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All three parties that now hold seats in the B.C. legislature promised major changes to the use of glyphosate in forestry operations during the recent provincial election campaign.

The BC Greens promised to ban the use of all chemical herbicides, including glyphosate, in forestry. The BC Conservatives committed to stop all aerial spraying of glyphosate. And the BC NDP, returned to government in a slim majority, promised to phase out the industry’s use of the controversial herbicide.

Ecologists and advocates welcomed the commitment, but they warn it’s not just glyphosate that needs to go — it’s the broader policies that prioritize timber over diverse ecosystems.

Aspen is a natural fire guard. Why has B.C. spent decades killing it off with glyphosate?

Those policies have resulted in more than 430,000 hectares of B.C. forest being sprayed with herbicides since the 1970s to kill off plants and trees — from berries and wildflowers to groves of fire-resistant aspen — that industry and government view as unwanted competition for conifer plantations. Those same species have been manually cut back from roughly half a million hectares more across the province, according to data analyzed by The Narwhal and Nikita Wallia, a spatial analyst and cartography specialist.

However, the sprayed area available in the government application The Narwhal retrieved data from only appears to include the initial brushing treatment even if a cutblock was brushed multiple times. When asked to confirm if more than 430,000 hectares have been brushed with herbicides, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Forests said its data recounts areas that have been sprayed multiple times and shows 738,000 hectares have been treated with herbicides since 1987.

While glyphosate use has declined significantly in recent years, the impacts of past spraying are still visible in forests today.

Explore where forestry companies have sprayed or cut back plants across B.C.

This map shows cutblocks that have been at least partially brushed either manually or with herbicides since the 1970s. By clicking on a particular cutblock, you can find the area of the cutblock, labelled as opening area, as well as the date, technique and area of the first brushing treatment. Ground applications of herbicides are displayed in yellow and aerial spraying is displayed in blue on the map. Manual brushing cut is displayed in red. In many cases, companies reported brushing only a portion of a given cutblock.

Click here to explore our interactive map

The Narwhal reviewed more than 2,000 pages of herbicide reports forestry companies submitted to the B.C. government in response to a freedom of information request. Those reports show companies target a host of species with herbicide treatments, from aspen and cottonwood to willows and rose.

Many of the targeted plants provide food not just for deer, moose, bears and birds but also for people, who harvest berries and medicinal plants from the land. Mixed forests, made up of diverse species, have been found to be more resistant to pests and disease. Aspen, maples, poplars and other deciduous trees return nutrients to the soil when their leaves fall each autumn.

Aspens play an important role wherever they’re found. Beavers prefer aspen trunks and twigs to build their dams. Birds nest in their cavities. Moose, deer and black bears eat their leaves. And, during the height of wildfire seasons, groves of relatively moist aspens can serve as a natural fire break. But those benefits are eroded or lost entirely when aspen are culled from forests where timber production is prioritized.

A spokesperson for the provincial Forests Ministry reiterated the government’s commitment to phase out the use of glyphosate and said the ministry is considering amending the policies that prioritize timber over other ecological values.

Updated Dec. 20, 2024, at 12 p.m. PT: The map caption in this article was updated to include details from the map’s colour-coded legend.

Updated on Feb. 13, 2026, at 10:52 a.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct the total area of B.C. forests where companies have reported spraying herbicides or manually cutting back vegetation. Government data shows forestry companies reported spraying more than 430,000 hectares of forests with herbicides since the 1970s, not more than one million hectares as previously stated. Additionally, companies reported manually removing vegetation from roughly half a million hectares, not 1.5 million hectares. The story has also been updated to add context about uncertainty in these figures due to the limitations of the data available.

Updated on Feb. 13, 2026, at 2:43 p.m. PT: This story has been updated to clarify that the 738,000 hectare figured referenced by the B.C. government referred to areas that had been brushed with herbicides

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Get the inside scoop on The Narwhal’s environment and climate reporting by signing up for our free newsletter.

For decades, forestry companies in B.C. have used glyphosate and other herbicides to kill off trembling aspen, a deciduous tree the industry and the provincial government view as unwanted competition for conifers destined to become timber.

The BC NDP, which returned to government with a slim majority in October, committed to phase out the controversial use of glyphosate in forestry during the provincial election campaign.

While ecologists and advocates welcome the promise, they warn it’s not just the herbicide that needs to go — it’s also B.C.’s broader policies that prioritize timber over diverse ecosystems.

After years of destructive wildfires, more and more people are recognizing the value of aspen and other deciduous trees.

In the summer, when aspens are lush and green, they act like a sponge, holding moisture from the forest floor in their bark and leaves. Conifers, by contrast, are drier, and their needles packed full of flammable resin. Conifers spur on fire, but aspens can slow it down.

As the provincial government considers its next steps, here are a few things you need to know about the use of herbicides in forestry — and the consequences of killing off aspen.

More than 430,000 hectares of B.C. forest have been sprayed with herbicides

B.C. government regulations require companies to prioritize conifer growth over deciduous trees like aspen — and those that don’t risk fines for failing to meet certain milestones.

In many areas across B.C., companies manually cut back plants that might compete with conifers for water, nutrients and sunlight. But herbicides are often a less expensive option, according to a 2019 review of the industry’s use of glyphosate by FPInnovations, a non-profit focused on research and development in the forestry sector.

Government data shows more than 430,000 hectares of forest have been sprayed with glyphosate to kill off any plants that might compete with conifer crops. Illustration: Alex Boersma / The Narwhal. Illustration: Alex Boersma / The Narwhal

Glyphosate, which the World Health Organization says is probably carcinogenic to people, is the main component in the popular herbicide RoundUp. Plants absorb the chemical, which blocks them from taking in nutrients from the soil, through their leaves. As the plant starves, its colour fades, its leaves shrivel and then it dies.

Since the 1970s, more than 430,000 hectares of forest in B.C. have been sprayed with herbicides — either by helicopter or on the ground using methods such as backpack sprayers.

However, the sprayed area available in the government application The Narwhal retrieved data from only appears to include the initial brushing treatment even if a cutblock was brushed multiple times. When asked to confirm if more than 430,000 hectares have been brushed with herbicides, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Forests said its data recounts areas that have been sprayed multiple times and shows 738,000 hectares have been treated with herbicides since 1987. 

Glyphosate use in forestry is in decline — but its ‘huge impacts’ persist

Spraying ramped up in the 1980s, according to government data analyzed for The Narwhal by Nikita Wallia, a spatial analyst and cartography specialist. 

In an emailed statement to The Narwhal, a spokesperson for B.C.’s Ministry of Forests said the use of herbicides in forestry has declined by 88 per cent since 2018, adding, “the province works with foresters to grow trees without glyphosate.”

But even as the practice becomes less common, the consequences of decades of glyphosate spraying are still visible in forests today, according to James Steidle, founder of Stop the Spray B.C., a group advocating for an end to glyphosate spraying. While Steidle says manually cutting back deciduous trees is better than spraying herbicides, he warns it can still have “huge impacts” on aspen communities and on forest biodiversity.

Herbicides target wildfire-resistant trees, food for moose, deer and bears 

The Narwhal reviewed more than 2,000 pages of herbicide reports forestry companies submitted to the B.C. government, received in response to a freedom of information request. Those reports show companies are targeting a host of species with herbicide treatments, from aspen and cottonwood to willows and rose.

Many plants the industry targets provide food not just for deer, moose, bears and birds but also for people, who harvest berries and medicinal plants from the land. Mixed forests, made up of diverse species, have been found to be more resistant to pests and disease. Aspen, maples, poplars and other deciduous trees return nutrients to the soil when their leaves fall each autumn.

Aspens play an important role wherever they’re found. Beavers prefer aspen trunks and twigs to build their dams. Birds nest in their cavities. Moose, deer and black bears eat their leaves. And, during the height of wildfire seasons, groves of moist aspens can serve as a natural break. But those benefits are eroded or lost entirely when aspen are culled from forests where timber production is prioritized.

Herbicides can change the way wildfires spread across the landscape

Wildland fire ecologist Robert Gray says herbicide use can change potential fire behaviour. In the short-term, it creates fuel for fires as sprayed plants dry out and die. The brush will eventually decompose, but a natural fire break is lost in areas where aspen and other deciduous trees are killed off.

“We talk about mature aspen as wet blankets or speed bumps on the landscape,” Gray says.

There are some caveats. Aspens dry out in the winter, so they are more resistant to fire when their leaves unfold from their buds each spring and they start to retain moisture. Even then, Gray says, groves of almost entirely deciduous trees — such as aspen, alder or birch — are needed to reap those fuel break benefits. And the trees must be tall enough and dense enough for their leafy canopies to close, shading the forest floor and trapping moisture in the soils and foliage below.

“We’re going to have to embrace hardwoods as part of the solution to the fire problem,” Gray says. “Moving away from herbicides specifically to kill aspen is the first step.”

The Yukon is embracing aspens as a fire guard — ecologists say B.C. should too

The Yukon government is clearing conifers from a 20-kilometre stretch of forest to protect the city of Whitehorse from a potentially catastrophic wildfire. Expanses of white spruce and lodgepole pine are being cleared to make way for aspen.

To some degree, the territorial government is attempting to emulate a transformation that would naturally be triggered by fire, Luc Bibeau, the manager of prevention and mitigation with Yukon Wildland Fire Management, says. In many areas, aspens are one of the first species to naturally regenerate after fire or other disturbances. Eventually, those aspen groves transition to forests dominated by conifers. Then fire sweeps through and the cycle begins again.

When fires move through aspen groves, they tend to be less intense, burning along the ground and not through the treetops — exactly the kind of fire that firefighters in Canada are effective at catching, Luc Bibeau explains. Photo: Supplied by James Steidle

But in many places across Canada, fires have been aggressively suppressed for decades, simultaneously suppressing the natural renewal of aspen forests.

“There hasn’t been a major wildfire in the area south of Whitehorse since somewhere around 1908,” Bibeau notes. 

Today, the dense forests of spruce and pine around the northern city are primed to burn. The Whitehorse fire break, which is as wide as two kilometres in some areas, is meant to reduce the risk and give firefighters a better chance to respond in the event of a major blaze.

In B.C., Gray says the provincial government should move away from its “active war on hardwoods” like aspen in tandem with its plans to phase out glyphosate.

“We need a lot more not only aspen on the landscape, but shrub communities and grasslands — and that’s going to happen anyway with the kind of fires we’re having, we just should be helping it along,” he says.

Updated Dec. 20, 2024, at 12 p.m. PT: The map caption in this article was updated to include details from the map’s colour-coded legend.

Updated on Feb. 13, 2026, at 10:45 a.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct the total area of B.C. forests companies have reported spraying with herbicides. Government data shows forestry companies reported spraying more than 430,000 hectares of forests with herbicides since the 1970s, not one million hectares as previously stated. A caption has been updated to remove a reference to the total area where vegetation was manually removed. The story has also been updated to add context about uncertainty in these figures due to the limitations of the data available.

