A handful of start-ups, many based in California, see all that plant matter as a potential feedstock for making products routinely used in housing construction – think insulation, flooring, panelling and concrete additives.

Not only would these bio-based products greatly reduce a building’s carbon footprint; in side-by-side comparisons, building materials made from straw, hemp, flax and cellulose are more fire-resistant than their conventional counterparts – a top-of-mind concern in the Golden State following the January wildfires that razed more than 50,000 acres of land, destroyed more than 16,000 structures and killed at least 29 people.

British Columbia and other parts of Canada have likewise experienced extreme weather events, from flooding to wildfires. “There’s going to be a really big push to create more houses in the near future,” says B.C.-based Elli Terwiel, owner and lead engineer at Sage Structural Engineering.

Terwiel is part of a growing movement of engineers, designers and architects that are trying to convince the construction industry that natural materials such as grain straw, corn stover (the stalks, leaves and cobs left over after the corn harvest), husks and even sewage sludge can be turned into high-performance building products. “The question is, how do we build those buildings better?” she asks. “How do we make these buildings the best that they can be for Canadians? And I do think that bio-based materials, whether just as insulation or the entire structure, there’s a place for them in the conversation.”

A recent report put out by RMI notes that many bio-based products are market-ready and are at or near cost parity today, despite most of these products not yet having reached the economies of scale of the incumbent building materials.

Mainstreaming natural building systems could, essentially, decouple economic growth from greenhouse gas emissions by transforming the high-emitting building sector into a carbon sink.

How did we get here?

The buildings and construction sector is by far the largest contributor to climate change, accounting for at least 37% of global emissions. In the United States alone, new home construction emits nearly 30 million tonnes of GHG emissions each year.

Until recently, architects and engineers have focused on reducing carbon emissions generated by the maintenance and operations of a building – the GHGs created from heating, cooling and lighting, which are projected to decrease from 75% of the sector’s total emissions to 50% over the next few decades.

But this assessment of a structure’s carbon impact doesn’t account for so-called embodied carbon. Embodied carbon refers to the GHGs released during the entire life cycle of a building, starting with the extraction of the raw materials used for construction through manufacturing, transportation, installation, use and disposal. The built environment relies on concrete, steel and aluminum, which are especially difficult to decarbonize and are responsible for a considerable proportion of a building’s embodied carbon load.

Studies have shown that as much as 60% of an average building’s carbon emissions are embodied as opposed to operational.

Everything old is new again

Bio-based building products are a highly effective way to reduce embodied carbon. Roughly 50% of the weight of plants is photosynthetically sequestered carbon. Buildings that pack mostly plant matter into their structures store substantially more carbon than the amount required to process and transport the materials themselves.

Straw, which is plentiful and a natural by-product of wheat, rice, rye and oats, sequesters 60 times more carbon than it requires to grow, making it one of the most powerful carbon-storing building materials in the world. “You’re taking what would be an agricultural waste product,” Terwiel observes, “that might break down in the field, and you’re putting it into a building. You’re storing carbon in buildings.”

Using natural building materials is not an entirely new idea. Cob, a mixture of clay and straw, is a traditional building technique in the United Kingdom, where cob houses dating back several hundred years still stand. Traditional straw bale construction has been employed for more than a century in the United States. Using cellulose (finely shredded cardboard fibres and recycled paper) for building insulation dates back many centuries in both the United States and Canada.

Code work

David Arkin, a principal at Arkin Tilt Architects, a firm that specializes in ecological planning and design based in Berkeley, California, has built dozens of straw bale structures as well as a four-unit townhome project in Oregon that achieved an 85% reduction in embodied carbon through the use of natural building materials.

The challenge of such structures – and there are several – is that straw bales, like so many biomass products, must be purchased directly from the source, in this case the local farmer. “It’s a matter of scale,” Terwiel says. “You have these very small producers who are at the early adopter stage, who haven’t achieved scale to be able to go after Rona or Home Depot. You have to know where to look to find these products and the people who know how to work with them.”

Moreover, walls insulated with plant matter tend to be much thicker than typical ones. While this has its benefits – excellent thermal properties, soundproof rooms – it can also be impractical in high-density, urban settings. Which is why Anthony Dente’s firm, Verdant Structural Engineers, also based in Berkeley, has been developing a drop-in structural wall panel made from straw bales that fits conventional dimensions, complies with California’s building code and eliminates the need to visit the local farmer. Verdant plans on launching the panels in early 2026.

