Feature

On December 8th, 2008, two events on opposite sides of the world coincided to potentially broaden the scope of silviculture in BC forever. In Poznan, Poland, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) agreed to include a protocol for carbon offset forestry projects, Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD). This adds to the existing UNFCCC tools of Improved Forest Management (IFM) and Afforestation, Reforestation and Restoration (ARR).

Canada yew is a low evergreen shrub that is native to eastern Canada. Over the past five years, demand for yew biomass in general has increased dramatically, because it contains chemicals called taxanes that are used to make important anti-cancer drugs.

Conventional wisdom holds that timber represents the main economic value derived from forests. In Canada, economic profits derived from Canadian non-timber forest products (NTFPs) certainly represent only a fraction of the profits developed from timber harvests. Some estimates put the direct economic value of NTFPs in the Canadian forest sector at about $240 million, annually. That's fairly small compared to the nearly $40 billion annual export value of Canadian timber harvests. But if one takes a closer look at the NTFP figure, it's still a significant level of consumption.

A lot of thought and effort is going into the design of forest offset protocols that could be fed into regulatory carbon markets. A number of crucial decisions will determine the environmental integrity of this policy effort: how to deal with the relative impermanence of reduced forestry emissions; how to safeguard other ecological and social values from the impacts of commoditizing biological carbon; and, as for all offsets, how to maximize additionality of emission reductions.