January 10, 2010
Globe and Mail

In a single season, an army of pine beetles has transformed our allies in the battle against climate change into the enemy.

Now the province is in a race against nature, as one billion beetle-killed trees across the province slowly seep the greenhouse gases they had so generously stored up in their decades of growth.

Such a turnaround seemed unimaginable back in February, 2008, when Premier Gordon Campbell first seized on the value of B.C.'s forests in his campaign against global warming. Trees lock away carbon dioxide, and the province has a lot of them - 60 million hectares of forests. They seemed to offer a natural, elegant means of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

"We have few natural allies in our fight against climate change that are more important than our forests," the Campbell government's Throne Speech read. The centrepiece of that speech was the Premier's climate action plan, which promises to reduce one-third of the province's GHG emissions by 2020.

Two months later, federal researchers published findings that exposed a fatal flaw in that great green design. The pine beetle epidemic has killed so many trees that the province's forests are now net emitters of greenhouse gases. Using computer modelling, they've determined the scales tipped in 2003, when the forests began to release more emissions than they absorbed.

By last year, the devastation wrought by the tiny, hungry beetles in British Columbia contributed more GHG emissions than all of the province's human activity put together - and nearly double the output of Alberta's much-maligned oil sands.

Twenty years ago, the war in the woods forced the provincial government to rethink how it makes forest policy. Aside from the raw economics of creating timber and newsprint, the province began to calculate environmental values. Today, it must add a third part to that equation: the carbon footprint.

SLOW DECAY OR FAST BURN?

Although the pine beetle epidemic has peaked, it will likely take a decade before the scales will tip back again. When a tree succumbs to a bug infestation, it begins to release greenhouse gases as it decomposes - a process that can take half a century. That's just half the problem. Those forests are no longer helping absorb carbon from the atmosphere. In 2009, the resulting footprint of the beetle-killed wood in B.C. was 74 megatonnes of CO2 equivalent. The oil sands next door generated 38 megatonnes.

"Our forests are a huge part of the story," climate-change expert Andrew Weaver said this week. But it's a part of the story that is often overlooked because the province does not count the overall contributions of its forests in its climate action targets.

Dr. Weaver's internationally recognized climate research has helped the province shape its policies on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. But he is wary of B.C.'s current enthusiasm for bioenergy as a solution to the challenge presented by the pine beetle.

"It's not kosher to say burning pine forests is part of the solution," he said. "You can say it's part of a forest renewal issue and it may be a transient plan as we transform the forests in some way, but you have to be really careful how you do it."

Burning wood for energy isn't new, but doing it efficiently is something else. Jonathan Rhone, CEO of Nexterra, is developing small-scale systems that can transform wood waste into "syngas," a relatively clean alternative to fossil fuels. His company has installed power plants in industrial, institutional and residential settings, but it's still a product in its infancy.

Despite the huge opportunities, he said B.C. is far from making broad commercial use of its pine beetle-killed wood. "We have a huge resource of biomass," Mr. Rhone said. "But there are still challenges in creating the right kind of business environment."