“I’ve given a lot of presentations to architectural firms,” Dente says. “I don’t talk about how they can buy 100 straw bales from the farmer and have a bunch of their friends stack them up in their walls. I’m talking to them about product development and efficiency and material science development and that they can start bringing these materials to their more conventional clients.”

The majority of plant-derived products, however, have yet to appear in building codes. Projects tend to be small-scale one-offs as a result, and mostly residential.

The compostable house

“Building for disassembly” refers to buildings that are designed so that every component can be removed and reused rather than tossed into a landfill where carbon is released into the atmosphere. For instance, hempcrete, derived from the hemp plant, is a superb insulating material and can also be used in place of concrete; it is lightweight, fire-resistant and entirely recyclable or reusable. “At the end of life, when you remove the finishes, you can take a building made with natural materials and it will compost itself. And that, I think, is pretty incredible,”  Terwiel says.

The RMI report cites a project that compared two residential homes, one built using standard, off-the-shelf materials, the other incorporating bio-based products in the flooring, panelling, rooftops and insulation. Equal in size, the carbon-storing model showed a 107% reduction in net emissions, tipping the building into net storage territory.

“By 2030? I’d like it if California has adopted and green-lighted the use of clay construction,” Dente says. “Clay construction is incredibly fire-resistant and high-performing – we make ovens out of clay! It’s kind of silly how hard it is to use a system that’s such a no-brainer fire solution.”

Victoria Foote is a writer and editor who specializes in clean energy and climate.

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“It damages their teeth, and eventually the cows or goats die,” Kitol says. The thickets also provide cover for predators like wild dogs and hyenas. “They hide there because it is so thick that you can’t see them. At night, when the goats or sheep walk around, they are attacked and killed.”

Last year, experts with Penn State’s PlantVillage project, which helps smallholder farmers adapt to climate change, arrived to train Kitol and others in the area on a clever way to turn mathenge from a problem into an asset. Workers gather up those troublesome weeds – biomass – and convert them into biochar, concentrated carbon that they “charge” with nutrients by mixing it with manure. Farmers then apply the mixture to their fields, sometimes planting grass that provides fodder for livestock. Kitol says that the biochar helps his soils retain water and improves their fertility, leading to higher yields.

Well beyond Kenya, biochar is having a moment: the worldwide market was worth $600 million last year and could rise to more than $3 billion next year. Anywhere people are producing waste biomass – corn stalks, weeds, dead trees – they’re also producing a powerful tool for sequestering carbon and improving soils. And if farmers can prove how much biomass they’re turning into biochar, they can prove how much carbon they’re putting back into the ground. Through a group like PlantVillage, a company can then pay those farmers to offset its carbon emissions. (Biochar in general accounts for more than 90% of durable carbon credits that have already been delivered worldwide.)

So with biochar, farmers are getting a new source of income and a way to better retain rainwater and boost yields. They’re helping mitigate climate change while adapting to its ravages. “Helping to solve an invasive species and land degradation problem, and produce biochar at the same time, is amazing,” says James Gerber, a data scientist who studies agriculture at the non-profit climate group Project Drawdown. “Anything that gets money into the hands of smallholder farmers in Africa is probably just a good thing. But if it’s part of a functional, verifiable carbon-credit program, even better.”

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The trick to making biochar is pyrolysis. As people have known for millennia, if you expose biomass to very high temperatures but in a low-oxygen environment, it doesn’t combust into all-consuming flames; it turns into a kind of charcoal. Companies can do this with big industrial chambers, producing the biochar you can buy for your garden. Smallholder farmers can do it by digging a pit and adding biomass in layers, which restricts oxygen to the smouldering fire at the bottom. A simple kind of metal kiln does the same.

Whatever the method, the plant material isn’t fully combusting and billowing smoke. With biochar, you end up with concentrated, solid carbon. “It’s essentially coal,” says David Hughes, the founder of PlantVillage. “It goes into the ground and it doesn’t break down, and this is because of the temperature you’ve exposed it to.”

Because biochar is so spongy, it helps the soil retain more water – an especially welcome trait given the worsening droughts in Africa and elsewhere. But that sponginess also demands special care when applying to a field. “If you just put biochar into the soil, it will suck up all the nutrients in there, and your plants will do worse,” Hughes says. “So you have to charge it with nutrients. You can do that with compost or NPK – nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium – blends.”

