Canada's Managed Forests Now A Carbon Source - Collapse Began Around 2000 And Is Accelerating
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You can find this data in the NIR's top-level inventory table, listed under "HWP" (Harvested Wood Product). And I've again used a 10-year running average for it. If you look at the left of this dashed line, you'll see that harvested wood emitted an average of 144 MtCO2 per year before 2000. But the green line shows the forest back then absorbed even more than that: 160 MtCO2 per year.
Having the forest absorb more CO2 than the harvested wood emitted made it easier to argue that the wood was "carbon neutral". But as the forest carbon sink collapsed, the forest couldn't keep up. A gap opened between that plunging green line and the steady, business-as-usual-logging dashed brown line. The size of that gap shows how much CO2 was being added to the atmosphere.
What started as a trickle in the early 2000s, quickly turned into the flood. And during the last decade, Canada's managed forest didn't absorb any of the CO2 emitted by the wood harvested from it. That's because, again, our managed forest ended up being a net emitter of CO2 over that decade. Twenty years ago, all the CO2 being emitted by harvested wood was being taken back up by the forest. Now none of it is. Instead, it is accumulating in our atmosphere, worsening the climate crisis.
This highlights one of the many economic threats created by foot-dragging on climate action. As our intensifying climate impacts drive ecosystems to become CO2 emitters, these degraded ecosystems no longer provide us with the valuable free service of cleaning up our CO2 mess. Canada's logging industry, in particular, reaped the benefits of this free CO2 removal. The carbon they harvest from the forest is exempted from Canada's carbon tax and from Canada's climate pollution targets. And their wood products have been viewed as "carbon neutral", giving them a marketplace advantage over alternatives that lack a free CO2 cleanup.
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https://www.nationalobserver.com/2021/05/07/news/canada-carbon-sink-managed-forests-circling-drain