‘Sustainable’ logging operations are clear-cutting Canada’s climate-fighting forests
Nonprofit environment watchdogs put their stamps of approval on countless wood products that get touted as responsibly produced. But Reuters found that the timber firms these groups certify are harvesting large swaths of Canada’s older forests, which are critical to containing global warming.
Canadian forests have seen some of the world’s largest declines in ecologically critical primary and old-growth woodlands over the last two decades, even as sustainability-certification programs grew to include nearly all of Canada’s logging.
To track destruction of older woodlands in these certified zones, Reuters analyzed forestry data in Ontario, a major logging province. The analysis found that about 30% of the certified boreal forests harvested from 2016 to 2020 were at least 100 years old. That resulted in the loss of 377 square miles of these older forests, an area the size of New York City and Washington D.C. combined.