Traditionally, a farmer might burn piles of waste like corn stalks, emitting carbon into the atmosphere. If different farms across a landscape are doing this after a harvest, air quality plummets and imperils human health.

So for a group like Biochar Life, which provides carbon-removal offsets for biochar, the first step is to get a farmer to stop processing their waste biomass the old way. “We need to prove that the farmer didn’t burn it or just leave it there and let the biomass decompose and create methane,” says Aom Kwanpiromtara Suksri, the co-founder and global head of development and compliance at Biochar Life, which has offices in Asia and Africa and has formed a partnership with PlantVillage.

To be sure, carbon offset systems have been plagued with problems. One is a perverse incentive to deforest an area and plant trees again, selling those credits to companies. Where there’s been deforestation from logging or agriculture, planting a bunch of a single species of tree doesn’t create a proper ecosystem. There’s no boost to biodiversity, and tree plantations don’t sequester nearly as much carbon as a real forest.

By contrast, Biochar Life says that its offset system is easier to quantify and that it’s so far distributed more than $300,000 to farmers, and $265,000 to local teams that verify the credits. “We can’t generate a credit until we’ve proven that we’ve generated biochar, and that biochar has been charged and put back into the ground,” says Matt Rickard, Biochar Life’s chief operating officer.

Then there’s an issue of permanence: if farmers plant a bunch of trees and a drought strikes, and those trees all wilt or catch on fire, their carbon is going right back into the atmosphere. Scientists are still working out how long biochar can last in different kinds of soils and climates, but indications are that it can last thousands or possibly millions of years. And compared to waiting for a tree to grow and capture carbon, adding biochar to soil sequesters the carbon in the ground immediately.

“Biochar, it’s kind of chemically locked in – it’d be very difficult to reverse that,” Gerber says. “For me, that is the most important reason that biochar has greater potential for carbon credits.”

And unlike planting a new forest and walking away, farmers can keep producing biomass, charging it with nutrients, and adding it to the soil year after year. At the very least, a smallholder farmer like Kitol is getting a better handle on an invasive species while boosting yields and preparing his soils for the drier times ahead. “I see the future of biochar as promising,” he says. “Biochar will be widely used as more people recognize its benefits.”

This article originally appeared in Grist. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at grist.org. 

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In April 2021, the United Kingdom’s Drax Group purchased Pinnacle Renewable Energy, becoming the largest wood pellet-maker in British Columbia and Canada. 

The acquisition gave Drax control of the majority of pellet mills in the province, locking up a vital new raw-material supply for its massive thermal electricity plant in North Yorkshire. 

Drax claimed the purchase guaranteed it a “sustainable” supply of pellets from North America (the company holds assets in the southern United States as well) of nearly five million tonnes per year, which would meet roughly two-thirds of its present needs and half of its projected needs as it continues to transition away from burning coal to wood.  

 Drax has long claimed that wood is a “renewable” resource that can be burned at its former coal plants in England for “carbon-neutral” electricity production – an assertion that may land it in hot water with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The organization announced in late July it’s reviewing a complaint about Drax’s carbon-neutral claim.  

But Drax’s sustainability claims are being challenged not only because its assertions are contradicted by its on-the-ground actions, but by unfolding events in B.C.’s forests, which are among the most ecologically diverse in the country. Drax says that the raw material for most of its wood pellets comes from “residuals,” in the form of the massive amount of wood chips and sawdust generated at sawmills. There is some truth to this. When round logs get turned into rectangular lumber products, up to half of each log ends up not as solid pieces of lumber or other wood products, but as chips and dust. 

Historically, much of that fibre went to other mills, where most of it became wood pulp, which then became paper, cardboard and other products. Now, pellet-makers like Drax use that fibre too. 

But here’s the rub: when Drax made its investment in B.C., there were 13 wood-pellet mills in the province. Those mills had not only increased dramatically in number over the previous two decades but quadrupled their output by the time Drax seized monopoly control. 

In a relatively short time, B.C.’s pellet mills had developed a sizeable – and rapidly growing – appetite for wood. 