Updated on Feb. 13, 2026, at 2:42 p.m. PT: This story has been updated to clarify that the 738,000 hectare figured referenced by the B.C. government referred to areas that had been brushed with herbicides

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Get the inside scoop on The Narwhal’s environment and climate reporting by signing up for our free newsletter.

For decades, forestry companies in B.C. have used chemical herbicides like glyphosate to kill off plants that might compete with trees destined for timber. Trembling aspen, named for its almost heart-shaped leaves that seem to quiver in the wind, is often on the hit list.

But after years of destructive wildfires that have wiped out whole neighbourhoods and sometimes whole towns, more and more people are questioning the wisdom of killing off this tree. Because when wildfires sweep across the landscape, aspen can help calm the flames.

Aspen is found across North America, dotted along riverbanks or in stands the size of a dozen or more football fields all stitched together. It’s the most common of the continent’s deciduous trees, which lose their leaves each fall and sprout new ones each spring. Aspen can grow from seed planted by hand or carried on the wind to fertile ground. But the tree often spreads by clone, through vast root networks that can sprout thousands of genetic replicas — each one the branch of a single, sometimes ancient organism.

In B.C. aspen is found sprinkled along the mighty rivers that wind through the southwest, in patches across the southern Interior and in groves that mark the transition from prairie to boreal forest. Wherever the trees grow, they’re important. Beavers prefer aspen trunks and twigs to build their dams. Birds nest in their cavities. Moose, deer and black bears eat their leaves.

And in the summer, when aspens are lush and green, they act like a sponge, holding moisture from the forest floor in their bark and leaves. Conifers, by contrast, are drier, and their needles are packed full of flammable resin. Where conifers spur on fire, aspens can slow it down.

But for industry, the money is in conifers.

Conifers are drier than deciduous trees like aspen, and their needles are packed full of flammable resin. Illustration: Alex Boersma / The Narwhal

Ecosystem costs of spraying glyphosate are ‘huge,’ says Suzanne Simard

B.C. has been farming conifers for decades. Telephone poles and packing crates, kitchen cabinets, furniture and even whole houses are made from these evergreen trees.

About 50 species of tree occur in B.C. But after companies clear cut stretches of forest, they mostly plant conifers — pine, spruce and fir. 

Companies are responsible for the conifer crops until the trees are considered “free growing” — meaning their growth isn’t impeded by other vegetation that might compete for water, nutrients and sunlight. 

To make sure they hit those targets, and to avoid potential fines from the B.C. government for missing that milestone, companies use chemical herbicides like glyphosate to kill off aspen, huckleberries, wild rose and a host of other plants they see as potential competitors for conifers. They use backpack tanks to target species from the ground and helicopters to douse large areas from the air.

Glyphosate, which the World Health Organization says is probably carcinogenic to people, is the main component in the common herbicide Roundup. Plants absorb the chemical — which blocks them from taking in nutrients from the soil — through their leaves. As the plant starves, its colour fades, its leaves shrivel and then it dies.

“They’re doing this because they think they can make more money from growing conifers on short rotations,” forest ecologist Suzanne Simard says. But “the costs to the ecosystems are huge,” she tells The Narwhal. “It’s devastating.”

James Steidle, founder of Stop the Spray B.C., a group advocating for an end to glyphosate spraying, describes the changes to the landscape wrought by modern forest practices as “incredibly dramatic.”

Fly over a forested area and you’ll see a “monotone, olive green patch of pine trees,” he says. “You can see it from space … you can see it driving down the road.”

FP Innovations, a non-profit focused on research and development in the forestry sector, was commissioned by the B.C. government to review glyphosate use in the industry. The group’s 2019 report said controlling “highly aggressive” competitors like fireweed and trembling aspen is sometimes necessary to establish conifer plantations.

“The unimpeded growth of conifers maximizes timber supply in the long term and the economic benefit derived from forests,” the review says.

In many parts of B.C. — and in Quebec, where glyphosate has been banned for more than 20 years — companies cut back competing vegetation with brush saws and plant taller seedlings to give their conifer crops an edge. But glyphosate is a less expensive option, according to the FP Innovations report.

Forestry companies ramped up herbicide spraying in the 1980s, but government data analyzed by The Narwhal and Nikita Wallia, a spatial analyst and cartography specialist, shows some of the earliest reports of herbicide spraying date back to the 1970s. Since then, more than 430,000 hectares of forest, spread over more than one million hectares of cutblocks across B.C. have been sprayed with herbicides, while plants that might compete with conifers have been manually cut back from about half a million hectares, according to the data.

However, the sprayed area available in the government application The Narwhal retrieved data from only appears to include the initial brushing treatment even if a cutblock was brushed multiple times. When asked to confirm if more than 430,000 hectares have been brushed with herbicides, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Forests said in a statement provided on Feb, 10, 2026, its data recounts areas that have been sprayed multiple times and shows 738,000 hectares have been treated with herbicides since 1987. In the same time period, 7.4 million hectares of forests were harvested. 

The ministry spokesperson noted that most chemical herbicide treatments occurred in the 1990s and early 2000s. “The past 20 years have accounted for only a third of the total treated area,” the statement said. But large stretches of forest are still sprayed with glyphosate and other herbicides annually. Between 2018 and 2023, forestry companies sprayed more than 20,000 hectares of forest — an area almost twice the size of Vancouver — to kill off aspen and other plants, according to the data. Another almost 70,000 hectares were manually cut back over the same period. 

In an emailed statement in response to questions as part of The Narwhal’s initial reporting in 2024, a spokesperson for B.C.’s Ministry of Forests said the use of herbicides in forestry has declined by 88 per cent since 2018, adding, “the province works with foresters to grow trees without glyphosate.”

But even as the practice becomes less common, the consequences of decades of glyphosate spraying are still visible in forests today. And while Steidle says manually cutting back deciduous trees is better than spraying herbicides, he warns it can still have “huge impacts” on aspen communities and on forest biodiversity.

Applying herbicides changes potential wildfire behaviour 

Many plants the forest industry targets as competitors to conifers provide food not just for deer, moose, bears and birds but also for people, who harvest berries and medicinal plants from the land. Mixed forests, made up of diverse species, have been found to be more resistant to pests and disease. Aspen, maples, poplars and other deciduous trees return nutrients to the soil when their leaves fall each autumn. 

And each summer, when wildfires spread across the landscape, moist groves of aspen can help temper the flames. But those benefits are eroded or lost as deciduous trees and other plants are weeded out.

“Anytime we apply herbicides, we are changing potential fire behaviour,” wildland fire ecologist Robert Gray explains. In past decades, herbicides were used to prepare for prescribed burns, especially in wetter ecosystems, he points out. “Today we’re just trying to kill vegetation that’s competing with planted conifers — the unfortunate side effect is that we create a hazardous fire condition.” 

If it doesn’t burn, dead, dried-out brush killed off by herbicides will eventually decompose, lessening the immediate fire risk. But in areas where aspen and other deciduous trees are killed, a natural fire break is lost too.

As climate change drives more frequent and intense wildfires, the need for more diverse ecosystems, from aspen groves to grasslands, is increasingly evident. Illustration: Alex Boersma / The Narwhal

“We talk about mature aspen as wet blankets or speed bumps on the landscape,” Gray, a private consultant, says. “So, if we kill regenerating aspen, we’re changing the trajectory for a landscape’s potential fire behaviour.”

Jen Baron, a fire ecologist and post-doctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, points to B.C.’s northern boreal and sub-boreal forests as an example. In the past, those areas would have been home to conifer forests, mixed conifer and deciduous forests and patches of pure aspen or other deciduous hardwood trees, often in wetter areas.

“We’ve effectively excluded a lot of those wetter forests over longer periods of time and simultaneously dried out the landscape,” she says.

Even if an aspen clone survives a dose of chemical herbicide, by the time new sprouts emerge their chances of survival may be limited. As conifers shoot upwards, past their free-growing milestone, the canopy closes, casting shadows across the plants below. But growing aspen can’t handle the shade.

Historically, fire would sweep through every so often, thinning the trees and letting the light back in, allowing aspen stands to regenerate. But for decades B.C. has suppressed fire on the landscape to protect its standing timber — simultaneously extinguishing the chances for aspen renewal after herbicides are applied.

The consequences can be far reaching. While dense conifer forests offer little to nourish wildlife and people, deciduous forests are lush with food. “Beneath the hardwood canopy, you still have berries and rootstock, all kinds of other plant species, but you don’t have that in conifer forests,” Gray says. 

B.C. requires forestry companies to kill off aspen in replanted areas

While conifer growth is the priority of the B.C. government and forest industry, the goal isn’t to completely eliminate other vegetation, according to the FP Innovations report. It points to research that found deciduous plants accounted for 15 to 21 per cent of forest density years after herbicide treatment in the Omineca region, which surrounds Prince George, B.C.

But Steidle warns glyphosate can affect the long-term health of aspen, even when it doesn’t kill the tree. And small patches of aspen the helicopter sprayers miss may succumb to frequent gnawing from rabbits, moose or beavers. “A lot of things will eat aspen trees other than brush saws and herbicide helicopters,” Steidle points out.

B.C.’s regulations allow for a fair bit of aspen mixed in among conifers in forests managed for timber, Steidle notes. But simply having aspen in the mix of a conifer-dominant forest won’t do much in the face of a wildfire.

Aspens aren’t a foolproof fire guard. They dry out in the winter, and only when their leaves unfold from their buds each spring do they start to hold in moisture. Even then, Gray says, groves of almost entirely deciduous trees — such as aspen, alder or birch — are needed to reap those fuel break benefits. The trees must be tall enough and dense enough that their leafy canopies close, shading the forest floor and trapping moisture in the soils and foliage below.

“We need more aspen trees, we need more of those species that can reduce wildfire,” Steidle says.

B.C.’s regulations require companies to prioritize conifers across 95 per cent of each cutblock they replant in the central Interior, Steidle says. In practice, it means companies are obliged to kill off pure aspen and birch stands across most of their plantations in the region, he says. And even in the remaining five per cent, he says aspen stands can’t be larger than two hectares. 

“Their war on aspen, the war on deciduous trees, is directly linked to the greed of corporations and the government today.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Forests Ministry said climate change and aspen leafminers, tiny moths that eat tree leaves, are the most significant cause of aspen declines. While Steidle agrees the pests are a concern, he says policies that restrict aspen in conifer plantations only compound existing pressures on these deciduous trees. “We’ve got to stop cutting down aspen, we’ve got to stop spraying aspen,” he says. “Nature can heal itself but we’ve got to get out of the way.” 

Killing off deciduous trees can come at a cost to conifers too

Forest ecologist Simard has long questioned B.C.’s free-to-grow policy. Even as a young graduate student, she recognized the interconnected nature of forest ecosystems and questioned the wisdom of killing off neighbouring plants to hasten conifer growth. With some of her earliest research, in the 1980s and 1990s, Simard set out to test whether the free-to-grow policy would accomplish that goal.

