Proceedings of the Subcommittee on the
Boreal Forest
Standing
Senate Committee on
Agriculture and Forestry
Issue 2 - Evidence
OTTAWA, Thursday, March 20, 1997
The Subcommittee on Boreal Forest of the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met this day at 4:00 p.m. to continue its study on the present state and future of forestry in Canada as it relates to the boreal forest.
Senator Doris Anderson (Chair) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chair: Good afternoon. The second session of the hearings on Canada's boreal forest is now open. Last Thursday we heard from Mr. Jacques Carette, Director General of the Industry, Trade and Technology Directorate, Canadian Forest Service, Natural Resources Canada, who spoke to us on Canada's forests from a federal perspective.
Today, we are pleased to welcome Dr. Michael Apps, Senior Research Scientist, Canadian Forest Service, who will discuss with us global climate change, a very interesting topic, I am sure.
Mr. Apps, you have the floor.
Dr. Michael Apps, Senior Research Scientist, Natural Resources Canada: Madam Chair, ladies and gentlemen, it is a great pleasure and honour to share with you some of the science that is occurring on the role of Canadian forests and global climate change.
I am going to speak to you as a scientist. The role of science is not to give policy direction or policy advice but to tell you what the consequences of decisions are and to give insight into how you affect the outcome in the future.
If I give you information on policy, I will be speaking as a person rather than as a government official, because my job is not policy. However, I think that what I say will have a major impact on policy decisions. I hope that you will learn from my presentation.
I grew up in the forests of British Columbia. To me, forests are Canada. Canadians are defined by our forests. We are part of this world.
I should like to quote to you from a paper by Mr. D'Arcy Linklater, Chief of the First Nations band in Nelson House. I believe that the philosophy of this is important with respect to forests in Canada. It reads:
The legends of our culture are rich with images of people, plants and animals working together shaping the natural environment and sustaining life.
To me, this is a definition of what Canadians, whether they be first peoples or not, are about. Forests are part of our environment.
The paper continues:
As we proceed and continue in this period of global warming, let us ask the Creator for understanding and sympathy, for clear vision and sensitivity, for wisdom, strength and courage. We must respect and dignify each other to give ourselves the freedom, the right and the opportunity to enrich our material, cultural and spiritual modes of life.
It is important to start off by recognizing that forests are part of the Canadian self-image and the image that the world has of us.
Senator Spivak: What is the title of that paper, please?
Mr. Apps: It is entitled "Boreal Forests and Global Change". It is very technical, but it does provide some of the science information about the impacts of human decisions on what is happening in our forests.
Senator Taylor: Does it deal only with Canada?
Mr. Apps: It is a Canadian book but a large number of Russian scientists have contributed to it as well.
I want to talk to you on three main themes today. The first is what is the role of forests generally in climate and climate change. The second is climate change impacts on Canadian forests; what we think will happen to our forests in this period of climate change. The third is to bridge climate change, forests and sustainable development and make it clear what the roles of forests, sustainable development and climate change are from a scientific perspective.
Through these three points, I will talk about science issues and challenges -- difficult things that we know and do not know; the implications you need to consider in making decisions; and emergent challenges and issues -- things which, from a science perspective, we think will happen that will influence the next generation of decision makers.
With regard to forests and climate, forests act as a major filter for air, water and various pollutants. Forests are part of the natural cycle which cleans the air and water and provides these resources to animals and humans. They exchange greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide. They play a large role in the climate system about which I will speak. As an example, forest fires put soot into the atmosphere -- carbon, particulates. That is a natural part of the cycle, and I will talk a little about that, too.
I will come to the issue of climate change and forests. The three diagrams now on the overhead projector tell why carbon is important. These diagrams each have important message.
The first shows the changes in climate and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere back to 160,000 years ago. These are actual measurements taken from ice bubbles.One of these lines represents the global temperature, which varied between -10 degrees and +5 degrees relative to today. This shows the fluctuations that occurred as far back as 160,000 years ago. We see two large glaciations and then a warming up.
This diagram also shows the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the temperature move together. The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere ranged from 180 up to 280. Today, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 360. It is off the top of the curve.
If carbon dioxide and temperature go together and the temperature varied by this amount, and now we are off this chart, there may be a consequence and we must be concerned about what the temperature will do now.
Therefore, our first piece of information is that temperature and carbon behave together and we are already way beyond what the world has seen in the last 160,000 years.
Our second piece of information is how much carbon we have been putting into the atmosphere through our industrial activities in the last 100 years. The increase in carbon dioxide emissions is illustrated on this chart. The numbers do not matter very much. What is important is that it is increasing rather quickly and it is this which has caused the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as illustrated in this diagram, to go from 280 to 360, which gives us concern about temperature. That is the issue of climate change in a nutshell.
Our third piece of information is how much of this remains in the atmosphere. This diagram gives direct measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide being the greenhouse gas. We see that it is increasing. These are direct measurements from 1955 to 1985 taken at Mauna Loa, Hawaii. These fluctuation are the actual fluctuations from year to year. I will explain that in a moment.
Once again, this illustrates how the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing. In 1985, it was already over 340 parts per million.
The other curves on this diagram illustrate total emissions, one being fossil fuel and the other land use change. There are ways of adding the pieces up to come to that number.
Senator Spivak: You speak only of carbon dioxide, but is that total emissions?
Mr. Apps: This happens to be carbon, not carbon dioxide, but there are other emissions.
Senator Spivak: Would that graph look different if you put in the other gases?
Mr. Apps: No, the shape would be exactly the same.
This graph illustrates the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and shows the fluctuations from year to year. First we see only one point on the surface and then we see the data from across the planet. This line shows the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and this line shows the time, going from 1981 to 1995, which happens to be the record. This goes from the South Pole to the North Pole, so you see why I call it the flying carpet.
Imagine a doctor coming from outer space and putting a mask on planet earth to measure the way it breathes. This is a record of the planet breathing carbon dioxide in and out.
When it is high in the north, it is wintertime. The planet is breathing out in the north. The trees are not yet working. However, at the same time they are breathing in in the south. Because there are not many trees in the south, the vacillations there are not very great. All we see in the southern regions is the ocean breathing in and out, but it does not breathe in and out as much as the forests of the north.