Drax and others involved in the pellet industry portray wood as a sustainable and “carbon neutral” resource. But hundreds of millions of trees are burning down in wildfires the world over, pumping massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and B.C. is no exception. Claims that forest products of any kind are sustainable let alone carbon neutral is a stretch, especially when the product in question is destined to be burned.  

Drax’s claims become even more unsupportable when pellet-makers turn whole logs – effectively whole trees – directly into pellets, which is exactly what the company does at its pellet mills in B.C. and in the southern U.S.   

At Drax operations near the B.C. communities of Quesnel, Burns Lake, Smithers and Houston, walls of logs line the mill yards. Those walls are then steadily whittled down as they are trucked to nearby chippers, which turn the trees into chips that later become pellets to be burned. Even with so many logs entering its facilities in B.C. and the southern U.S., Drax is looking to add more capacity to its North American pellet operations.  

Pellet-makers assert that such logs are of extremely low quality and have been rejected for use by sawmills, which use higher-quality logs to make lumber. They also claim that if they weren’t using those logs, they would simply be pushed into big piles at logging operations and burned as waste, clogging the air with smoke. By turning those logs into pellets instead, Drax says that it is engaged in a “virtuous cycle” of not only reducing waste, but using that waste to make energy. 

But just how many “low quality” logs enter Drax’s facilities, or those of its competitors? And could such logs be used for other purposes? The answers to those key questions are ones that forest industry unions and environmental organizations alike want. But they are not publicly available. The provincial government, which regulates all logging activities on public lands (only 6% of the provincial land base is privately owned), has gone to extraordinary lengths to delay the release of such information and insists that it can be obtained only through submission of a formal freedom-of-information (FOI) request, a process that can take years to complete. 

Unanswered questions also swirl around just how much Drax and others have benefited from a 17-year-old program that has effectively subsidized the delivery of huge volumes of “lower quality” logs to pellet and pulp companies alike and that may be hastening depletion of the province’s forests. At the very least, that program has fuelled the delivery of untold millions of such logs to both entities. But just how many such logs have gone to Drax is unknown and cannot be obtained, the government says, short of another FOI request. 

(Despite the prospect of lengthy delays, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has filed formal FOI requests to obtain information on the subsidy program and the logs delivered to Drax operations.)

Meanwhile, the provincial government in its most recent budget signalled that logging rates are poised to come crashing down. In just three years, the number of trees cut down annually in B.C. could be half of what it was 15 years ago, which is roughly when the wood pellet industry in the province began its dramatic expansion and Drax swept into the province and took over. 

With forests the world over under stress from logging and from climate change, Drax should fully account for every whole log entering its facilities. In its absence, there is a gaping hole in the company’s claims to be the world’s cleanest, greenest and most virtuous energy producer. 

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In 2021, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) set a target for the aviation industry to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. With the sector contributing 2.8% of the world’s total carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion, many airlines are considering carbon-capture-and-storage technologies and electric-powered planes. But these innovations may be years away from becoming scalable solutions. Sustainable aviation fuels (or SAFs), however, are an immediate tool that could help airlines kick-start their green transition.

“The use of SAF is expected to contribute around 65% of the reduction in emissions needed by aviation to reach net-zero in 2050,” says Albert Tjoeng, head of corporate communications for the IATA, which defines an SAF as a non-fossil fuel that has the potential to generate lower carbon emissions than conventional kerosene in its life cycle.

In April, Air Canada committed to investing $50 million in SAFs and other carbon-reducing technologies. And according to IATA, more than 50 airlines around the world have used sustainable fuels.

“Airlines bought every drop of SAF available in 2021,” Tjoeng says. “So airlines want to use SAF. The issue is the supply.”

At the moment, industry standards state that . Scientific trials to prove that aircraft can safely run on a solution that’s 100% sustainable are in the works.

There are a number of sustainable alternatives, some commercially available, some in development. Here’s what could be an eco-friendly power source on your next flight:

Cooking oils

Oils and fats are currently the most accessible option, according to Bradley Saville, a professor at the University of Toronto in the school’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry.

“There’s a lot of growth where you’re seeing refineries being reconfigured because it’s low-cost and the infrastructure required for production is perfectly aligned with existing oil refinery technology,” he says. “The compatibility makes it a very attractive initial pathway.”

In the Netherlands, for example, Neste, an oil refining company, has a partnership with McDonald’s. Since 2020, Neste has picked up used cooking oil from 252 of the fast-food restaurants and refines it into fuel.