In a series of experiments in different forest types, she and other researchers tested whether removing deciduous trees, shrubs, grasses and wildflowers — by cutting them back or dousing them with chemical herbicides — led to faster-growing conifers. The results varied depending on the plant communities, Simard explains. In some cases, particularly in wetter ecosystems where brush grows fast and dense, conifer seedlings did fare better when neighbouring plants were knocked back. But in other places, there was little to no benefit for conifers, Simard says, and it may have even caused them harm.

Over the years, Simard kept an eye on an experiment she ran in the southern Interior as part of her graduate research, testing how lodgepole pine responded to the removal of sitka alder. Cutting back dense thickets of the shrub did seem to help the conifers grow bigger, she notes. Years later though, Simard noticed fewer trees survived a pine beetle infestation where most of the alder had been killed off by herbicide spraying. Where sitka alder had been allowed to regrow after the initial trim, the pines survived.

“Spraying glyphosate is unnecessary, we don’t need it,” Simard says. “If we do better forestry, these plant communities will look after themselves, but we mess things up with these really bad forestry practices.”

Aspen planted around Whitehorse to restore a natural fire guard

With more frequent and intense wildfires expected across western North America as the climate warms, the role aspen plays as a natural fire guard is gaining attention.

The Yukon government is creating a 20-kilometre firebreak in the boreal forest to protect the city of Whitehorse from a potentially catastrophic wildfire. Expanses of white spruce and lodgepole pine are being cleared to make way for aspen.

“One day, there will be this huge golden band in the fall along the west and south edge of Whitehorse that I’m pretty stoked for people to see from the air,” Luc Bibeau, the manager of prevention and mitigation with Yukon Wildland Fire Management, says in an interview.

In the summer, when aspens are lush and green, they act like a sponge, holding moisture from the forest floor in their bark and leaves. Illustration: Alex Boersma / The Narwhal

To some degree, the territorial government is attempting to emulate a transformation that would naturally be triggered by fire, Bibeau says. In many areas, aspens are one of the first species to naturally regenerate after fire or other disturbances. Eventually, those aspen groves naturally transition to forests dominated by conifers. Then fire sweeps through and the cycle begins again.

But in many places across Canada, fires have been aggressively suppressed around communities, Bibeau explains. “There hasn’t been a major wildfire in the area south of Whitehorse since somewhere around 1908.”

Today, the dense forests of spruce and pine around the northern city are primed to burn. The Whitehorse fire break, which will be as wide as two kilometres in some areas, is meant to reduce the risk and give firefighters a better chance to respond in the event of a major blaze.

When fires move through aspen groves, they tend to be less intense, burning along the ground and not through the treetops — “exactly the kind of fire that firefighters in Canada are really effective at catching,” Bibeau points out.  

And if a fire does move through the firebreak, those aspen will regenerate, he says, “so it has this self renewal mechanism.” 

B.C. government poised to reconsider glyphosate use in forestry

Researcher Jocelyne Laflamme is digging into the role aspens could play in tempering wildfire behaviour in B.C.’s Okanagan region. As part of her PhD research at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, Laflamme is investigating whether decades of snuffing out wildfires may have artificially suppressed aspen abundance — and what the fire regime might look like if aspen flourished across the landscape instead.

Laflamme is relying on a sophisticated modelling program developed by the U.S. Forest Service and the University of Washington, called REBURN. While she’s still tweaking the model and adjusting inputs, she says very preliminary results suggest more fire on the landscape leads to more aspen, which in turn limits the size and intensity of fire.

During the fall 2024 election campaign, the BC NDP, which was returned to power, committed to phase out the use of glyphosate in the forests industry. Observers say the province also needs to embrace deciduous forests. Illustration: Alex Boersma / The Narwhal

B.C.’s northern boreal forests are more adapted to high-severity fires, Baron says. But as the climate warms, even those forests “are burning in totally new ways to us,” she explains, pointing to the Donnie Creek fire complex that burned more than half a million hectares in the province’s northeast in 2023.

Fewer pockets of forest escape those types of infernos. It’s a concern, Baron explains, because those fire refugia, as they’re known, function as seed banks that help forests regenerate. “However, I will say, if you look at a lot of the recent fire scars in the north, what’s regenerating there is aspen.”

“It’s adapted to come back after high-severity fire and so, from a restoration and a management perspective, allowing broadleaf trees to just come back where they want to come back is one of most cost effective interventions.” 

Almost 40 years after B.C. introduced the free-to-grow policy, the government seems ready to reconsider the use of chemical herbicides in forestry. All three parties that hold seats in the provincial legislature promised change during this fall’s election campaign. The BC Conservatives committed to stop all aerial spraying of glyphosate. The BC Greens promised to ban the use of all chemical herbicides in forestry. And the BC NDP, returned to government in a slim majority, promised to phase out glyphosate — although a spokesperson for the Forests Ministry did not provide The Narwhal with a timeline when asked.

While Gray says phasing out glyphosate is long overdue, he believes the broader issue is the need to move away from the “active war on hardwoods” like aspen.

“We’re going to have to embrace hardwoods as part of the solution to the fire problem,” he says.

“We need a lot more not only aspen on the landscape, but shrub communities and grasslands — and that’s going to happen anyway with the kind of fires we’re having, we just should be helping it along,” he says. 

“Moving away from herbicides specifically to kill aspen is the first step.” 

Updated on Feb. 13, 2026, at 2:40 p.m. PT: This story has been updated to clarify that the 738,000 hectare figured referenced by the B.C. government referred to areas that had been brushed with herbicides

Updated on Feb. 13, 2026, at 10:13 a.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct the total area of B.C. forests where forestry companies have reported spraying herbicides or manually cutting back vegetation to reduce competition with planted trees.

The original data analysis for this story counted entire cutblocks where herbicide spraying or manual vegetation removal had occurred. Follow-up reporting showed initial brushing treatments were often limited to a portion of those cutblocks. 

Government data shows companies have reported spraying more than 430,000 hectares of forest with herbicides since the 1970s, not more than one million hectares as previously stated. Companies have reported manually removing vegetation from roughly half a million hectares, not 1.5 million hectares. 

Between 2018 and 2023, companies reported spraying herbicides across more than 20,000 hectares, not 52,614 hectares, while companies reported manually cutting back vegetation across almost 70,000 hectares, not 183,380 hectares as previously reported.

The story has also been updated to add context about uncertainty in these figures due to the limitations of the data available.

Updated Dec. 20, 2024, at 12 p.m. PT: The map caption in this article was updated to include details from the map’s colour-coded legend.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

On a cold day in November 1989, my father was flying low in a Cessna-185 fixed-wing airplane over the Caribou Mountains in northern Alberta, when he saw a vast number of otherworldly animals scattered across the surface of a frozen lake. He was astonished. He called them grey ghosts.

The Caribou Mountains — more wetlands than mountains — rest on a saucer-shaped plateau gently ascending above the surrounding lowlands of the Peace River valley, blanketed in sphagnum moss, bog cranberry, Labrador tea and lichen. It’s a vast tract of 13,405 square kilometres of subarctic boreal forest bordering the western boundary of Wood Buffalo National Park. The land is pockmarked with what are known as collapse scar bogs, depressions where thawing permafrost created slumped bogs pooling with water.

Woodland caribou have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to survive in harsh, wintry landscapes. Photo: Ryan Dickie / The Narwhal

Few species can survive on such a harsh landscape, but it’s home to what my dad calls the grey ghosts: threatened boreal woodland caribou. Their wide hooves — “like snowshoes,” my father says — help buoy them above the snow, while acting like shovels to scoop and paw to forage through the winter. Caribou’s specialized digestive systems allow them to glean sugars and nutrients from 100-year-old lichens. They’re so hardwired to lichen they can scent it entombed beneath three to four feet of ice and heavy snow.

Woodland caribou diverged from barren ground caribou more than 350,000 years ago. While their strategy has always been to make themselves scarce — “to spread out on the landscape in low-density herds,” my father says — today they are in grave peril. Herds have disappeared. Although uncertain of their historic numbers, biologists have documented declines as early as the 1970s. Only 2,000 caribou remain in Alberta today.

My father — Dave Moyles, then a wildlife biologist with the government of Alberta — and his colleagues had craned their necks straight down, as the snow-covered landscape slid by, their eyes searching open stands of black spruce. That day, they were looking for moose, although my dad spent much of his career searching for caribou.

A Cessna 185 flies low over the Caribou Mountains in the northwest corner of Alberta. Photo: Supplied by Trina Moyles

He was astounded, on that day, to count 80, 90 and then 100 woodland caribou. They couldn’t sum up an exact ratio of females to males to calves — a standard measurement — because “there were way too many animals,” my father recalls. It was likely what’s known as a post-rut aggregation, he tells me, a term to describe when woodland caribou come together in October to mingle and mate, the males knocking antlers in combat over small harems of females.

The size of the herd echoed the oral traditions told by the Little Red River Cree Nation who hunt and trap in the Caribou Mountains, my father says. Hunters had told him stories about seeing massive herds of woodland caribou on the west end of Margaret Lake, the source of the Pontoon River, located northwest of Fort Vermillion, Alta. 

“I’d never see anything like it again,” my dad says now. “What we saw [over the years] was mostly declines. You couldn’t find caribou in places where you used to find caribou.”

Human disturbance remains the most pressing threat to the survival of woodland caribou, experts say. Roads, cut lines, seismic lines and all-terrain vehicle trails fragment caribou habitat. Photo: Supplied by Trina Moyles

My father has now flown over the changing landscape in Alberta for 30 years. Cumulative pressures on woodland caribou have never been higher. The federal Species At Risk Act states 65 per cent undisturbed forest in a caribou range offers a 60 per cent chance of a herd maintaining a self-sustaining status, meaning it can survive without conservation efforts. But most of Alberta’s herds are already facing losses far below that threshold. There are no self-sustaining herds left in the province — remaining populations are maintained by controversial, government-funded wolf cull programs.

“You can visualize the health of a range by looking at the amount of area impacted by humans,” my father says. “Cut lines, well sites, roads, seismic lines, cutblocks — and also how much forest has been burned by wildfires in the last 40 years.”

Across Alberta, myriad disturbances — like cutblocks seen here near Rocky Mountain House — break up wildlife habitat. Wide open spaces can make it easier for predators to stalk their prey. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

Unprecedented and devastating wildfire seasons in recent years have undoubtedly factored into the equation, and the future of woodland caribou in Alberta has never been more uncertain. In 2023, a record-breaking 3.3 million hectares burned — nearly seven per cent of the province’s forests — disturbing more land than the 11 previous fire seasons combined. A recent report by the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute found woodland caribou lost more than five per cent of critical habitat to wildfires in 2023, with northern herds facing the most severe losses, including nearly 13 per cent in Bistcho Lake range and nearly 14 per cent in the Caribou Mountains.

