Greenpeace warns on Canada's northern forests

By Allan Dowd

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) - Greenpeace warned on Thursday that Canada's logging practices threaten to turn the country's vast northern forest into a source of global warming, but the forestry industry says it is already taking steps to fight climate change.

Logging and other development in the boreal forest release the carbon that the trees have trapped from the atmosphere over decades, potentially producing more greenhouse gases than from burning fossil fuels, the environmental group charged in a new report.

Greenpeace called for a moratorium on new logging in areas of the forest that still have large, unfragmented blocks of older-growth trees, and warned it had similar fears about the boreal forests that stretch across Russia and northern Europe.

"Research is starting to show that the forest is tipping from being an annual carbon sink to being an annual carbon source," said Christy Ferguson, Greenpeace's forests campaigner in Toronto.

The "Turning Up the Heat" report, prepared by researchers at the University of Toronto, surveyed a variety of separate scientific studies on the boreal forest in recent years but did not include any new research itself.

Canada's boreal forest, characterized by the predominance of conifers like pine and spruce, stretches in a vast curve across the country below the Arctic, from the Yukon territory in the northwest to the Atlantic coast of Newfoundland.

Studies estimate it stores about 186 billion metric tons of carbon, equal to about 27 times what the world produces from burning fossil fuel each year. Two-thirds of the carbon is stored in the forest's soil.

Greenpeace says the carbon released as trees are harvested contributes to climate change. That, in turn, threatens the northern forest with problems such as insect outbreaks and large forest fires that destroy more trees.