This illustrates the way the planet breathes in and out, which is what is causing this in and out effect.
Senator Spivak: Are you saying there are many fewer trees in the south?
Mr. Apps: Most of the southern part of the planet is water. The main way for carbon to go in and out is through living cells. The process by which that happens is photosynthesis. Photosynthesis does happen in the ocean with phytoplankton, but it is not as powerful an absorption method as are the forests and the grasslands in the terrestrial systems.
Senator Spivak: Are you saying that the northern forests are more important?
Mr. Apps: This data shows that there is more exchange in and out in the north than in the south, and the major difference between those areas is that there is more land surface in the north, and that is the process.
A similar phenomenon happens with methane, which is another greenhouse gas, but I will not talk about that. It is an issue, but not as big an issue for the forests as carbon dioxide.
What is causing the build-up of carbon in the atmosphere? This diagram shows that the total amount of carbon which remains in the atmosphere is also increasing with time. The black line shows the actual increase in the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere with annual variations taken out. That is real data showing how much carbon is in the atmosphere.
The red line is an independent data set. It illustrates the amount of carbon that we are putting into the atmosphere every year through industrial activities. This is fossil fuel cement. It is not the biospheric. Half of the carbon remains there, so there is an adjustment factor to bring the two lines into agreement; namely, a multiplication of about .4 to make them agree at this point. However, look how well the two lines agree the rest of the way up. This simply says that the build-up in the atmosphere is related to the amount of carbon we are putting into the atmosphere.
I will explain in a couple of moments what forests have to do with that. You will notice that the black line is different than the red line in a few places. In fact, when this aberration was seen there was hope that the world was correcting itself. Some people thought that the problem was going away. More recent data shows that it has come back up to the red line. These departures show that the planet's breathing process is different, that there is a biological feedback going on.
Therefore, it is as a result of human activities that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising.
This next slide presents the numbers a little differently. We see emissions from fossil fuel and cement production, estimates of land use change and the amount of carbon that we burned off from deforesting in various parts of the world, primarily the tropics. Those total about seven gigatonnes. That is a huge number which we are putting in every year. Seven gigatonnes of carbon is equivalent to burning the forests of British Columbia completely every year with no carbon residues. That is a very large amount.
Only half of that remains in the atmosphere. We are pretty sure that the phytoplankton and the processes in the oceans take up two gigatonnes. That leaves about two gigatonnes. Other scientists have done studies which lead them to believe that that carbon is somehow going into forests in the northern hemisphere. These numbers are in addition to the normal breathing in and out of the planet. These are the additional carbon units we are putting in which seem to be disappearing. However, we cannot destroy or create carbon. It has to go somewhere.
Therefore, if two gigatonnes of carbon are going into the forest, can we count on the forest continuing to take that up?
Senator Spivak: If that carbon did not disappear, would it be enough to cause runaway warming?
Mr. Apps: Runaway warming is not quite the right issue, but if the downward arrows no longer functioned, the upward arrows would increase. That is where the issue of forests lies.
Forests take up carbon through photosynthesis, and that is the only way that carbon is taken up. The green leaves breathe in the carbon as carbon dioxide. Fifty per cent of the dry matter of trees is carbon. It comes not from the roots but from the atmosphere.
However, there are many processes by which carbon goes back to the atmosphere. The trees respire during the winter, as do their roots, the dead material that ends up on the forest floor and the material that we harvest from the forest and put into products. So there are many ways in which carbon can be released back into the atmosphere and just one way that it can be taken up. That is why forests are important.
The issue is not how much carbon is in trees, soils, peat, or forest products; the issue is the net difference between all the red arrows and the one green arrow. It is the net change that is important. By looking at that we can actually estimate how carbon changes.
The issue is that climate change can affect forests. This slide shows the boreal forest looked at from Canada. If climate is changing these forests, then the forests will change to something different. What happens to the carbon pools and what will be the change?
What are human beings doing to the climate that affects the forests? Climate change will have a much larger impact on Canadian forests in the next 100 years than most people are aware.
Senator Taylor: Have you any comparison of carbon absorption by forests versus grain fields?
Mr. Apps: Yes. I will explain that a little later, although I will give you a hint right now. Trees store carbon for 100 years before it releases it. They breathe in slowly, hold on to it and then breathe it out. Grain breathes in and out every year and the amount stored over that period of time is relatively small.
There are two main methods of projecting how the forests will change. One method is called biogeographical approaches, and these are models because there is no data about the future.
As G. Baskerville said, "The dilemma of mankind is that all facts are about the past, but decisions are made for the future where the facts are not yet known." We have no data for the future and this is a dilemma for you.
Biogeographical approaches try to project the changes in the distribution of the forests, the cover type if you like, usually by making a correlation between climate and existing vegetation. Their best use is looking at the sensitivity of the forest to climate change; that is, not saying what will be, but how much it might be changed. A bad use is to predict what the forest will be.
The assumption of these models is that the climate and the forests will be stable and steady. Neither of those assumptions will be true under the scenarios we are talking about. It assumes that the future is like the past.
J.P. Kimmins said that use of empirical relationships for predicting future tree growth is like driving a car using the rear view mirror. That might work on the prairies, but it does not work very well in the Rockies, and it will not work very well for assessments of future climate change. We cannot rely on past data to say what will happen in the future.
I now come to the issue of how the boreal forest might be affected by climate change. In this I will rely on a very large community of scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Contributors to this group include thousands of scientists and academic researchers in government and industry. This panel produced a second assessment report in 1995. The conclusions on the boreal forest are the following:
First, climate change is likely to have its greatest impacts on the boreal forests. This community thinks that is a very valid statement.
Second, northern tree lines are likely to advance slowly into the tundra. There is also great confidence in that statement.
Third, increased fire and pests -- meaning insects, disease and so on -- are likely to decrease the average age, biomass and carbon stores of that forest, having its greatest impact at the southern boundary.
This is understandable because on the southern boundary things get killed more quickly. In the north it takes a long time for things to regrow, so the biggest impact is in the south, which is where we live. There is medium confidence in that statement. The actual information is very difficult to project.