Across Western Canada, wildfires have devastated forests and wildlife habitat, which can also pose a danger to prey species with fewer places to hide. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

The 2024 season has only intensified the crisis for woodland caribou in Alberta. By mid-August, there were more than 100 wildfires burning in Alberta with the largest, the Semo Complex, burning 15 kilometres north of Fox Lake, right in the way of caribou habitat in the Caribou Mountains. At more than 100,00 hectares, it’s nearly twice the size of Edmonton. The Melvin River Complex, at roughly the same size, is burning on the northeast and southeast side of Bistcho Lake, which is home to the Bistcho caribou herd.

Wildfires are burning at a higher frequency and severity than decades past, experts say. The time interval between major fire events — what scientists call “stand-replacing” fires — is shrinking. What does that mean for a species adapted for survival in old-growth forest — forests at least 40 to 50 years old? Can the grey ghosts survive the intensifying wildfire crisis?

Woodland caribou are on the verge of disappearing from the Alberta landscape

I was only four years old when my family moved to Peace River, Alta., and my father began flying over the boreal forest in the northwest corner of the province, counting caribou. Every February, from 1989 to 2017, he listened to the pulse of caribou, the females outfitted with radio collars, documenting their diminishing herds. He counted the number of calves born and compared that number to the number of females lost, every year, to measure what was called the “recruitment survival index.”

The author’s family moved from St. Albert to Peace River, Alta., in 1990. From 1989 to 2017, her father counted woodland caribou in northwest Alberta and documented their decline, largely due to logging and oil and gas extraction. Photos: Supplied by Trina Moyles

Over the latter half of the last century, woodland caribou populations in Canada have suffered steady losses due to the encroachment of extractive industries. In 2002, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada designated woodland caribou as “threatened” and, in 2003, the federal Species At Risk Act followed with the same designation. Today, many of the 15 remaining herds in Alberta are on the verge of extirpation, or local extinction. Some herds have seen their population drop by close to 80 per cent. 

The causes of their plight have been well documented. Caribou are arguably one of the most studied wildlife species in Alberta. Human disturbance through the industrial development of oil, gas, timber and peat has resulted in loss and fragmentation of caribou habitat. Disturbance of old-growth forest encourages the growth of pioneer species, or the first species to colonize landscapes altered by industry, including grasses and leafy shrubs and trees. This attracts foraging deer and moose and, in turn, more predators. Linear features become highways for wolves and bears to more easily prey on caribou.

Historically, the fire cycle in the Western boreal forest burned every 100 to 150 years, so woodland caribou evolved to live closely with wildfire. Like caribou, fire belongs in the boreal forest. It has a role to play: releasing coniferous seeds, stimulating the growth of pioneer species and regenerating the cycle anew. Over tens of thousands of years, fire has shaped caribou.

My father recalls the summer of 1995 when a lightning-caused wildfire swept through the Caribou Mountains, candling in the black spruce and smouldering deep in the lichen-carpeted peat, growing to cover 129,000 hectares. 

An Alberta Fish and Wildlife staff member counting the number of males, females and calves on a caribou survey in February 2017. Biologists closely monitor caribou populations, which have been in decline. Photo: Supplied by Trina Moyles

Researchers estimated it was the first time the forest had burned in over 90 years. In 1998, another large-scale wildfire tore across the boggy plateau. Researchers at the University of Alberta calculated 76 per cent of the caribou’s home range was razed by the 90s fires.

“The 1990s saw some bad fire years in the Caribou Mountains,” my dad says. “There were these peat pockets along the Pontoon River. You could actually see the depth — 100 feet deep in some places — but the fires were so hot and extensive that a lot of that burnt right off.”

Wildfires threaten a delicate balance

Woodland caribou aren’t helpless in the face of fire. My father hypothesizes they’ve learned to avoid and flee from wildfires based on at least three adaptive traits. First, their acute sense of smell can likely pick up the scent of wildfire smoke, pushed by the winds. Second, their bodies are designed for long-distance travel. And third, like us, they possess an intricate memory of the landscape. They somehow know where to go.

“Caribou just keep moving, moving, moving,” my father says. “It wouldn’t be unheard of for them to travel 20, 30 kilometres in a day. And as long as some of the herd know of these pockets of [habitat] they’ll keep seeking them out.”

This is what my dad calls herd memory: knowledge passed down from female caribou to her offspring like an old, weathered map of the land — a family heirloom of sorts. It’s why the loss of even one female can be so detrimental to a small herd, he says.

The author’s father, Dave Moyles, working with Alberta Fish and Wildlife staff to collar and release an adult female caribou in the Chinchaga, north of Manning, Alta., in 1990. Efforts like these allowed biologists to track woodland caribou’s movements on the landscape. “It helped us realize just how big some of these caribou ranges were,” Moyles says. Photos: Supplied by Trina Moyles

The winter after the wildfire in 1995, my dad flew over the Caribou Mountains and saw caribou travelling through the residual remains of the burn, what firefighters call “the black.” Wildfires don’t typically raze the forest down to ashes in a uniform fashion. They often leave behind pockets of trees, understory and patches of lichen, somehow unscathed.

“A caribou is so sensitive they’ll pick up the unburned lichen through the snow,” my dad says. “You’d see them feeding in an area for, say, a year or two following a burn.”

But beyond that, he saw that caribou avoid the charred forest entirely. 

Wildfire isn’t inherently bad for caribou, but it amplifies challenges

Some wildfires are beneficial to wildlife species in the boreal forest, ushering in scores of insects to burrow in blackened trees. Fire beetles can sense the heat from kilometres away and scuttle toward the ashes to breed and lay eggs. Birds and bats descend on the swarms of insects. Black-backed woodpeckers prefer to hammer nests into charred trees — it’s believed their habitat will grow by nearly 13 per cent as a result of the 2023 wildfires. Pioneer plants and grasses rise from the nitrogen-rich soil and attract mule deer, white-tailed deer and moose, while predator species, including wolves and bears, stalk their footsteps.

A deer peeks through a burnt forest in British Columbia. Wildfires can be beneficial to some species, which thrive after a burn opens up the forest. It can also clear the way for predation. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

Wildfire isn’t inherently bad for caribou. A recent study indicates that, after 20 years, lichens regenerated faster in areas disturbed by wildfire compared to areas that were clear cut for timber. The study’s author, Ian Best, a post-doctoral biologist at the University of Northern British Columbia, isn’t entirely sure why, but posits it could be because fire leaves pockets of unburnt lichen behind, or the result of charred deadfall and coarse woody debris suppressing the growth of leafy plants, which tend to outcompete lichen.

But indirectly, wildfires open up access to the landscape and caribou habitat. My father observed how, following the fires, wolves could “work an area” through the open burn. And it wasn’t only the wolves. Once, he responded to the collar on a female caribou that had gone into “mortality mode” — a rapid-firing radio frequency — in the Caribou Mountains. As they flew to retrieve the collar, my father looked down, startled to see a lynx hunkered down on top of the caribou.

“He glared up at us like, you know, ‘Bugger off — this is mine!’ ”

Canada’s 2023 wildfire season was the most destructive ever recorded, according to Natural Resources Canada. More than 6,000 fires burned 15 million hectares of land. “That’s an area larger than England and more than double the 1989 record. Normally, an average of 2.5 million hectares of land are consumed in Canada every year,” Natural Resources Canada said. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

Research shows woodland caribou avoid areas burnt by wildfires due to a lack of lichen and the risk of running into wolves and predators. Stan Boutin, a professor emeritus at the University of Alberta, told me he and his colleagues were surprised to learn that, even in the face of large-scale wildfires, caribou weren’t displaced from their home ranges. They avoided the burned areas — especially during the winter and when the females calve in May and June — but stayed within their ranges. 

Similarly, a recent study from 2021, based on data from six woodland caribou ranges in Alberta, found exposure to wildfires didn’t directly lead to death. The paper argues burned habitat is unlikely to be the primary cause of caribou declines in Alberta — and that recovery efforts and conservation ought to focus more on human disturbance.

Human disturbances like roads and seismic lines criss-cross much of Alberta. The degradation and fragmentation of habitat impacts many wildlife species. Some research has suggested human disturbance is more detrimental to species like caribou than wildfires. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

“In the past, when these big fires burned though there was probably a bump up in the predator numbers for a short period of time,” Boutin says. “But that quickly changes after 40 or 50 years, particularly in the peatland areas. They go back to forest that won’t support moose, so it becomes caribou habitat again.”

The problem isn’t that caribou are maladapted to wildfire, but rather that some ranges in Alberta are so badly fragmented by human disturbance — severed by seismic lines, oil and gas well sites and forestry cutblocks — that their strategy of avoidance is practically null. They’re left with hardly any alternatives of where to go.

In some areas of Alberta, oil, gas and timber activities are so pervasive they’re hard to escape. Photos: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

My dad points to the Chinchaga caribou range, north of Peace River, that extends along the B.C. border where 81 per cent of the range has been disturbed by oil, gas and timber activities. In the 2000s, he advocated against the use of prescribed fire in the Chinchaga to manage the pine beetle infestation that swept through northern Alberta.

“I was pretty adamant against burning there. The Chinchaga range is hugely dissected by industrial activity and you layer fire on top of that. From a caribou perspective, I couldn’t agree to that,” he says. “And I was pretty unpopular for that.”

Today, despite wildfire being a natural process in the boreal forest, caribou are reaching a critical tipping point where they can’t tolerate losses from both people — and fire. And increasingly, their habitat is being recognized as worth protecting from flames.

Should caribou habitat be a wildfire-fighting priority?

Wildfire fighters simply cannot put out every fire that lights in the forest. There are too many, they are too remote or, in some cases, the landscape would be better off letting it burn. So in the jargon-filled vocabulary of wildfire-fighting, deciding which fires to fight or how many resources to put toward them depends on what are known as the “values at risk.” Homes, schools, businesses, power lines are all values. 

My father and his colleagues fought within the Alberta government’s wildfire management division for woodland caribou habitat to be considered a “value at risk.” They succeeded in 2015.

Under Alberta Wildfire’s priorities for allocating firefighting resources, “critical wildlife habitat” is included in “natural resources,” to be prioritized after human life, communities, and watersheds and sensitive soils, Josée St-Onge, an information officer with Alberta Wildfire, confirmed with the Narwhal. 

A fire-ravaged slope in B.C. Firefighting resources are allocated based on an assessment of what to prioritize for protection. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

“If firefighting resources are limited and the choice is between [fighting] a fire threatening a community or another fire threatening caribou habitat — the choice is obvious,” my dad says. “But at least we got caribou habitat defined as a discussion point.”

Protecting woodland caribou also protects a diversity of other fauna and flora species that favour older forests, including pine marten and boreal chickadees.