Dutch airline KLM has been viewed as a trailblazer for its use of cooking oil as fuel on a commercial flight in 2010. One year later, it scheduled more than 200 trial flights between Paris and Amsterdam using biofuel made from used cooking oil. Lufthansa and Continental Airlines followed suit shortly after.

Saville, who has also been assessing sustainable-fuel life-cycle emissions for the United Nations’ International Civil Aviation Organization, says that oils can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 to 90% compared to fossil fuels.

But to be truly sustainable, Saville adds that the best way to produce this fuel is to use excess or unwanted oil and fat that doesn’t pass food-grade standards instead of growing crops specifically for fuel.

His models also show used oil and fat being the cheapest to produce, at US$1,200 to $1,300 per ton.

Biomass and municipal waste

Saville says that biomass, made from algae, crop residues, animal waste, forestry residue and municipal waste, could also have big potential as an aviation fuel.

“If you look to crop and forest residue and leave just the right amount behind to promote good soil quality, you could replace a fairly high percentage of jet fuel,” he says. “Then with municipal solid waste, you’re solving a waste problem and turning it into energy.”

Biomass has the same 80 to 90% reduction as used oils but come at a slightly higher production cost, at US$1,800 to $1,900 per ton. This is one barrier to implementation, Saville explains, and one reason why these fuels are in short supply. Unlike with waste oils, the infrastructure transition isn’t as seamless and supply chains aren’t set up to source and deliver on this in a big way, he adds.

In 2021, United Airlines used jet fuel made from agricultural waste such as corncobs and corn stalks in a normal passenger flight. And in 2016, the airline and Los Angeles International Airport made a pledge to purchase up to 15 million gallons of sustainable aviation fuel using agricultural waste and non-edible natural oils over a three-year period. Saville considers the airline a leader in this sense, noting it has been the only airline that has consistently made other offtake agreements with fuel producers.

In 2017, British Airlines partnered with U.S.-based Solena Fuels to make and use jet fuel from municipal solid waste. It was the first project in the world to attempt to convert municipal waste into a fuel for airplanes.

Synthetic kerosene

Synthetic kerosene, also known as e-kerosene or power-to-liquid, might show the most promise in terms of its ability to reduce the airline industry’s carbon footprint. It is made by combining hydrogen and carbon dioxide. If the hydrogen is generated using renewable electricity (known as green hydrogen) and the carbon dioxide is captured from the atmosphere, models have shown it to have zero, or very close to zero, carbon emissions.

This is a sustainable fuel that is in the earliest stages of development and implementation.

British energy giant Shell is working on establishing synthetic kerosene operations in Germany and the Netherlands. It produced 500 litres of e-kerosene over three months for a KLM flight in February 2021, from Amsterdam to Madrid, that blended the e-kerosene with conventional fuel.

In October 2021, German non-profit atmosfair opened the first production plant, aiming to produce a carbon-neutral product. Lufthansa announced at the time that it had agreed to buy 25,000 litres of the fuel each year for five years. The fuel will be mixed with conventional kerosene.

Then in June, Airbus, Uniper, Siemens Energy and Sasol also announced that they were partnering to open an e-kerosene production facility in Hamburg that would be operational in 2026.

Saville says he can’t provide cost estimates at this time, but numbers provided by the Dutch Ministry for Infrastructure and Water Management in 2021 calculated a production price tag ranging from €1,500 to €6,800 per tonne, which translates to US$1,800 to $8,200.

What Saville does project, however, is that these options will be mainstream in the next seven or eight years.

“We’ll just be scratching the surface, but we’ll be on a clearer path,” he says. “It will be important for broader policy support and cooperation to take place amongst a bunch of different stakeholders and federal government. This will ensure we can increase production and build the infrastructure.”

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It’s a question that’s been tripping up national carbon calculators around the globe since the days of the Kyoto Protocol. From the late 1990s, industry and governments have largely considered burning wood pellets in power stations to be renewable, zero-emitting energy, since planting new trees should, theoretically, absorb enough carbon dioxide to cancel out the emissions that come out of smokestacks as they burn.

But doubts regarding the science behind those claims and the sustainability of the practice have been mounting as more countries ramp up the burning of woody biomass as a replacement for coal.