Fourth, net primary productivity -- the rate at which things grow -- where it has enough rainfall, is likely to increase. However, even where it does increase, there is liable to be a net loss of carbon because, although the trees grow faster, there are increases in decomposition. Things breathe out more rapidly than they breathe in. Therefore, even where things might be improving in the short term, there will be more carbon going into the atmosphere. There is medium confidence in that statement.
These are very powerful statements.
Senator Taylor: With regard to what you said about increased fires, in our hearings across Canada we heard complaints that fire controls are so good that a mass is building up on the forest floors.
Mr. Apps: I will show you some data on that in a few moments.
The other method of projecting the forest's response is the dynamic approach. With this approach we try to keep track of things as they are changing. We consider what the consequence of a certain action is liable to be. We are not trying to make predictions. We are trying to assess how the forest will respond to certain behaviour. That is very much the right way to go, but it is a very difficult scientific problem. It is not that we do not know enough; it is that we are asking questions that have never been asked before. In Canada, we are trying to grapple with this in both the academic world and government science. It is a difficult task.
The bad use of this approach is to make absolute predictions.
Dr. J. Maini, a retired scientist from the Canadian Forest Service, once said that without predictive capability we are like accelerating cars on a road with curves at night -- we must be careful not to oversteer our headlights.
We need to use our best knowledge in looking forward.
I will now show you what the current understanding of predicting forest response is. This slide shows the boreal forests of Canada today. British Columbia is greyed out because the data which was used for this particular model was not good enough to handle B.C. with its mountains. The work on this was done by two scientists in Environment Canada.
The second illustration shows the forests as they would like to be under a doubled CO2 climate. If the climate were in equilibrium, and if the forests were allowed to grow for long enough that they could come into equilibrium and everything worked exactly the way it did in the past, the future might look like this.
I am not saying that that is what will be, but where there is change in colour and forest distribution, the forest as it exists today is trying to change to a different type, and that is because it is stressed.
There are different kinds of stress. If I gave you a million dollars, you would be stressed, although it would be good for you, in a way. If I took away all your money, you would also be stressed. The same is true for the forest in that it will not behave the same way under different kinds of stress.
This is not a prediction of what the forest will look like. It is a prediction of what sensitivity the forest has. There are big changes on the horizon there, and that is just one model.
Senator Spivak: I do not understand what the colours on the diagram mean. Would it be a different kind of forest? Would it be grasslands? Would it be desert?
Mr. Apps: We see here the grasslands as they are now, the prairies. In this scenario they have taken over much of the boreal forest of Saskatchewan and Manitoba. You would be hard pressed to find the boreal forest of the central plains at all. If anything, it appears way over here. Trees do not pick up their roots and move. If the models are correct, this climate will be here 100 years from now. The trees will not move from here to there in 100 years.
Another important aspect under this scenario is that the temperate forests suddenly move over here. That is the magnitude of changes in climatic conditions which our forests are liable to experience under one particular climate scenario.
Senator Taylor: Does that take into consideration different soil conditions?
Mr. Apps: No.
Senator Taylor: After all, it is following the Canadian Shield.
Mr. Apps: It does not.
Senator Spivak: It does not talk about permafrost or tundra?
Mr. Apps: No, not at all.
Senator Spivak: How do we know that forests can grow there at all?
Mr. Apps: That is exactly the right question. In fact, you have set me up.
This first diagram shows where we are now and the second one shows where it wants to be 100 years from now. We want to be able to look at the change as we go along and change that arrow as we go through it to ensure that we are moving in the right direction. However, that is a very hard job. That is the hard job of science right now. That is the emergent challenge.
This is not only about the way the climate is changing but about the way we do business in the forest; the way we view the forest, working with it, using it for our benefit while preserving it for the benefit of our children. That is what sustainable management is about.
Senator Spivak: Is anyone looking at what we have to do in order to maintain a forest for 100 years?
Mr. Apps: That is an excellent question. The climate change group with which I am involved in government is working with universities on exactly that. The Canadian Forest Service Science of Climate Change Initiative is trying to answer exactly that question, but it is very difficult.
Senator Spivak: I do not get that feeling when I listen to the political statements which seem to be directed toward "lumber now". I hope it is percolating up. I am glad to hear that.
Mr. Apps: I have no particular vested interest, but I think there are people in industry and government who are now listening, and that is because there are a number of scientists like myself saying that our children and our grandchildren will be affected. We are saying that we think there is something happening and that they must pay attention to it. Scientists in the government are certainly trying to do this. I am proud to say that the group I am with is working very hard on this.
To do the projected changes, we need to look at the dynamic factors. The changes are driven by disturbances, and disturbances consist of fire, insects, harvesting, wind-throw, flooding and many other things.
Some of these are natural and happen whether humans are there or not, but they are all influenced by our activities. Harvesting is pretty much a human activity alone, but it is only one of the things we do. These are the direct effects.
The issue is not whether or not these disturbances exist; it is how they are changing over time. So the issue for climate change in particular, and global change more generally, is how we are changing these things and the influence we are having on them.
That is the difference between climate change, which is the thing we are doing, and climate, which is the thing that is there. We must know what our actions are doing.
We know that fire is one of those disturbances, and the chart I am now showing you is the record of area burned by fires on an annual basis from 1930 to 1990.
As you see, this is not constant; it changes over time. We can see that in the 1980s and 1990s there were some very large fires. In 1994, there were some very large fires. In 1991, approximately 5 million hectares burned. That is bigger than some European countries. These were not caused by human activity. We were stopping some of them and some we were not stopping. Forest fires happened before humans were on the scene as well.
Senator Taylor: Have you any evidence that fires were allowed to proceed with no effort to stop them?
Mr. Apps: We are examining that right now. My information is that we were very successful in protecting certain areas from natural fire, but in others we just were not effective. Five per cent of the fires cause 95 per cent of the damage. We can stop 95 per cent of the fires, but immense damage is done by the 5 per cent that get away.
The issue here is not whether we are doing something right or wrong. If the fires were going to happen, are we doing the right thing by stopping them? The question is whether we are increasing the probability of fires by climate change in particular.
It is not only fires that are causing these changes. The diagram I am showing you now is a little different than the one I showed you before. Many of the big peaks from year to year are being averaged out. This shows five-year running averages so the big fluctuations do not show. This goes from 1920 to 1990. We see the same average as you saw in the previous graph for the fires. When you average it out, it is a bit smoother.