“It’s not just caribou, it’s the whole ecosystem,” Laura Finnegan says. She leads the caribou program at fRI Research, based in Hinton, Alta. Several large fires in 2023 swept through the caribou habitat where Finnegan and her colleagues conduct their research in the province. She tells me her team was alarmed by the “unexpected” size and intensity of the wildfires. Moving forward, she says it’s an important conversation to have as a society.

Wildfire fighters simply cannot put out every fire that lights in the forest. There are too many, they are too remote or, in some cases, the landscape would be better off letting it burn. But a fire-ravaged landscape can also pose challenges for some wildlife. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

“It’s a question that could extend beyond caribou,” Finnegan says. “How do we account for climate change and these larger events, whether it’s wildfires, rain, snow or flooding, in management plans and conservation efforts?”

Government recovery efforts fail to adequately plan for wildfire — and caribou are running out of time

When it comes to planning for caribou recovery efforts in the province, environmental critics say the government of Alberta has failed to account for wildfire disturbance. In 2020, the provincial government signed an agreement with the federal government to create what are known as sub-regional land-use plans. These plans would enable the co-ordination of industrial activities with caribou habitat, along with restoration. So far, two of 11 eventual plans have been released, and none have been implemented.

“In the two caribou recovery plans that have been released, including the Cold Lake and Bistcho Lake sub-regional plans, there is no provision to respond to catastrophic natural disaster, or natural disturbances like wildfire,” Tara Russell, program director at the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society’s Northern Alberta chapter, says.

Without accounting for these disturbances, the plans likely overestimate how much habitat can be recovered for caribou within a 100-year time frame. It also poses a risk of over allowing industrial development, she says.

The federal Species At Risk Act states 65 per cent undisturbed forest in a caribou range offers a 60 per cent chance of a herd maintaining a self-sustaining status, meaning it can survive without conservation efforts. There are no self-sustaining herds of caribou remaining in Alberta. Photo: Supplied by Trina Moyles

In the current Bistcho Lake plan, if the total area of natural disturbance within the caribou range exceeds one per cent, it would trigger a plan review. But the 2023 wildfires impacted eight per cent of the Bistcho Lake caribou herd’s habitat. That should necessitate a review, Russell says, even though the plan hasn’t yet been implemented. 

Critics argue Alberta’s recovery efforts have been delayed and bureaucratic; it’s time caribou simply do not have. The Alberta government is years behind on meeting its obligations to protect caribou, Russell says. 

An image captured by a trail shows a caribou from the Bistcho herd walking through a forest that burned eight years ago. “This is the only caribou we found at this site over three years,” Ryan Cheng with the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society says, noting woodland caribou avoid burnt areas. Photo: Supplied by the northern Alberta chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society and Dene Tha’ First Nation

“The agreement is up for renewal in 2025 and yet they’ve barely met the commitments laid out in 2021,” she adds.

In January, the Alberta government released its first report — three years late — on caribou recovery efforts. It found virtually no progress has been made to reduce human disturbance and habitat loss in caribou ranges. Human activity increased in 23 out of 28 caribou subranges from 2018 to 2021. Restoration efforts have barely scraped the surface. Of the 250,000 kilometres of seismic lines that carve up caribou ranges in Alberta, by the end of 2021 only 139 kilometres had been restored.

An Alberta government report released earlier this year found virtually no progress has been made to reduce human disturbance and habitat loss in caribou ranges. Photo: Ryan Dickie / The Narwhal

Boutin says Alberta has historically favoured predator control — culling wolves to reduce the pressure on caribou — over other means of caribou recovery, including the restoration of seismic lines, or investing in maternal penning programs. 

“The data is pretty darn strong,” he says. “If you want to keep caribou around and are willing to kill wolves to do it — you can, in fact, do it.”

He’s referring to a study published in April 2024 that found wolf control increased the abundance of southern mountain caribou by 52 per cent compared to a range without intervention. The authors argue that without wolf control, caribou subpopulations will continue to be extirpated before habitat conservation can become effective.

But the wolf cull has been hugely controversial across Canada. Other researchers, including Chris Darimont, a conservation scientist at the University of Victoria, have accused governments of using predator control instead of actually limiting, or halting industrial development — logging and oil and gas — in caribou habitat.

Many forests in Alberta are primed to burn with drought conditions, poor management policies and insect infestations all playing a role. Environmental critics say the government of Alberta has failed to account for wildfire disturbance to caribou habitat. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

“It’s a very tough, tough decision that has to be made by society,” Boutin says. “If we want to conserve caribou, do we want to do it at the price of ongoing wolf control?”

Indigenous communities fear for the future of woodland caribou

If we lose caribou in Alberta, Indigenous communities — people who’ve lived closely with caribou, hunting them, subsisting off their meat, using their hides for clothing and weaving them into their identity and worldview — will have the most to lose.

“I’m told [by Elders] that if you hunted a caribou in the fall or early winter, their bones made the best hide scrapers because they were so firm,” Stephanie Leonard, environmental coordinator for the Aseniwuche Winewak Nation, says.

“There was a lot of use for the caribou.”

Members of the Aseniwuche Winewak Nation identify as Cree, Stoney, Iroquois, Beaver, Shuswap and Saulteaux and live in seven communities north and south of Grande Cache, Alberta. Their traditional lands encompass several caribou ranges, including the Little Smoky, a range that’s experienced habitat disturbance of 96 per cent, due to logging and oil and gas.

Oil and gas activity across Alberta has significantly impacted wildlife habitat. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

In 2012, the nation founded Caribou Patrol, an Indigenous-led stewardship program to promote caribou conservation within their traditional territory. In response to the high number of caribou killed by vehicle traffic along Highway 40 — considered one of the “deadliest highways” for caribou in Alberta — they patrol the roads during the caribou’s seasonal migration in spring and fall and record caribou sightings made by the public. 

Caribou sightings dropped in 2023, Leonard says, likely a result of the thick smoke that descended from large-scale wildfires burning in the vicinity, obscuring visibility.

“I think there were less people out and about because it was so smoky,” she says. “It was less the fires and more the smoke. It was hard for us to breathe. We could hide in our buildings with our filtered air, but wildlife can’t do that.”

She says people are concerned about the increasingly devastating impact of wildfires on communities. Elders aren’t able to be out on the land, practicing their traditional culture, due to health risks posed by wildfire smoke. She’s also worried about caribou habitat. 

“There’s so little good caribou habitat left, there’s a worry that if it burns, where are the caribou going to go? Is that going to be the end?”

The 2023 wildfires decimated 5.5 per cent of the Little Smoky caribou range. Environmental organizations, including the Alberta Wilderness Association, the Northern Alberta chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society and the Pembina Institute have continually called on the Alberta government to release the Berland and Upper Smoky sub regional plans, for herds located between Grande Prairie and Grande Cache. Both plans are overdue, but so far, it’s still “coming soon”, Russell says.

In the meantime, “to see caribou declining, it’s like losing a part of your world,” Leonard says.

The survival of woodland caribou in Alberta requires political will

In 2017, I joined my father on one of his final flights over the boreal forest as a biologist. We flew north of Peace River and listened for the signal of the radio collars worn by females. 

The author’s father on one his final flights over the boreal forest as a biologist, listening to the telemetry pulse of the radio collars worn by adult female caribou. Photo: Supplied by Trina Moyles

The plane soared over farmland, cutblocks, well sites, roads, cut lines and the misshapen scars of old burns. We were searching for the Deadwood caribou, a herd that is barely hanging on, my father tells me. The signal pulsed stronger — like a heart beat — and we discovered them hiding in the deep snow in a tightly knit stand of lodgepole pine. At the sound of the helicopter, the caribou fled onto a frozen body of water, grey ghosts not running, but flying across the lake.

Without intervention, most scientists agree the future looks bleak for many caribou subpopulations in Alberta. 

Research indicates that female woodland caribou actively avoid areas burnt by wildfire, particularly in May when they calve. Calves today are facing severe mortality rates due to the increased abundance of predators, including wolves and bears, on the landscape. Photo: Supplied by Trina Moyles

There may be hope left for caribou subpopulations in Alberta’s far north, my father says, including herds in the Bistcho Lake and Caribou Mountains ranges, but only with political will: limiting industrial development, restoring disturbances and building wildfire into the equation. 

“Their days are numbered,” my father solemnly tells me of the Deadwood herd. “It could take decades, but they’ll eventually blink out.”

My father’s words make me think of a star exploding in the night sky. We’ve reached a tipping point with caribou — one of the few animals to survive the Ice Age and the Holocene. They’ve been here so long and yet they could so suddenly — in a relative blink — disappear. 

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

In June, wildfire smoke originating in Quebec descended upon the eastern United States, turning skies orange and creating dangerous air quality for millions of people. The smoke has since lightened in most of the United States. But up north, the situation remains dire across Canada’s boreal forests.

Late last week, 498 fires blazed across the country. Tens of thousands of people have evacuated since late April. And less than halfway into wildfire season, a whopping 8.1 million hectares have already burned; on average only around 330,000 hectares typically burn by mid-June. By the end of the month, more hectares had burned than during any other fire season on record.

Fire in nature isn’t necessarily bad. Canada’s boreal forests are built to burn. Tree species like jack pine and lodgepole pine need fire to unlock their cones’ seeds. But this year has the perfect conditions — increased thunderstorm activity, drought in the western boreal forest and a record-setting “heat dome” — for noxious and destructive fires of a different caliber.

This kind of combustible situation is becoming more common as the planet warms. “There’s pretty clear evidence at this point that the frequency and the size of the fires have really gotten a lot bigger,” says avian ecologist Jeff Wells, vice president for boreal conservation at the U.S.-based National Audubon Society. “That’s clearly related to climate change.”

Wildfire seasons, which usually last from May to September, are also starting earlier and ending later. “We’re seeing fires in October,” says Steven Nitah, former Chief of the Łutsël K’é Dene First Nation in the Northwest Territories who now works at the non-profit Nature for Justice. “That’s unheard of.”

The unprecedented size and intensity of these fires disrupt life for people and wildlife, including birds. Recently billions of birds have migrated north from as far as the tip of South America to nest and raise young in Canada’s boreal forest. So, it’s only natural to ask: What is the fires’ impact on avian life there?

Small, patchy fires are good for bird habitats, but big, hot fires stunt regeneration

To a certain extent, birds are accustomed to wildfire. “These birds have lived alongside fire for a really long time, to the point where fire offers many benefits to birds,” says Andrew Stillman, a conservation ecologist who studies fire impacts on birds at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Relatively small and patchy fires help foster a diversity of forest habitats that exist side by side like a mosaic, each habitat home to its own species. Birds like blackburnian warblers thrive in old-growth forests, while white-throated sparrows populate the shrubland that sprouts after a fire. Black-backed woodpeckers prefer to hammer nests into burned trees. 

