut logging as a key example.

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Because forest companies are required to re-plant cutblocks with new trees, the NRCan annual report considers clear-cut areas to still be forests, she said.

“I think anyone in Canada could walk into a clear-cut and then walk into an old-growth forest and be able to tell you that there is a difference,” she said.

“The government of Canada doesn’t distinguish between an area that’s been logged and maybe turned into a plantation and a standing old-growth of primary forest, so what we get is a really skewed image of how much forest is there in Canada and how healthy is it, how resilient is it to the kind of mega-fires we are seeing.”

Hansen said failing to account for the cumulative impacts on Canada’s forests both threatens their long-term health and biodiversity, while leaving communities at risk from floods and fires due to weakened forest resilience.

At the same time, she said, the federal government has used its own accounting to promote Canada internationally as a leader in forest protection and a source of sustainable forest products.

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In a statement, Natural Resources Canada said it and the provinces are “continually discussing new indicators and areas where those indicators can be improved.”

But it stood by its reporting, which it said uses “internationally agreed-upon indicators of sustainable forest management to report on forest sustainability.”

“Forest degradation is a complex issue, affecting multiple forest values, attributes, services, and species. There is no universal definition or reporting framework for forest degradation,” NRCan said.

“However, recognizing the need for a deeper understanding of the conditions impacting Canada’s forests, the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers (CCFM) … is actively working to define and report on forest degradation in Canada. CCFM’s priority is to work towards a definition framework that is scientifically credible, internationally acceptable, culturally sensitive, objectively measurable, and transparent.”

The coalition of environmental groups is calling on the federal government to improve transparency in its accounting to include details on the effects of large-scale logging, including rates of forest degradation, impacts on old-growth forests, regeneration failures and governments’ performance on respecting Indigenous rights.