As I said, it is not just fires. There are forests that have been destroyed by insects. Insects acted similarly at different times in different places. There was a big spruce budworm outbreak in Eastern Canada in the 1940s and another one in the late 1970s. Insects killed forests in places where fire was not the issue. The two put together add up to quite a large area.
The third factor I mentioned was human harvesting. There is a characteristic to the area being harvested that you do not see with the others. The area being harvested is continually increasing. It does not jump around the way the natural disturbances do. So harvesting is affecting the forest and there are two very important things with regard to the areas that are involved. The natural fluctuations are very large compared to what we are doing. Second, harvesting is increasing, but not as rapidly as the changes in the total. On this graphs it looks as though it decreased from 1920 to 1970, for whatever reason, and then in 1970 there was a big increase in the total.
There is some uncertainty in this data. These numbers may be larger. There has been this change in disturbances. The question is how the changes in disturbances have been reflected in the way the forest looks, both from harvesting and from the natural disturbances. This is where the global forest and climate change becomes important.
A diagram I showed you earlier illustrated how much carbon we are globally putting into the atmosphere. Half of it is remaining there and, of the remaining half, some goes into the oceans and some goes elsewhere. The question is whether this arrow is starting to change.
This next slide is a flow diagram of how we actually keep track of all the carbon. This has been peer reviewed by the scientific community. When we translate the disturbance diagram into the effect it has on the carbon pools, we get a diagram that looks like this. This is the rate at which carbon is annually breathed in compared to being breathed out. When you keep track of all the carbon in vegetation, soil, forest products, et cetera, there is more carbon being taken in than is being given out, so it is a sink. It is a good thing. It is removing carbon from the atmosphere.
We had a sink in the order of 150 units of carbon. To put that in context, we burned about 100 units in fossil fuel in Canada. Up until about 1970, it looked like the forests were taking up more than half again of what we are actually emitting in Canada. The minister at that time, Frank Oberle, said: "This is great. Forests are solving the fossil fuel problem." I said: "Sorry, Mr. Oberle, I cannot back you up on that because I do not know that that will continue. There is no reason why that should be."
We were a sink, but because of that change in disturbances it turned around and it looks as though the forests may have been losing carbon in the last five years. We are not positive about this. In particular, we have not taken into account some of the other changes that go on. However, just looking at the effect of disturbances on the way carbon is stored in the forest, taking into account fire, insects and harvesting, and keeping track of the carbon that we remove by harvesting and putting it into wood products -- which is a good thing because it keeps carbon on the ground and not in the atmosphere -- we were a sink and now we have become a bit of a source. If this were due to climate warming, it means that the arrow I showed you before indicating where some of the carbon was going may no longer be there and could change. That is the runaway effect.
The carbon that is removed from the atmosphere ends up in trees and soils and, when we harvest it, it ends up in forest products. It is actually very good to store wood that way because that is a carbon store which is being removed from the atmosphere and which we can control. We can decide whether we want to let it decompose. When we remove fossil fuel from the ground and put it into the atmosphere, we have no control over it.
The question is what will happen in the future. I have shown you a depiction of how the forests look now and how they want to be in the future. We know how much carbon is in here. Building on information from scientists in government and universities, the Canadian Forest Service has assessed the amount of carbon. In the boreal zone alone there are 7,000 million tonnes of carbon. In soils there are 30,000 million tonnes. In forest products there are only 300 tonnes. Although that is a small number, we have absolute control over it. We can manage that; we can keep that carbon. We do not have as much control over the other holders of carbon.
What will these pools look like under the changed climate? It is not difficult to see that, if you go from that to that, these will be different.
To make that change is very difficult, as I have explained before.
Senator Spivak: What do your figures show you as to what should be the human activity, if this is the end you are coming to?
Mr. Apps: I will try to answer that in a few moments, if I may.
I have made the link between disturbances, carbon budget and climate. Now I want to make the link between climate and the disturbances. I showed you that data for fire, insects and human activity. I did not make the statement, and I cannot, that that was due to climate change. I will not make that statement. My job is not to predict what climate is. As a research scientist in the government doing forest response modelling and trying to understand what the forest is, God said to me, "Mike, here is the record of what the climate will look like. Your job is to tell me what you think the forests will look like." So I am not here to tell you that the climate is going to change. We have been told by other scientists that climate is liable to change and I am here to say that we think forests will be significantly affected by that.
With regard to the disturbances, this diagram shows that in 1993 the average temperature in the west was 4.5 degrees warmer in the spring than it had ever been from 1950 to 1990. In other words, it was a hot year. That is also the period in which there were big fires. The point is that if we get warmer and drier conditions, we can expect fire to increase.
In fact, more research by other government scientists, again working with other colleagues and universities, have resulted in some projections. If the climate changes according to these scenarios of climate change, how will the risk of fire increase? This diagram shows what it looked like from 1980 to 1989. Red means there is a bigger probability of fire while green means there is less probability. The increase in red in these different models says what the probability of increase is.
This is telling us that under these climate change scenarios we can expect more fires under every single one of these circumstances. It is saying that the risk will go up, not because of what we are doing to the forest directly, but because of what we are doing to the forest indirectly, and this should be a huge concern for everyone.
The final point is about Canadian forests, climate change and sustainable development. The change I have witnessed in the last decade in forestry and forest science is that the image of what the forest's role is and the scope of forest management has changed from being concerned about a strictly local situation to having to consider the larger picture. This was a very hot issue a few years ago. Headlines read, "Revenge of the Killer Trees", "The Worst of Times", and "Doing the Carbon Shuffle". Forest managers are now asking what contribution they are making either to solving the problem or making it worse. Forestry, if practised well, can do a little to help. If practised badly, it can do a little harm. The bottom line is that forestry in Canada will not make a big difference to that issue. It will have a significant difference in the quality of life that we have in that forest, which is a different issue, but the changes that will occur from climate are much larger than the changes we can effect directly on the forest.
That is my best professional opinion at this time. That does not, however, mean that there are not things we need to do.
Senator Taylor: You say that managing the forest will not have much effect on the climate. However, will the climate have a large effect on the forests?