But as fires burn bigger, hotter and more frequently, decimated habitat doesn’t have time to regenerate before burning again, erasing the mosaic of open space, shrubs and century-old trees. Birds that prefer mature forest are pushed out. Even fire-loving birds suffer from intense burning: Stillman has found that young black-backed woodpeckers in the western United States are less likely to survive after giant fires because they have nowhere to hide from predators.

Black-backed woodpeckers prefer to hammer nests into burned trees. But even fire-loving birds suffer from intense burning: young black-backed woodpeckers in the western United States are less likely to survive after giant fires because they have nowhere to hide from predators. Photo: Jim Rivers, Oregon State University / Flickr

Birds are also at direct risk from raging wildfires, though the risk varies by season. In fall, after any new young have learned to fly, birds can move out of the way, Stillman says. But if fire strikes during nesting season, parents must make difficult decisions. They might stay in a dangerous area if they have nestlings. If they choose to abandon their brood, they will have to fly to an unfamiliar area to try nesting again — which is a risky move, too, when they don’t know where food or predators are. “There’s a lot of things that go into that calculus of moving versus staying,” says Oregon State University ecological physiologist Jamie Cornelius, who studies how birds adapt to unpredictable environmental changes like fire. 

If they choose to move, their options are limited by the huge swaths of land that are currently inhabitable. “If a fire encompasses millions of acres, then there are millions of birds impacted,” Wells wrote in an email. Inevitably many birds and nests will succumb to the flames. But boreal birds tend to have wide ranges, so he doesn’t expect these fires to push any species toward extinction. And many species breed later in the season, some starting as late as August, so their nests may not be affected by current fires.

In fact, migrating birds are still arriving up north after long journeys from their wintering sites. As fires burned in Quebec, Wells heard blackpoll warblers and Swainson’s thrushes flying overhead in Maine on their way from South America. “They’re arriving to see the fires and you imagine their response is to try to go somewhere else,” Wells says. Where the birds will go is anyone’s guess.  

Effects of smoke on bird health isn’t well understood

Beyond the fires lies a more insidious threat: smoke.

“Smoke is a messy soup of toxins,” says Olivia Sanderfoot, an ecologist who studies the impacts of wildfire smoke on birds at University of California, Los Angeles. “Those all have different health impacts.”

The risk that smoke poses to humans, and to birds, depends somewhat on distance. Toxic gases such as carbon monoxide pose a direct risk to firefighters on the front lines. But smoke’s primary hazards are particles smaller than a strand of hair, which can be carried for thousands of miles. Because of their tiny size they can be absorbed directly into people’s bloodstream and, with exposure over time, lead to health problems, including cancer and cardiovascular diseases. Particulate matter, commonly released from fossil fuels, is estimated to be responsible for 4.2 million premature deaths every year.

As fires burned in Quebec this spring, avian ecologist Jeff Wells heard blackpoll warblers and Swainson’s thrushes flying overhead in Maine on their way from South America. “They’re arriving to see the fires and you imagine their response is to try to go somewhere else,” Wells says. Photo: Société de protection des forêts contre le feu

The extent to which smoke affects birds’ health isn’t as well understood. The health effects may mirror what we see in people, Sanderfoot says — and they certainly manifest more quickly. Bird lungs are not like human lungs: They are rigid, with several balloon-like air sacs facilitating airflow that travels only one way, so that birds take in air on both the inhale and exhale of a breath. This constant flow of fresh air pulls in roughly twice as much oxygen as human lungs, enabling birds to fly in oxygen-poor air at high altitudes. But it also makes them more susceptible to air pollution. Indeed, the idiom “canary in the coal mine” comes from the real-world use of canaries in mines to signal high levels of carbon monoxide because the birds are extra sensitive to poisonous gas.

That’s why in 2020, when Willamette Valley in Oregon filled with smoke from nearby fires, Cornelius worried about the birds. “Everybody disappeared inside,” she says. “And I’m like, ‘Man, the birds are still out there doing whatever they’ve got to do.’” To better understand what was happening to them, last summer she sought out bad smoke conditions in the Oregon woods and sampled blood from juvenile red crossbills living there. She found that the birds’ immune systems were kicked into high gear, presumably to fight inflammation or other damage from the smoke. And the birds were smaller in size than normal for their age — perhaps due to reduced foraging or other behaviour changes in response to smoke.

Studies show geese flying ‘disorganized paths’ to dodge smoke in 2020

It’s even harder to study how birds change their behaviour. In 2020 researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey got lucky when four migrating tule geese wearing GPS trackers for an unrelated study encountered a dense plume over Washington. The birds flew in disorganized paths, occasionally climbing to altitudes over 13,000 feet to dodge smoke. Three of the tracked birds took a rest stop in the Pacific Ocean for a few days, as if waiting for the worst to pass. One goose ended up in Idaho, where tule geese had never been observed before. Though a small sample size, the smoggy skies seemed to cause the geese to engage in unusual behaviours.

For a deeper look at how birds respond to smoke, in the fall Cornelius will track American robins to see if birds living in fire-dependent forests behave differently than those that are not adapted to fire. She’s also following smaller birds like chickadees and finches on foot to measure whether birds that hunt insects in the air — exposing them to more smoke — are more affected than ground-foraging birds. 

“On a comparative level, what makes a bird more exposed?” she wonders. “And what makes them more or less flexible to be able to change things and reduce their exposure if they are in a smoky area?”

The unknowns outweigh the knowns and experts have a long list of questions to work on now. The answers are growing only more urgent as wildfires become more regular and intense, given the hotter, drier conditions on a warmer planet.

In addition to reducing carbon emissions to address climate change, experts say the best way to help birds is to protect as much remaining habitat as possible. Many areas that have high biodiversity or high carbon storage have been mapped out — for example, within the 10,000 square-mile Thaidene Nëné, an Indigenous protected area in the Northwest Territories. Sites with high ecological value should be prioritized by fire responders in the same way that people and property threats are prioritized during a fire emergency, says Nitah, who was the Łutsël K’é Dene First Nation’s lead negotiator during a new national park’s creation in the area. 

Of course, the forest needs some fire. Indigenous people have burned land through a practice called “cultural burning” for generations, shaping the mosaic of the boreal. This sort of fire management could help reduce the intensity of the fires and protect at-risk habitat. It’s going to take both old and new ways of living with fire to help all of us weather the blazes to come.

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This story was updated on June 4, 2025

2023 was a record year for Canadian wildfires. At times, it felt like the whole country was burning. 2024 was better, but still devastating and many Canadians face a new reality: the seemingly never-ending possibility of a summer choked with smoke and flames. 

Wildfires consumed record-breaking chunks of the country in 2023, thanks to a dry, hot spring. Choking smoke, increasingly common in Western Canada during fire season, blanketed more populous eastern cities and led to more coverage and concern for what’s happening when it comes to Canada’s wildfires. 

Hot conditions, lightning, human carelessness and forests left cluttered and itching for rebirth have all contributed to the infernos. 

The 2025 wildfire season has already been devastating for many communities, with both Manitoba and Saskatchewan declaring states of emergency in May on account of wildfires. Increased wildfire activity is a pattern the country is likely to see repeated in the coming decades. Temperatures are expected to rise with climate change. Precipitation is expected to be erratic. Disease and pests are killing or weakening trees and forests are continuously managed for industry, homes and infrastructure, a practice that has made forests more flammable.

Here’s a breakdown of how fires start and why they seem to be getting worse. 

What starts wildfires?

Typically, nearly half of all wildfires in Canada are caused by lightning strikes, but that can vary from region to region and from month to month. 

The B.C. government says the majority of wildfires each year are caused by lightning, while in Alberta, the majority are caused by humans — including from off-road vehicles, campfires, fireworks, ammunition, industrial activity, agriculture, power lines and some arson. Some years it’s not even close. In 2020, 88 per cent of wildfires in Alberta were caused by humans. Between 2017 and 2022, on average 68 per cent of wildfires were human caused in Alberta. 

The wildfire that ripped through Fort McMurray in northern Alberta in 2016 decimated the city and sent citizens fleeing. The cause of the fire is still not known, but it was likely human. Photo: Chris Schwarz / Government of Alberta

The National Forest Database shows between 1990 and 2020, 33 per cent of fires in Quebec were caused by lightning, while in Ontario the figure was 50 per cent.

But according to the federal government, fires that start from lightning do the most damage, accounting for 67 per cent of land burned. Lightning-caused fires tend to occur in remote areas and several fires can start at once during a storm. 

All of those flash points, like lightning, require a forest dry enough to burn. 

What caused 2023’s fires?

The great fires that swallowed large swaths of Canada early in 2023 started before lightning found its yearly footing and for a while there was an outsized number of mostly accidental, human-caused infernos. 

Ignition was driven by forests left parched by a dry spring and unseasonably hot temperatures across much of the country. Vast areas of Canada were experiencing drought conditions last spring, with some parts of Alberta classified as extreme. 

A snapshot in time of causes of wildfires in the early portion of the 2023 wildfire season, according to data from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. Humans cause plenty of wildfires, whether through industrial activities or recreation. Lightning accounts for nearly half of all fires that burn, but that depends on the region and the time of year. Graph: Shawn Parkinson / The Narwhal

As wildfires burned across the country, arson was a source of debate, driven by misinformation. In Alberta it took on new meaning when it was amplified by Premier Danielle Smith. Turning to conspiracy in the face of anxiety is not an uncommon reaction when faced with the psychological impact of all-consuming smoke.

But the facts didn’t support the claims.

When The Narwhal asked the RCMP in Alberta about arson last June, a spokesperson said it was investigating 12 suspicious fires at that time, but stressed that didn’t mean those were arson.

In 2024, the drought continued across the Prairies, and that meant another brutal fire season, albeit subdued compared to the previous year. Approximately five million hectares burned across Canada in 2024, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre — less than a third of the previous year’s total. 

So far in 2025, the season is staying close to the 10-year average for the number of fires, although that doesn’t factor in the size and force of an individual fire. In terms of area burned, 2025 is slightly less than the previous year as of the end of May. 

Conditions vary across the country, with B.C. facing less extreme conditions compared to the past two years, but the risks increase east into Saskatchewan. Nearly the entire province faces extreme fire risk this spring, according to Natural Resources Canada. 

What about forest management?

Canada’s forests aren’t what they used to be. 

Decades of forestry and forest management have altered natural cycles and natural growth. An analysis of annual data from the federal government shows more than 930,000 hectares of forest were logged on average in Canada between 1990 and 2020 — that’s just over 1.5 times larger than the Greater Toronto Area. 

Historically, the boreal forest, which stretches across Canada, would burn periodically, with species, including black spruce and lodgepole pine, dependent on fire for regeneration. The commercial value of trees for timber changed priorities.

Although there has been a shift towards recognizing the ecological importance of fire, governments have invested heavily in fighting fires before they can spread, in part to protect valuable trees destined to be logged. 

The federal government says the cost to fight fires over the past decade have ranged between $800 million and $1.5 billion each year.

