TORONTO - A report that suggests Ontario's logging practices in the boreal forest are contributing to climate change is "laughable,'' Minister of Natural Resources David Ramsay said Tuesday.
In a report released Tuesday, Vancouver-based ForestEthics said that continued logging of the intact boreal forest is escalating carbon dioxide levels and increasing climate change.
But Ramsay said that's "not logical at all'' since only two per cent of trees in northern Ontario are logged each year.
"You're talking about a few machines in hundreds of thousands of square miles surrounded by vigorous growing trees that suck up carbon dioxide,'' Ramsay said in an interview.
"We have a vast region of nothing with a few trucks running and a few harvesters in the bush. It's not an issue at all.''
Ontario's boreal forest region covers 49.9 million hectares and extends from the northern limits of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence forest to the Hudson Bay Lowlands.
The ForestEthics report, entitled "Robbing the Carbon Bank: Global Warming and Ontario's Forests,'' said protecting boreal forests "must be a key component of any government climate plan.''
The group said the vast forest stores billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide. Not only does logging release much of the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, current harvesting practices reduce the forest's ability to retain it, the report said.
ForestEthics' strategic director, Tzeporah Berman, said logging forests releases more greenhouse gases than the use of all of Canada's passenger vehicles. Premier Dalton McGuinty should take that into account as he prepares a climate change plan, expected this spring, he said.
"We need to stop this wholesale looting of our common carbon bank if we want to mitigate global warming,'' Berman said in a release.