Mr. Apps: Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. Climate change does not have a single solution. It is not something that we can point to someone as being responsible for. We all have to do things a little differently. Forestry has a definite role to play in solving the climate problem, as do others, but it cannot be the scapegoat; it cannot be the solution. We all need to be involved in that.
The buzzword in forest science and forest management is sustainable development. What does it mean? According to the Brundtland Commission, which coined the phrase, sustainable development is "meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." That is a direct quote from the Royal Commission on Environment Development, the Brundtland Commission. The issue is, what does that mean if the future environment is different than anything we have experience with? I believe that we cannot sustainably manage this piece of forest without considering what impact the rest of the world is having on that, and the role that that piece of forest has in the bigger environment. It is a two-way street. It is not what you do wrong here to the exclusion of out there; it is what we do wrong in the bigger picture and the impact.
The other piece of the puzzle is the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Under Article 2 of the UN Framework on Climate Change, the 150-plus nations which have signed on have agreed to the following goal with regard to greenhouse gas emissions: "...to achieve...stabilisation of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system."
In other words, they have agreed that they must take actions in the way we manage our human affairs and what we do in the environment so as to prevent buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to an extent that would cause dangerous interference. People say that science must answer that question. It is not for science to answer that question because the word "dangerous" carries a value judgment. It is your decision and my decision; it is human decisions about what we want to have happen.
Senator Spivak: Yes, but science can answer "no regrets".
Mr. Apps: I do not think we can. I think we can be part of that, because regret is a human value. We can say that if you do this, we think this will be the consequence, and then you and I, as humans, say, "Yes, I accept that" or "No, I do not."
Senator Spivak: The earth will be here but humans might not. It is a question of survival.
Mr. Apps: I would like to explain that very clearly. The issue is that science has to add up the pieces to see what the change in the global environment is. If we are going to manage this piece of land, one of the jobs of science is to predict what impact that management will have on the bigger picture. It is the job of policy to say what we want to have happen to the bigger picture, and the key for this is to have good indicators of what our performance is.
For example, in forestry we work at a stand level and the impacts that we have at the stand level have an impact on the region. The region has an impact on the country and the country has an impact on the globe. So we go from a very small scale where we cut trees or grow trees, for example, and a very short time frame, up to the regional level, which is larger, and then to the bigger one, which is the globe.
Policy works in the other direction. We say what we want to achieve and then work back down. The task for policy is to find a way to meet the overall objective and apportion the jobs down lower.
However, there is a difference between the two things. Science works from the small to the big. Policy starts from the big and works down to the small. It is a very difficult task. The way we make it work is by having indicators of what it means: carbon stored in a stand, carbon stored in a country, carbon stored at the global level. Those are indicators we can keep track of.
I am sure that I have convinced you that climate change is a big uncertainty. I cannot tell you how the climate is going to change, but I can tell you that it will change. We are dealing with something that will change, but we do not know how much. We do know that it will be faster and larger than anything we have experienced. So we are dealing with uncertainty.
The job of science is to make the best possible projections of the possible changes in those indicators. Society has to assign values to them. Do we find that change acceptable? Do we find the results acceptable? That is valuation and that is the job of society. The job of policy- and decision-makers is to put these two pieces together to select on the basis of what you think will be the perceived benefit.
So we can do three different things -- we can harvest, we can not harvest, and we can grow more trees -- and we will have three different possible futures. The job of science is to point out the consequences of each route. The job of society is to decide what is more important -- more trees, fewer trees and more wood, or a parking lot. Those are value judgments. They have nothing to do with science. Policy needs to select between them based on what we think will be the outcome and what we think will be the benefits.
Here are the three choices again, but now a decision has been made and we end up doing something. The job of putting science and policy together is that when we have done that, we have learned something about the way the world has worked. If we do this properly, we will learn from carrying out that intervention, whatever the decision might be. The decision might be to do nothing, and the world will change. Society, policy-makers and scientists have to learn from that experience and find out what the change is.
When we have changed the world, we start all over again. We have learned; we have made a mistake; so we correct it. If we correct it, we adapt. If we adapt, we have a new world and we have a new set of decisions to make.
We are working with an uncertain future and we will make mistakes. Scientists will make mistakes in their projections; society will make mistakes because we put the wrong values on things; and we know that we will make wrong policy decisions. Let us go into this uncertainty with some belief that we will work together so that we have learned from that mistake and we will make a better decision the next time around.
In particular, the climate may not be what we thought it was going to be. We must use science together with the way we make decisions.
Even if we knew what the world will look like 100 years from now, we will move through to that point regardless of what we do. Time will march on. We need to use our best scientific information to help make decisions jointly that affect the values. Scientists have a very distinct role to tell decision makers and society as a whole what we think will be the consequences of your action, and that is what we are trying to do. We are trying to understand that change. If we do this properly, perhaps we can envisage a future that will be good for our children and our grandchildren.
The take-home messages for you are the following: First, the best evidence we have to date is that climate will change over the next 100 years.
Senator Taylor: Before you leave that, maybe it is because I am a geologist, but I am afraid that your 160,000 years is a mere snapshot of our climate. I am wondering whether you have taken a big enough view. If you took a bigger snapshot, would you by any chance come up with a different graph?
Mr. Apps: That is possible. These are geological time frames, as you pointed out. Perhaps if we went back to the cretaceous-tertiary boundary, the carbon dioxide might have been greater. I used this not to predict that there will be changes but to point out that in this time record, which is much greater than the interval we are talking about, we have already exceeded the boundaries.
Human industrial activity has occurred only at the very end of this graph. It does not even show on this graph. We are talking about different processes. The geological processes are slow. We are talking about a very rapid change and the forests are not behaving geologically. They are responding to the dynamic changes.
Therefore, while I appreciate your point about the bigger context, I do not think the issue of what we do as people in Canada is determined by the same things as the geological record.
Senator Taylor: One hundred and sixty thousand years is not very long in relation to the age of the earth, but with regard to the next 100 years and our children and grandchildren, this is a graph we should be using, and it looks as if we are heating up.
Mr. Apps: This is both positive and negative. In fact, there are more negative swings because of the ice ages.
Senator Taylor: Except that now the industrial era is exaggerating the heating. Does carbon dioxide excess always follow heating?
Mr. Apps: No, sometimes they lead and sometimes they lag. You cannot draw a cause and effect that carbon dioxide causes the heating or that heating causes the carbon dioxide, because sometimes it is one way and sometimes the other.
