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• Mill Report
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• Environmental Mgmt. & Fire
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By Ken Matthews, Forestry ManagerForestry & Engineering

Coulson Group Forestry and Engineering are moving.

Effective March 1, 2009, the Coulson Group Forestry and Engineering office are located at the Air Crane office at the Airport. We will no longer use the 4th avenue office location. We will retain the same email addresses and phone numbers.

Forestry and Engineering are currently doing some final engineering clean up on the work we did in TFL 54 last summer and are looking to begin the next program in Cataract –Toquart later this spring or summer. Zolie and Foster are working on some new quality control inspections on the falling and bucking happening out at the logging operations at Kennedy Lake. Ron is getting ready to complete the planting program for this spring of approximately 200,000 trees.

Carbon Sequestration and Green house Gases. Are our forests worth more standing than being turned into lumber?

Everyone has read and listened to the discussions on greenhouse gas emissions and global warming in particular relating to the increasing release of carbon into the atmosphere. There is much discussion about what we can do to reduce the emissions and bring the atmosphere back closer to a pre-industrial age condition.

Forests are one of the greatest storehouses of carbon. When the leaves, wood, and roots decay, burn, are eaten by insects, or otherwise decompose, they release carbon back in to the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.

Much of the world appears to be heading for a cap and trade market system in carbon emissions as a last ditch effort to try and control the rate of emissions. In this system industries or activities are capped in the amount of emissions they can let go. If individual companies exceed the cap they must shut down or purchase credits from others who are storing carbon or working more efficiently under the caps. Those who sequester carbon or work efficiently under their caps can sell carbon credits on the market in developing exchanges.

Reforesting areas which can support forests but have not been recently growing trees is clearly a huge opportunity to add to the carbon storehouse. On the Coast of the BC, this is not the case; we are required by legislation to reforest all of the areas we log so simply planting trees is not seen as a gain or credit opportunity.

The value of holding old growth forests in their current state is a more difficult question and several groups are doing models of growth and natural loss and economics to see if there is more value in holding these old growth forests for carbon sequestration as opposed to logging them and using forest products. A project is underway in Clayoquot Sound in TFL 57 to test some economics in a Coastal situation.

Many argue that we already leave components of the stand in place and growing (non clear cuts); we replant or reforest areas immediately after logging; and much of the wood we harvest is made into lumber and other products which are not burned or destroyed for many years, so therefore the amount of credit we could get for holding carbon in old growth coastal forests is low. The answer is not easy given the low rate of return for logging in some timber types; there may be some interesting results. In the longer term we may find that someone will pay the land owner or manager more for carbon credits to hold timber standing than they can get for logging the timber.