When fires threaten homes, infrastructure, oil and gas installations and harvest areas for logging companies, firefighters sweep in to do battle — either fully committed to putting out the flames or letting parts of it burn while managing others. 

Logging north of Revelstoke, B.C. Protecting forest resources for timber companies disrupts the natural fire cycle and can lead to a buildup of wood and debris for fuel. Photo: Eddie Petryshen / Wildsight

Across Canada, fire agencies assess fires on a case-by-case basis while recognizing the ecological role of fire and the high costs of fighting them. 

“High-priority areas for protection include residential areas, high-value commercial forests and recreational sites,” according to Natural Resources Canada. “Low-priority sites are generally wilderness parks and remote forests of limited economic value — although protection of rare habitat, culturally significant areas and similar values will influence suppression decisions.”

The consequences can be a buildup of fuel — the accumulation of deadfall, dense brush and more — that allows fires to burn bigger and stronger when lightning (or a careless human) strikes. 

Decades of putting out fires has led to a “fire paradox” and makes fighting fires in the future more difficult, according to a 2019 paper examining Canada’s wildfire management. 

In other words, the more you protect a forest from fire, the more likely it is to eventually burn.

Approximately 60 per cent of Canada’s 3.47 million square kilometres of forests are “covered by a management plan that includes production, conservation or other uses,” according to a 2017 Statistics Canada report. 

Proponents of logging, often clearcut, argue the practice aims to mimic the sweep of a wildfire, clearing the land in order to help it rejuvenate, but those practices don’t necessarily achieve their ends — fire-dependent species like lodgepole pine rely on heat and research suggests logging doesn’t reproduce the “large numbers of small disturbances and the small number of extremely large disturbances created by wildfires.” Research has suggested logged areas of the boreal forest are more susceptible to fires in the decade after harvesting, while areas that were burned are not. 

How bad was the 2023 wildfire season?

In short, it was bad.

There were 7,131 fires according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. But it’s not just the number of fires, which can range from small outbursts of flame to enormous conflagrations, that matters. 

17,203,625 hectares — an area roughly the size of North Dakota — burned, the largest burned area on record by more than double.

The areas of Canada burned, by hectare, between 1983 and 2023. It’s just one way to measure the impact of the 2023 fire season, which shattered records. Graphic: Shawn Parkinson / The Narwhal

That’s not to say there haven’t been bad years, but 2023 was the worst in recorded history. Since 1990, according to the federal government, fires have burned an average of 2.5 million hectares each year.

In 2023, approximately seven times that average burned. 

It also far exceeded the past record.

The caveat is that location matters. When fires burn in the wilderness, away from infrastructure, homes and industry, they are often left to their own devices. That can impact the number of hectares consumed.

Is climate change to blame?

Weather is a big factor in how many fires are lit and how fast they grow. Hot and dry weather means forests are ready to burn and burn fast. This year’s weather is an example. 

Models show climate change is having an impact. 

Between 1948 and 2022, annual average temperatures have increased 1.9 C, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada.

“Nine of the 10 warmest years have occurred during the last 25 years, with 2010 being the warmest on record (3.0 C above the 1961 to 1990 reference value),” according to the department.

It isn’t arson: untangling climate misinformation around Canada’s raging wildfires

At the same time, annual average precipitation in the form of snow, rain and all the other wet-sky stuff increased between 1948 and 2012 and that trend is expected to continue. Ultimately, the impacts will vary by region, time of year and whether and to what extent carbon pollution is curtailed. 

That might sound good for combatting wildfires, but projections also anticipate a feast-or-famine scenario, with extreme amounts of precipitation in short periods combined with dry spells. That can lead to both flooding and droughts. 

The changes in climate are also putting strain on forests with increased disease and infestation from mountain pine beetles and other pests. According to data from Statistics Canada, in 2020, nearly 18 million hectares of forest was stripped of its greenery or contained dead-standing trees, courtesy of bug infestations. The result is more fuel for fires. The Canadian Wildland Fire Strategy, last updated in 2016, warns things are likely to get worse. 

“Wildland fires caused by lightning and humans are predicted to increase 18 per cent by 2050 and 50 per cent by 2100,” it warns. “The growth of the wildland-urban interface, expanding industrial development and consequential results of climate change are compounding factors of this projection.”

Updated on June 5, 2024, at 10:44 a.m. MT: This story has been updated to include data from the rest of the 2023 wildfire season.

Updated on June 4, 2025, at 2:44 p.m. MT: This story has been updated to include data from the 2024 wildfire season.

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It was the biggest black spruce tree Eric Reder had ever seen. It measured 57 centimetres in diameter — more than double the average for the usually narrow conifer — and towered above the other spruces dotting the Duck Mountain forest, some of which is protected by the Government of Manitoba as a provincial park.

“As far as I can tell, this is the biggest black spruce we have recorded in the province,” Reder, a campaign leader for the Wilderness Committee, recalls.

“And it’s in a logging area.”

Reder stumbled upon the record-breaking spruce last summer at the edge of a logging site inside the boundaries of western Manitoba’s Duck Mountain Provincial Park, home to some of Manitoba’s oldest forests — and one of just two parks in Canada still subject to commercial forestry.

The Duck Mountain forest in western Manitoba boasts a distinct ecoregion where wetlands, old forests and many species of flora and fauna meet at the province’s highest elevation. A provincial park within that forest has a combination of protected areas, recreational areas and areas designated for industrial activity like logging. Photo: Eric Reder / Wilderness Committee

Over 11 days in 2021 and 2022, Reder surveyed the forests within the park and surrounding Duck Mountain region to assess the impacts of ongoing logging on the unique ecodistrict of the Ducks. His findings — including biodiversity loss, violations of provincial forestry rules and decimation of the park’s recreation trails — were released in a Wilderness Committee audit this week.

As Louisiana-Pacific, the Tennessee-based company that holds logging rights and operates a timber mill in the region, seeks provincial approval for its new 20-year forest management plan and the rights to keep logging the forests, Reder and the Wilderness Committee are hoping to protect the region’s biodiversity and put a stop to park logging for good.

Field study reveals logging in Manitoba’s Duck Mountain breaking provincial rules, threatening diverse ecosystem

In the summer of 2022, Reder packed cameras, drones, cooking equipment and solar panels into an old touring van, then set out for a seven-day field excursion in the nearly 5,000-square-kilometre Duck Mountain ecodistrict, about five hours northwest of Winnipeg. He hiked more than 40 kilometres through the bogs, wetlands, forests and bush; he spoke to local residents and farmers; he visited dozens of clearcuts and logging roads in the provincial park and surrounding region.

When he got home, Reder set up a two-metre whiteboard and began listing his concerns. By the time he finished, the whiteboard was full.

“The entire region is now sliced up by all-season logging roads, including virtually all portions of Duck Mountain Provincial Park,” Reder says. “It’s just astonishing to imagine that we’ve allowed this to happen to a provincial park.”

Eric Reder has campaigned against commercial forestry in Manitoba parks since 2006, overseeing the efforts that led Manitoba to ban logging at 12 of 13 provincial parks. Photo: Ruth Bonneville / Winnipeg Free Press

He found fields covered in piles of woody debris (a violation of Manitoba’s forest use regulations) and clearcuts that edged too close to wetlands and waterways. According to Reder, he found trees felled by the wind after their neighbours were clear-cut away, missing barricades, washed out culverts and overly wide access roads that damaged park trails. Virtually every section of the Ducks, barring a small northern stretch of forest that’s slated for logging next year, has been cross-hatched by logging access roads and clear-cut fields littered with felled trees, Reder says.

“There’s so much waste, there’s so many trees that should never have been knocked down,” Reder says in an interview after a press conference for the audit’s release. “We’re caring for our provincial park as a wood fibre lot — as a tree plantation.”

Forestry waste — including large dead trees that should have remained standing as wildlife habitats — litter a logging area in the Duck Mountain region in summer 2022. Photo: Eric Reder / Wilderness Committee

The company is currently allowed to harvest 350,000 cubic metres of lumber from the Duck Mountain region every year — the equivalent of about 500,000 average-sized mature aspen or black spruce trees. They’re also required to re-plant at least 80 per cent of what they harvest. (Louisiana-Pacific were not able to respond to a request for comment by publication time.)

The Wilderness Committee audit lists 41 concerns and several recommendations to better protect the ecodistrict by expanding the existing Duck Mountain protected area (a 500-square-kilometre backcountry zone where development is barred), enforcing logging rules and putting an end to commercial forestry inside the boundaries of the provincial park.

“This isn’t about stopping logging,” Reder says. “It’s about putting areas aside that shouldn’t be impacted by logging and making sure the logging has a minimal impact.”

Louisiana-Pacific logging licence in Duck Mountain extended for decades without review

Reder cut his teeth in environmental advocacy with a campaign to ban logging in Manitoba’s provincial parks. The very first Wilderness Committee campaign rallied 23,000 Manitobans to write to their government and oppose park logging between 2007 and 2008, backed by a 1992 provincial clean environment commission decision that recommended phasing out logging and commercial forestry in parks. Thanks to that “swell of support,” Reder says, the Manitoba government banned logging in 12 of its 13 provincial parks by 2009.

Duck Mountain was the only exception.

“It was socioeconomic. [The government] said it was about not being able to remove that much wood fibre from the mill’s supply,” Reder recalls.

By that point, Louisiana-Pacific had been logging the Ducks for a little over a decade. Their original forest management plan — a long-term guiding document required for a forestry licence — had expired in 2006, and a new one was expected that same year.

Louisiana-Pacific didn’t submit the new plan until the end of 2019, and it still hasn’t received final approval from the provincial government.

Louisiana-Pacific and other permitted loggers have been operating in the Duck Mountain region since 1996. The company is now working through the provincial environmental act licensing process to get approval for a new, 20-year forest management plan. Photo: Eric Reder / Wilderness Committee

In the interim, the company’s logging licence was extended three times, most recently until March 2024, despite the missing management plan and allegations the province had failed to consult the five First Nations within the logging area as required for licence extensions. Two Nations, the Minegoziibe Anishinabe (also known as Pine Creek First Nation) and Wuskwi Sipihk First Nation have filed lawsuits to that effect. (Wuwski Siphihk First Nation declined to comment for this story. Minegoziibe Anishinabe was unable to respond to an interview request by publication time.)

A spokesperson for the minister of natural resources said in an email the company’s licence has been extended on a “short-term basis” to support ongoing consultations with Indigenous Peoples and “keep more than 500 people working.”

Dan Soprovich tried to blow the whistle on issues he saw in Louisiana-Pacific’s first forest management plan decades ago, saying the company planned to chop far more wood than the forest could support. Today, he says, Manitoba’s conservation department is too understaffed to properly review the new forest plan. Photo: Ruth Bonneville / Winnipeg Free Press

To those who have followed these logging activities since the beginning, the lack of provincial attention on the forests of the Duck Mountain region are a significant oversight.