Senator Taylor: Right now carbon dioxide is leading the heating, is it not?
Mr. Apps: The process is different from this diagram. We know that carbon dioxide acts as a greenhouse gas. I could go into the physics of that, but it is not relevant. We have reason to believe that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will lead to heating now because of the process.
There has been a revaluation of the cyclicity using new time frames and there is a group of geologists who believe that we are headed toward another ice age, that we are in a cooling trend. There is another argument that that may not be true, and that we may be going through some natural variation.
As I said, one of the problems is that we are dealing with a new set of processes. We are putting more carbon into the atmosphere. That is a change which we have caused. You have to be very careful when you use correlation because when you move outside the domain where that correlation applies, all bets are off. You have no reason to know that it will work.
Senator Taylor: I follow that, but it is disturbing when you say that carbon increase is not necessarily associated with climate warming. I thought it would always be warming; that more carbon causes more greenhouse which makes it warmer.
Mr. Apps: Yes, but there are other processes that go on. I do not think anyone has been able to explain why sometimes carbon dioxide leads and sometimes temperature leads. We know they are connected, but there are different mechanisms that apply.
Senator Taylor: They do tend to track together though. We should be watching for heating because carbon has gone up.
Mr. Apps: Yes.
Senator Spivak: There are two points here. One is that there is uncertainty and the other is that there is human activity which has never occurred before. The prudent thing would be to proceed so that you have no regrets if the worst case becomes reality. If the best case becomes reality, you have no regrets either.
I think that is the answer for many ordinary people, but perhaps not scientists, although I think the majority of scientists are now coming around to that conclusion on climate change. Many people ask why we should proceed in such an expensive way when we do not know what we are doing. I think the key is "no regrets". Why should we take a chance with a future which might be terrible if we do not have to, particularly since it is economically efficient and beneficial to do things which we should do anyway?
Mr. Apps: I am not going to make a political or a policy statement. I do want to point out, however, that if you do not recognize that change is going to happen and you do not build that into your vision of the future, you may have a no regrets policy based on the information you are accepting now and you may have regrets because you did not consider that issue. That is why I say that, with this uncertainty, we should use our best knowledge about how climate might change, knowing that we are going to be wrong, so that we will have no regrets on that as well. We have to be much more expansive in our thinking.
Senator Spivak: We want a smart no regrets, not a stupid one.
Mr. Apps: You have it exactly. I think that is the way to handle this. That is exactly what I am saying. I remind you of my opening statement on what sustainable development in forestry is. We have moved in forestry from being concerned about just this little patch of ground to the impact we have on the larger picture. That is an important aspect.
In conclusion, first, the best evidence is that climate will change as a result of our human activities at a rate with which we have no experience. Some scientists believe that we are already detecting that change. That is a very powerful statement.
Second, Canadian forests will change as a result. I have absolutely no doubt about that. In other words, the indirect effects of human activities -- indirect meaning we change climate that changes the forest -- will be larger than the direct effects; that is, what we actually do in the forest.
Third, Canada's largest industry, forestry, will be changed. There is no question about that. The other point is that the Canadian way of life will be changed, not only forestry. We will all be affected.
Fourth, science must provide the best estimates of indicators, society must set the values on those indicators and decisions must reflect both our best estimates of change and the values. It is not science alone or values alone; it is the two together.
Fifth, uncertainty will stay with us. That is the bottom line. We, our children nor our grandchildren will ever know enough. We must be adaptive and learn from our successes and mistakes.
We do have a choice about what will happen to our forests. The question is whether we will exercise what we know about our past. Can we learn from our mistakes as we make them in order to improve our decisions? Can we learn from the past? Will we make the choice?
We know the climate is changing. We have the ability to make decisions. If we learn from our past and use foresight, we might avoid it.
We must learn from the past, but we must be careful that past mistakes do not catch up on us.
I thank you for your time and I would be very happy to answer any questions that I can, giving you my best science knowledge. I sincerely believe that science, decision-makers and society must take an interest in this issue for our children. If we really believe that it is important to work with the planet, we must pay attention to the changes we are creating by what we do to the forest both directly and indirectly.
As I said at the beginning of my presentation, Chief D'Arcy Linklater said that we must work in harmony with the forests. We use them, we embrace them, we are part of them and they are part of our cultural heritage. They must be part of our children's cultural heritage as well. It goes beyond forestry and beyond all other activities. We owe it to ourselves and to our society to make the right decisions.
Senator Spivak: You have been talking in macro terms. I am going to talk in micro terms. Given what is happening in the boreal forest in Canada, and particularly in the west where it is a very recent development, can you or should you have an impact on what the annual allowable cut is, not to mention other practices? From what we have seen in our study thus far, it seems that the basic operation is provincially directed and is sustained yield. In other words, cut as much as you can because otherwise we will kick you out.
With the information you have, can you determine what would be prudent?
Mr. Apps: I will address the big picture first and then come down to the specific. After a harvesting operation or a fire, you see the death, but you do not see the long-term, slow response. You do not often see the forest regrowing. However, that does happen after fire and after harvesting, unless you destroy the land base. Sustainable forestry is different than sustained yield.
My personal impression is that many more companies are trying to be more sustainable. In the big picture, I think there are improvements that can be made. On the small scale, we are trying to bring the level of research that I talked about here, which is at the global and national scale, down to an operational level, to the level of comparing forestry activities to fire activities. We are trying to do this in a particular area with the Foothills model forest. So yes, I think it is possible and people are listening and asking what they can do to help improve the carbon balance.
Senator Spivak: We have learned in this study that no one knows what they are doing. The industries, the centres of excellence, et cetera, all say that.
Second, the provinces allowed them to build huge factories which have a built-in demand system. So the biggest barrier is not the science but the people who are not interested in science.
For the purposes of our particular study, not looking at the global picture, it would be very useful for us to know what is prudent in order to evaluate what is actually happening on the ground.
Mr. Apps: That is a very valid concern. You used the term "no regrets policy" and spoke about ensuring that what we are doing makes sense.
I do not think you are right when you say that they do not know what they are doing. We do not know the answers, but we are trying to learn. I think the network centres of excellence are admitting that they not know the answers and are tying to learn from what we are doing.
