Good morning, Chair, and good morning committee. I thank you for the opportunity to be appearing as a witness.
My name is Werner Kurz. I'm a senior research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service in Victoria. I lead the team that conducts the greenhouse gas inventories and projections for Canada's forest sector.
Today I want to speak to you about the question of whether the Canadian forest sector recovery and climate change mitigation objectives can be aligned. I have distributed my presentation to the committee.
Keeping global mean temperature increases to below 2°C requires net negative emissions in this century. These negative emissions can only be achieved by simultaneously reducing fossil fuel emissions and increasing forest carbon sinks.
Globally at present, forests remove about 30% of human-caused emissions. It is therefore important that when we calculate and estimate mitigation, these must be incremental activities to the existing sinks. Unfortunately, as we witnessed around the world recently, forest sinks are also at risk from climate change, causing large and rapid releases from wildfires. Therefore, developing climate-effective mitigation strategies requires the scientific assessment of the available options.
Turning to slide 3, we are fortunate that we have in Canada a forest carbon monitoring, accounting and reporting system and a series of models. We started developing this carbon budget model in 1989, and the third version of it is now used around the world for similar types of analyses. We use these tools to report on past carbon dynamics as legislated for the state of forest reporting and for international reporting. We also project future carbon dynamics, develop climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies, and lay the scientific foundation for various forest carbon initiatives.
On slide 4 I show you a picture of a million cubic metres of wood. This is containing the amount equivalent to about one million tonnes of CO2. In British Columbia we harvest about 67 times this amount. There's about the same amount of CO2 contained in this wood as the emissions from all other sectors in British Columbia. How we use this wood therefore matters greatly.
Turning to slide 5, what we have learned in our analyses over the recent years is that there are two indicators that we must pay close attention to. These are the carbon retention time, in other words, the amount of time for which the harvest of carbon is retained in the product, and the displacement factor or substitution benefits, in other words, the amount of avoided emissions that we achieve through using a wood product.
Bioenergy has a wide range of displacement factors. The highest are achieved if we replace diesel fuel generators in northern communities, but all bioenergy uses have a very short carbon retention time, releasing the carbon back into the atmosphere that was removed by tree growth.
What we have consistently demonstrated in Canada and around the world is that the highest mitigation benefits are achieved if wood is used in long-lived structural building products, which often retain the carbon for decades or centuries.
On the next slide I show you examples of buildings that are constructed in Canada. These are not only high-rises like the 18-storey Brock Commons building on the campus of the University of British Columbia, but also bridges and other infrastructure like hockey rinks and museums.
How we use the harvested wood matters. I'll give you a numerical example, conducted by my Ph.D. student, Sheng Xie. If we hypothetically were to replace all harvested wood in British Columbia and use it to produce liquid transportation fuels, we could just meet B.C.'s annual demand of about nine billion litres per year.
If, on the other hand, we would, again hypothetically, use all the wood harvested in British Columbia to produce mass timber buildings, we could build around 10,000 of these 18-storey Brock Commons buildings per year.
The big difference is that if we used the wood for mass timber, the cumulative emissions by 2050 would be nearly two billion tonnes of CO2 lower with the mass timber approach, because carbon is retained in the wood and emissions from other products are reduced. The same is, of course, also true for fossil fuel emissions, but we release all the carbon from the harvested wood back into the atmosphere.
Of course, not all harvested wood can end up in mass timber and B.C. does not build 10,000 Brock Commons buildings per year, but this is to demonstrate that how we use the wood matters.
There is this problem of climate change and the impacts of wildfires on carbon retention. In British Columbia, the 2017 and 2018 wildfires have caused 200 million tonnes of CO2 emissions per year.
That is about three times the emissions from all other sectors in British Columbia combined per year. We have, therefore, recently started a new research project funded by the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions in which we address the question of how we can reduce future wildfire emissions and strengthen B.C.'s forest-based bioeconomy at the same time, for example, by using wood residues from fuel treatments in various applications.
In conclusion, keeping temperature increases to below 2°C requires net negative emissions before 2100, and while this may seem far away, this is within the lifetime of children born today. This requires drastic reductions of emissions in all sectors, but it is not achievable without also greatly increasing future forest carbon sinks. These are unfortunately also at risk from climate change, and we need to take the interaction between forest management decisions and fire risk into consideration.
Climate effective mitigation strategies in the forest sector exist and must be based on sound scientific assessments of their greenhouse gas impacts. Canada's forest sector recovery can be aligned with climate mitigation objectives to improve forest management and in particular the increased use of long-lived wood products.
Thank you very much.