Werner Kurz proposes analysis of the impact of BC investment – B.C. has a forest carbon initiative of $290 million for things like rehabilitation, forest fertilization and other activities. That investment is designed to achieve a lot of outcomes, including improving the carbon balances, but we won’t know how effective the efforts are for those balances unless we can zero in on their signal.”
The past two summers saw B.C.’s worst wildfire seasons on record. …Then the mountain pine beetle struck. The epidemic, which affected more than 14 million hectares of pine forest in B.C., cut the legs out from under the province’s — and Canada’s — position as a climate do-gooder. …That renewed calls for B.C. to include wildfire emissions in its greenhouse-gas inventory… Without those… the inventory suggests the forests are soaking up more carbon than they are releasing. …Werner Kurz, a researcher with Natural Resources Canada in Victoria… says good reasons exist for monitoring and measuring emissions from natural disturbances separately from those from human-caused forest emissions. …In a recent paper, Kurz and his team proposed a way to separate the two forest-emissions sources. …The study’s results… include estimates of the delayed release of greenhouse-gas emissions from wood used to build, for example, houses, furniture or shipping pallets.