There is great concern about clear-cutting, for example. However, we must realize that the things we use to replace wood products also require energy. We use aluminum for window frames. Aluminum is bauxite ore with energy thrown at it. The energy usually comes from fossil fuel. Wooden window frames, on the other hand, are made from trees that can be regrown if management is practised properly.
The issue is not so much clear-cutting or harvesting as it is not destroying the land base and allowing the trees to grow again. I sincerely believe that some of the experiments that are ongoing are designed to find out how to do that better.
The point is that if we do not use wood products, people will still build their window frames, and if they make them from aluminum, the impact on the environment might be larger.
Senator Spivak: I am not coming from that point of view at all. I am coming from the point of view of having heard these people say, "We really do not know how to do this."
Looking at the other side of the equation, I have no doubt that they would like to harvest sustainably. It is in their interest. On the one hand, they are not sure how to do it and, on the other, they have a huge monster which they have to feed, and each province is saying, "You had better do that or we will cancel your licence."
What we really need to know is at what point development must stop.
Mr. Apps: That is exactly what some researchers and parts of the industry are trying to do with experimentation. They are trying to apply adaptive management.
My impression from 10 years of working in this science is that many of the industry people are now willingly trying to find a better way of doing this. That is partly in response to public pressure, and that is healthy. The reality is that regardless of for what reason they are doing it, there is a change, and it is much better to pretend to be practising sustainable forestry than to say, "We don't care." That is the change. I truly believe that people are starting to be aware of their larger responsibility.
Senator Taylor: I want to ensure that I understand you clearly on climate change. Is it a desirable result, in your opinion, to bring carbon emissions down? Are we emitting too much carbon?
Mr. Apps: As I said right at the beginning, that is a value judgment and I can give you my opinion on that. From a science perspective, I can tell you what the changes will be. If your belief is that the changes in the forests will be bad and you do not want those, then we have to ensure that the climate does not change in that way.
Senator Taylor: We have to stabilize that.
Mr. Apps: This is very difficult because science can say what the impact will be, but it is you and I as humans who have to say whether that is acceptable. That is where policy, science and society have to come together.
Senator Taylor: In the province from which you and I come, many argue that global warming is not necessarily a bad thing, that we can learn to adjust with it, that with science and engineering we will be able to survive and be even better off than we were before.
However, there is another school that says there is no asymptote to that curve, that we will build on into infinity and ruin the earth.
Speaking scientifically, do you foresee the ruin of the earth if emissions continue to accelerate?
Mr. Apps: I think the world will adapt. The issue is whether it will adapt in a way that you and I want. The world will survive. The world and the environment does not care. The Gaia Hypothesis says that the world is a living thing. Gaia will solve the problem. It will adapt. The world will evolve. The question is whether we will evolve with it or go the way of the dinosaur.
As a scientist, I can tell you that this is how the world might change, but you and I jointly have to decide whether this is a world in which we can live. I cannot answer for myself whether I think it will be acceptable. I do not want to leave this world to my children, but that is my value.
Senator Taylor: You are a scientist and I am an applied scientist. We take something after it has happened and try to adapt.
Mr. Apps: We answer the questions and you apply it. That is the way it should be.
Senator Taylor: I understand that you personally would like to have carbon brought under control. I am just wondering whether you are not being too didactic in interpreting that the forest will look like that if the heat continues. You are not a biologist, are you?
Mr. Apps: No, but I have worked in forestry for 15 years.
Senator Taylor: I am just wondering whether, biologically and botanically, climate warming would not change a forest rather than move it. For example, perhaps there would be more oak and beech rather than poplar, and more fir rather than spruce and pine. I do not believe that there is sufficient soil in the north for the forests to shift there. I am wondering whether we would not get a leopard with different spots rather than what you are suggesting.
Mr. Apps: I have here a diagram which illustrates how the species will change. This answers the question of how things will change and what things would like to grow in. We are trying to examine that question. All you see here are differences.
We are trying to do that right now. You are right that I am not a biologist, but I have the advantage of being able to draw from many biologists in the academic world and in the Canadian Forest Service. We work together looking at those changes.
What happens in 100 years is very different from what happens in 1,000 years, because it takes between 20 and 50 years before a tree grows to the size and maturity that it can produce new trees. It takes 100 years to create a new generation. So by the time the trees that are starting today are ready to start producing seed of their own type, the environment will have changed around them. You cannot change the species of trees that quickly, because they take 100 years.
If we plant trees today that are adapted to the climate of 100 years from now, they will not do well now, and the trees we plant today that are good for now, will not be right for the conditions which will exist 100 years from now. That is the dilemma.
You said that there is no reason to expect it to asymptote. The pictures I showed you of the changes in the forest were based on two times CO2, which means not controlling our emissions enough to stop the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from increasing two times. That is projected to occur in approximately 100 years, but there is no reason to expect it to stop there. The latest projections are that we will go way beyond that. We are not meeting our emission targets now. We seem to be incapable of taking the consequences into account around the world. So chances are that we will exceed two times. People are now looking at four times and six times. The changes are even larger.
There are a couple of other things that I have to say because I have painted a bleak picture. There are some good things that will happen. First, if you put more carbon into the atmosphere, the trees see more carbon dioxide, which is their food, so they will grow a little better, and I have not factored that into equations that I showed you. The results we have for the Canadian boreal forest do not include that effect.
We have not included that because all the evidence to date indicates that for the boreal zone that so-called CO2 fertilization has no effect. It is not real for the boreal forest ecosystems. That does not mean it will not become real, but it is not there yet.
Senator Taylor: Poplars are not orchids.
Mr. Apps: It is not quite as simple as that. It is because there are many other factors to be taken into account. It is not just how the trees breathe; it is how they distribute the carbon into the ecosystem, the forest floor and the soils. That is a different process.
There will be places in this country, particularly in Eastern Canada, where the trees will grow better, and there is no reason to expect them to do worse. There is no question that there will be places where things will be better, but the whole system will have changed.
From a science perspective we can say that it will change, although we do not know where it will change. If you want to invest money in planting trees, I cannot tell you where to plant them, but I can tell you places that are at risk. Frankly, much of the boreal forest is at risk from that climate change.