In October, the world’s largest biomass-burning power generator, Drax Group, was one of 15 companies booted off the S&P Global Clean Energy Index. S&P also ditched the French bioenergy firm Albioma. The reason given: their “carbon-to-revenue footprint” was too large. S&P didn’t offer company-specific details beyond that, saying only that changes to the S&P Global Clean Energy Index were integrated “in order to enhance index diversification, improve transparency, further reduce the index’s carbon footprint, and align the index methodology with market trends and sustainable investing norms.”

That same month, a study led by Princeton University, published in the journal Science, called out a “serious” error in the climate accounting rules widely applied to biomass energy since the Kyoto Protocol. “This accounting erroneously treats all bioenergy as carbon neutral regardless of the source of the biomass…. For example, the clearing of long-established forests to burn wood or to grow energy crops is counted as a 100% reduction in energy emissions despite causing large releases of carbon.

“Burning wood to produce energy can actually worsen climate change, at least through the year 2100 – even if wood displaces coal, the most carbon-intensive fuel.”

 –John Sterman, MIT

The carbon-neutral assumption might be true if you’re using perennial grasses or twigs, but scientists say that tree plantations don’t store as much carbon as natural forests, and regrowth takes time. It could take 40 to 100 years for planted trees to absorb the carbon debt released by biomass power plants (in boreal forests those estimates jump to 100 years).

Back in 2018, MIT scientist John Sterman concluded that “burning wood to produce energy can actually worsen climate change, at least through the year 2100 – even if wood displaces coal, the most carbon-intensive fuel.” In early 2021, the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council affirmed that using woody biomass for power “is not effective in mitigating climate change and may even increase the risk of dangerous climate change.”

Meanwhile, the carbon accounting loophole has fuelled a boom in the biomass industry in Europe, the U.S., Canada and the U.K., where it’s highly subsidized. In the EU, biomass accounts for about 59% of all renewable energy consumption.

Once the largest coal generator in western Europe, Drax now gets two-thirds of its biomass from southeastern U.S. forests and a growing percentage from western Canada. Last April, Drax purchased British Columbia’s Pinnacle Renewable Energy, which the company says should increase its annual operational capacity to 4.9 million tonnes of biomass pellets by 2022, up from 1.6 million tonnes. Drax now owns more than half the pellet mills in B.C.

Pellet makers generally say they don’t cut down whole trees and instead use fallen branches, sawdust and other waste wood, but environmental organizations in both the U.S. and Canada say otherwise. The Natural Resources Defense Council has said that “multiple independent investigations show that wood sourced from clearcuts of mature and biodiverse forests routinely enters Drax’s supply chain.”

Drax says that its biomass meets the “highest sustainability standards” and that, in B.C., “harvesting increased significantly to utilise the dead and dying timber [affected by mountain pipe beetle] as lumber in sawmills whilst it was still viable.”

Ben Parfitt, a researcher with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), takes issue with the statement. “Photographs, videos and publicly available data clearly show that Drax doesn’t discriminate between living or dead trees. It takes whatever it can get its hands on,” says Parfitt, who wrote an investigative report on the pellet industry in April. He adds, “It’s time the B.C. government commissioned an independent expert to investigate.”

Until then, CCPA is calling for a ban on any new pellet mills in the province. The Vancouver-based environmental group Stand.earth has called for a moratorium on the logging of B.C.’s primary forests for pellets. Across the pond, 50 MPs wrote a joint letter to Britain’s energy minister in December, calling the burning of wood to create power a “scandal.”

Drax maintains that its bioenergy has slashed its CO2 emissions from power generation by more than 90% since 2012. The firm is looking into piloting carbon-capture technology, which CEO Will Gardiner says will make the company carbon-negative by 2030.

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COVID-19 is not the only curve we need to flatten. Building back better means also bending and flattening the curve on greenhouse gas emissions.

Building back better means prioritizing communities, companies, industries, plans and infrastructure that protect what we have – biodiversity, stored carbon, ecosystem services – and stopping or winding down those that do not.

The focus on tree planting is a very Canadian approach – we don’t want to rock the boat on existing industries. But let’s be clear: our forest policies mirror European policies from the 1960s, while our agricultural policies look like those from the 1980s – neither of which focused on maintaining ecosystems as the foundation of resiliency. Europe is now scrambling to undo these effects – to rewild.