Senator Taylor: I appreciate what you have said from a science perspective. It has clarified a lot for me. However, I question your statement that carbon storage by trees, including wood products, is much greater than that of crops. A tree must grow for 60 to 100 years before we can make furniture from it, but a new crop is grown each year.
I would be interested to know what the carbon storage would be from a square metre of the earth's surface that had been cropped for 60 years. Most of the carbon is ploughed back in the ground, but some of it is made into paper.
Are there any studies on the difference in carbon sink between the boreal forest and crops?
Mr. Apps: Yes, there are. Trees breathe in slowly and breathe out slowly. Grasslands and crops breathe in quickly and breathe out quickly. It is the difference between that over time that makes the difference.
We can actually determine that because in a typical forest carbon is stored in the soil, in peat lands, in forest products, in the treetops and in debris on the forest floor. You can measure how much carbon is in the soil and in the trees. With regard to croplands, you do have grain, but it is usually consumed and then released fairly quickly afterwards, so it is not long-term storage. So that pool is rather small, comparatively.
We can measure how much carbon is in the soil and soil is, generally speaking, not as large a component in the agricultural systems as it is in forests. The amount going in and out every year is larger, for the same area, but the amount being retained is different. We can measure that and we are fairly confident about that.
Senator Taylor: Grain is really only a small part of the plant. A large portion of the plant is root and straw. It cycles pretty well every year for 60 years, whereas a tree only cycles once.
Mr. Apps: Yes, but just think about what it does. You are absolutely right that it produces that carbon, but that carbon is pulled out of the atmosphere. It can either go back to the atmosphere through decomposition or it can end up in the soil as another decomposition product.
The straw decomposes every year. Animals, microbes and bacteria chew it up, taking that chemical energy that was stored by photosynthesis to fuel their life, and when they respire, they put the carbon back into the atmosphere. They have used the photosynthetic energy that was fixed by the green leaves when they were growing to put part of it back into the atmosphere as CO2. Some remain as a humic acid or a decomposition product that stays in the soil. If grasslands were storing more carbon than trees, the amount of carbon in the soil would have to be larger, but it is not.
Senator Taylor: I would like to see the scientific comparisons. I follow your logic in a philosophical way, but I am wondering whether fifty-year studies have been done on crop lands versus forest lands to determine the difference in carbon absorption, carbon retention and carbon reflection.
Mr. Apps: To get that information you need agricultural land that has been turned to forests or forest land that has been turned to agriculture in order to compare it before and after.
Senator Taylor: What I would like to know is how much we are losing by converting forest to farm. It may be a very small change. I am from the same school of thought as you, that there is a great difference between forest and crop land. However, I am now starting to think about multiplying croplands 50 or 60 times. That is a lot of fibre. I am wondering what the actual difference is.
Mr. Apps: The annual production is higher, but the amount that is retained over time does not appear to be so. We can get that information for you.
Senator Taylor: I would just like to have some scientific backing for it.
Mr. Apps: That information exists with agricultural scientists in universities and in government and we can get that for you.
There have been studies examining land that used to be forest, were turned into agricultural and then returned to forest. They have looked at the soil content. It appears as though when it was turned into agriculture there was a significant loss of the carbon that was in the soil when it was a forest. Therefore, the soil content went down because the soil was mixed making the carbon more available for respiration.
When it turned back into forest, micro-conditions changed and the soil carbon started to increase again. Experiments of which I am aware where there has been a conversion from forests to agriculture and back show that when it was agricultural it was lower than when it was forests.
Senator Taylor: That answers half the equation. The other half is whether the crop, which has now been carted away and consumed, absorbed more out of the atmosphere while it was growing. It has been pointed out to us that trees absorb more in the first half of their life than in the second half.
Mr. Apps: Yes.
Senator Taylor: Is it possible that a corn field, a hemp field or an oat field absorbed more from the air, than a pine grove of equivalent size?
Mr. Apps: That is a very difficult concept to explain, although the answer is simple. You are talking about the rate at which things are taken in and then released. The issue with regard to the build-up of carbon in the atmosphere is how long they are held for.
As I have already said, plants in the agricultural system breathe much more quickly than forests. Forests have a lot more carbon stored in them for longer periods, but they breathe more slowly. Therefore, there are large and quick changes from agriculture. From forests, the swings are slower. However, they have stored a lot more carbon in various components.There are not all those components for storing the carbon in the agricultural system, and that is where the difference lies.
Trees absorb more slowly, but they release more slowly, too, and it is the difference between them that really matters. It is the difference between rate and storage.
Senator Taylor: I would like to see the comparisons. You say trees do more. Do they do twice as much, three times as much or ten times as much?
Mr. Apps: I can send you some information on that. This is a very relevant issue around the world. I am trying to get a group from around the world to come together in Canada to compare different sites and different systems.
There is information now, although I do not have it at my fingertips, and we can certainly give you that. The scientists who are working on this issue are looking at that very intently.
We are in a new era in the scientific community right now. Science has always done experiments on a very small scale and then looked at the big consequences. We are now looking at things with which we have no previous experience. The community of cultural scientists, forestry people, ecologists, economists and physicists are all working together.
The big breakthroughs are usually made when people with very divergent information and knowledge come together because they learn from the different fields. This is extremely exciting from a scientific perspective because we are learning from agricultural people and hydrologists. More important, we are sharing knowledge to generate information that has a very large impact. That is important and fun. The sciences are coming together as they never have before.
There is a group of us in agriculture, forestry, and peat lands trying to put the pictures together and answer what will happen when the changes occur. Some people think that when the forests disappear we will have agriculture there. A farmer knows that it is pretty hard to move into a forested area and produce a grain crop. As you have already said, Senator Taylor, the soils just will not sustain it.
The same is true with forestry. Some people who do not know the forests of Canada and Russia say that warming is good because the forest will expand into the tundra. Permafrost will stop that. It just will not happen that way, at least not in the short term.
We are working together and educating each other. The big challenge for Canadian science in government and in the scientific community in the academic world is learning to cross over some of the interdisciplinary boundaries of agriculture and forestry. That has not happened in the past but it is happening now. This is very exciting for science and for people like you who are dependent on this information.
The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Apps, for a fascinating presentation.
Mr. Apps: We are pleased to help you in your decision-making in any way we can.
The committee adjourned.