Last month, in a new study in Nature on “irrecoverable carbon,” scientists detailed the vast stores of carbon that are being released and cannot be restored by 2050. The study calls for the next generation of protected area networks to safeguard critical ecosystems with high, irrecoverable carbon stocks.

A groundbreaking report released in early May commissioned by the UK treasury assessed the economic value of biodiversity, and concluded that current high rates of biodiversity loss pose a major risk to our economies and our way of life. Just as diversity within a portfolio of financial assets reduces risk and uncertainty, diversity within a portfolio of natural assets – namely, biodiversity – directly and indirectly increases nature’s resilience to shocks, reducing risks to the services on which we rely.

Boreal forests store more carbon per hectare than any other forest type on Earth, other than mangroves. Yet every year logging companies clearcut 400,000 hectares – almost a million acres – of boreal forest. That’s a rate of seven NHL hockey rinks per minute.

Research in British Columbia has shown that after a clearcut, there’s a minimum 13-year window during which the logged and replanted area does not sequester carbon, and it can take more than a hundred years for forests to recover to their pre-harvest state. This analysis suggests that clearcutting is preventing forests in B.C. from removing an additional 26.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year from the atmosphere.

Canada’s primary forest loss is amongst the highest in the world.

Maintaining older, biodiverse forests draws down carbon levels and helps buffer imperilled ecosystems against the impacts of climate change. Protecting intact forests also makes nearby communities more resilient to climate impacts such as drought, floods and wildfire.

In April, Stand.Earth released an investigative report on Canada’s growing wood-pellet industry. Pellets are heavily subsidized and touted by our governments as a climate solution. However, growing the wood-pellet export industry in Canada doubles down on carbon emissions: first by instantly releasing a forest’s stored carbon at the smokestack, and second by further degrading forests, which are a critical ally in the fight against climate change.

In the words of scientist Bill Moomaw, professor emeritus at Tufts University and the author of several Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, “If we let some of our existing natural forests grow, we could remove an additional 10 to 20% of what we emit every year; instead, we’re paying subsidies to have people cut them down, burning them in place of coal, and counting it as zero carbon.”

Listen to the science.

We need to focus on protecting high biodiversity areas and carbon-rich primary, intact and old forest landscapes. For example, we are still allowing logging in critical caribou habitat (to make toilet paper) when our own scientists have said we need to protect those same forests.

This needs to stop now.

By supporting Indigenous Guardian programs, employment centred on land restoration, and economic diversification in forest communities, we can create more jobs. Canada could be a global leader and also make progress on reconciliation by committing to reach a 30% protected area target, with a majority of those lands integrating existing Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area (IPCA) proposals already submitted through Canada’s Target 1 process.

It is time to reimagine the wood-products industry in the same way that we are starting to reimagine the energy and oil sectors. We can add jobs and economic vitality with a value-added job strategy. We can build furniture, make things we need and create consistent employment in forest communities. And we can stop shipping raw logs and wood pellets while clearcutting the forests that are our planet’s carbon pools. We can explore alternate fibre supplies, recycled fibre and agricultural waste.

Rather than maintaining existing practices, which are still designed to ensure maximum extraction, we need to update forest practices to reflect adaptation science and ecosystem-based management that maintains or restores original forest complexity. This model can also transform forestry from boom and bust cycles, to add good jobs with built-in longevity: selective logging in forest ecosystems, investment in second-growth milling, and Forest Stewardship Council–certified logging will employ more people.

We need to get honest about industrial impacts on our forests and carbon accounting. A recent report from Wildlands League revealed that Canada is underreporting our rates of deforestation. New numbers show that approximately 21,700 hectares are deforested each year in Ontario due to roads and landings imposed by forestry in the boreal forest (roughly equivalent to 40,000 football fields). This is seven times greater than the reported deforestation rate by forestry for all of Canada, and these findings undermine the claim of “near zero deforestation” in Canada.

We also have a broken carbon accounting system when it comes to terrestrial carbon. We are not properly accounting for emissions from logging old forests or the methane emissions from peat and soil disturbance. A recent University of Waterloo paper looked at peat and soil disturbances from seismic lines used in oil and gas exploration in Alberta alone and found that these undocumented emissions would boost Canada’s national reporting of methane in the category of land use, land-use change and forestry by about 8%.

Instead of tearing down nature, we need to rebuild our systems and protect the abundance we have.

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