“This is the biological study equivalent of a huge, irredeemable mess,” says Dan Soprovich, a wildlife ecologist who formerly worked for Manitoba’s Natural Resources Ministry and helped present the Wilderness Committee audit this week.

“It cries out for the need for independent assessment. Not company assessment, not their consultants and not the government.”

According to Soprovich, the province’s understaffed conservation branch lacks the scientific expertise and resources to make a good decision about forest management. As a result, he says, there’s been a lack of balance in how projects like the Louisiana-Pacific logging are assessed.

“They need to have scientists that are dedicated to the task, because they don’t have that now,” Soprovich says. “I saw the deterioration, the inability for the branch to be able to do its job. It’s in chaos.”

For its part, the provincial spokesperson said “there are well-established policies and procedures to review and permit activities within provincial parks,” adding harvests “must adhere to strict provincial standards and are monitored.”

The spokesperson was unable to confirm how frequently conservation staff conduct inspections or other monitoring activities.

Biodiversity protection should be prioritized in Duck Mountain, advocates say

The forests in the Duck Mountain region provide habitat for a variety of species; there are fish in the waterways and rare birds in the skies. Notably, the region is home to a dwindling moose population.

While moose aren’t a protected species in Manitoba, the population in the Duck Mountain region saw such a severe decline in the late 2000s that moose hunts — including for First Nations and Métis hunters who have traditionally harvested in the region — were cancelled outright. The Manitoba Métis Federation resumed a limited number of Duck Mountain moose hunts in 2021 after going toe-to-toe with the province over harvesting rights. (The Manitoba Métis Federation was not able to provide a response by publication time.)

“The decline in the moose population parallels the establishment of industrial clear-cut logging by Louisiana-Pacific,” Reder says.

Reder explains that a decline in safe habitat caused by commercial forestry leaves moose vulnerable to predators like wolves.

Beyond the moose, Reder says several at-risk species that make their home in the Duck Mountain forests have been conspicuously absent from the company’s proposed forest management plans. Two species of endangered bats, the endangered red-headed woodpecker and other at-risk bird species live among the trees, yet none have been accounted for in the company’s new forest management plan, he says. If they are not addressed, the company could be in violation of the federal Species At Risk Act, the audit notes.

Nearly every logging road Eric Reder hiked during his trips to Duck Mountain Provincial Park showed signs of moose and wolves. The large roads and logging operations have eroded moose habitat, he says, leaving them more vulnerable to predators. Photo: Eric Reder / Wilderness Committee

To Soprovich, the values of wildlife, of biodiversity and of old forests haven’t been given nearly the same weight as the economic value of the forestry industry.

“It’s focused too much on fibre economic return and not enough on all the other values,” he says.

As climate change leads to more severe and frequent events like forest fires, Soprovich suggests the value of maintaining and protecting old forests — and the biodiversity they support — becomes all the more important.

Canada has joined countries around the world in committing to protecting 30 per cent of lands and waters by 2030 to better support and protect biodiversity. While industrial activity is barred from about 10 per cent of Duck Mountain Provincial Park, reaching 30 per cent protection, the audit notes, would mean keeping another 1,000 square kilometres of park land free of industrial activity.

“We need to find balance,” Soprovich says.

While that balance could come in the form of expanded protected areas, Reder and the Wilderness Committee believe the time has come to listen to decades of advice and put an end to logging in Manitoba’s parks.

“We have the public, we have the government and we have the highest environmental voice in the land saying we need to end this,” Reder says.

“This region is in trouble and it needs to change.”

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Manitoba’s herd of iconic boreal woodland caribou are one step closer to having their population — and habitat — protected. This week, the federal and provincial governments signed an agreement re-affirming their commitment to protecting and recovering the threatened and declining population.

“Our boreal caribou populations have been in decline across the country. It’s an iconic species, it’s on our 25-cent coin, it’s a symbol of the Canadian wilderness and according to estimates there are between 1,500 and 3,500 left in Manitoba,” Terry Duguid, Winnipeg member of parliament and parliamentary secretary to the minister of environment and climate change, said in an interview.

“Obviously here’s a need for action to ensure this species has a future in our province and our country.”

Conservation advocates say a plan for the protection of boreal woodland caribou is long overdue from the Manitoba government. Photo: Manitoba Conservation and Water Stewardship

Woodland caribou — cousins of the European reindeer — make their home in the boreal forests of nine provinces and territories, from Yukon to Newfoundland, but the animal’s habitat is continually lost to development. Caribou are known to avoid human activity, and require large swaths of undisturbed forest to find food and avoid predation. Because of their sensitivity to the landscape, boreal caribou can serve as an indicator of forest health. 

The boreal caribou have been listed as threatened under the federal Species At Risk Act since 2003, while the province designated the local population as threatened in 2006. Both governments acknowledged the degradation, fragmentation and loss of caribou habitat owing to industrial activities, road development, wildfires and other human land uses have been the greatest threat to caribou populations. Shrinking habitat has left the species increasingly vulnerable to predators.

Degradation, fragmentation and loss of caribou habitat owing to industrial activities, road development, wildfires and other human land uses have been the greatest threat to woodland caribou populations. Map: Manitoba government

“This species is particularly sensitive to industrial activity and disturbance,” Duguid said. “Habitat really is the key to ensuring boreal caribou have a future in our province.”

Agreement follows years of provincial delay on woodland caribou management plans

The three-year agreement inked Wednesday culminates several years of advocacy and groundwork from conservation groups and government alike. According to conservation advocates, a formal plan for caribou protection in Manitoba is long overdue. 

“As action plans for recovering high-risk caribou populations were initially due for completion in 2009, it’s great to see new energy and investment in protecting this threatened wilderness icon,” Ron Thiessen, executive director of the Manitoba chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, said in an emailed statement. 

Manitoba has been working towards effective caribou management for decades, starting with a recovery strategy first released in 2006 and updated in 2015. The latter strategy delineated 15 caribou ranges within nine management zones and set a target to develop action plans for those management zones by 2020. The goals set out in the strategy were among the most ambitious in the country, Thiessen said, outlining a commitment to maintain between 65 and 80 per cent of intact caribou habitat within the management zones. 

But those action plans never came. In the meantime, according to Natural Resources and Northern Development Minister Greg Nesbitt, the Manitoba government has been collaring, tracking and monitoring the caribou herd.

“We’ve certainly been monitoring our caribou and trying to get a handle on the population,” Nesbitt said in an interview. “They’re very mobile, they move around, they’re hard to survey.”

The new bilateral agreement, Duguid said, is meant to hold governments accountable to caribou conservation. Habitat protection, herd monitoring, data collection and other on-the-ground tasks will be carried out by provincial conservation officials, while the federal government plans to support those efforts through funding and knowledge sharing. 

“We will not only be relying on traditional science, but also on the Traditional Knowledge of [Indigenous] communities — and that’s going to help us particularly in the management of rangelands where caribou are found,” Terry Duguid, Winnipeg member of parliament and parliamentary secretary to the minister of environment and climate change, said in an interview. Photo: John Woods / Winnipeg Free Press

The federal government has already committed $1 million to support Manitoba’s habitat and herd management efforts, and has committed to further supporting Manitoba’s efforts in future years.

Nesbitt said the federal contribution will help support initiatives around habitat planning and protection, herd monitoring and predator monitoring, among other measures. 

Habitat conservation, Traditional Knowledge key to woodland caribou population recovery

According to Thiessen, government efforts will need to go beyond habitat and population monitoring to recover and maintain caribou populations. At present, the new agreement amounts to little more than a pledge of federal help in developing Manitoba’s long-overdue protection plans, Thiessen said, adding he hopes to see formal and aggressive action plans in place by 2025.

“Protection of large, intact landscapes is required as it’s the only measure proven to sustain woodland caribou populations,” he said.

“Time will tell if the plans lead to large protected areas where industrial activities and associated road networks do not occur.”

Nesbitt acknowledged the province has been promoting mineral exploration in the north in recent years, though he believes such exploration has minimal environmental impact and noted industrial developments need to consider wildlife and habitat impacts before permits can be issued. 

Still, formally designated conservation areas would allow governments to better regulate industrial activity on the land, while helping Canada move toward the biodiversity and conservation targets set at December’s COP15 biodiversity conference in Montreal, where Canada reaffirmed its commitment to protecting 25 per cent of its lands and waters by 2025, and 30 per cent by 2030. 

The Manitoba government designated the local population of boreal woodland caribou as threatened in 2006. Photo: Manitoba Conservation and Water Stewardship

“We need industrial activity, we need to protect our wildlife and ecosystems,” Duguid said. “We are a big country — we can do both.”

Both federal and provincial governments plan to develop management plans alongside Indigenous communities who “live among the caribou and have a spiritual connection that goes back in time thousands of years,” Duguid said.

“We will not only be relying on traditional science, but also on the Traditional Knowledge of these communities — and that’s going to help us particularly in the management of rangelands where caribou are found,” Duguid added.

A provincial consultation department has been engaging Indigenous communities on wildlife management for many years, Nesbitt confirmed.

Across Canada, governments are increasingly looking to First Nations for Traditional Knowledge and input on caribou protection. “Since time immemorial, First Nations have searched out caribou for sustenance and nutrition,” read a joint report by the Assembly of First Nations and David Suzuki Foundation. “Across Canada today, boreal woodland caribou herds share the land with approximately 300 First Nation communities.”

“They are the experts on their traditional territory and we respect that and we want to work with them,” Deguid said.

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Angus Gardiner doesn’t remember summers being so hot, fires so big, caribou so sparse or walleye so abundant. 

Gardiner has lived his whole life in Île-à-la-Crosse, a small Métis settlement with a population of just over 1,000 people in northwest Saskatchewan. The community, known as Sakitawak in Cree, was first established by fur traders in 1776. Today, it’s an area where locals hope increased control of their land will help ease the pressures of a changing climate, industrial activity and what they see as the Saskatchewan government’s outdated approach to forestry and fishing in the region. 

Gardiner is a Métis Elder and this place he calls home — where he and his family have trapped, hunted and fished for generations — received three years worth of funding in 2019 from the federal government to explore the idea of establishing an Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area called Sakitawak. The protected area would cover what’s known as the N-14 fur block — a 22,000-square-kilometre area with Lac Île-à-la-Crosse at its centre — and could become the first Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area in Saskatchewan.

The fur block is blanketed by boreal forest and wetlands rich in peat — a key carbon sink — and is home to woodland caribou, moose, bears and more; it’s a breeding ground for great blue heron and osprey; and its waterways are filled with pickerel, jackfish and whitefish. 

But it is hemmed in and threatened by logging companies granted 20-year leases without community consultation by the provincial government — and it’s that same government which proponents of the protected area say is unreceptive to their plans and concerns.

In Sakitawak, 839 million tonnes of carbon is stored naturally

Indigenous protected areas first emerged in Canada from a model established in Clayoquot Sound on the West Coast. The concept is predicated on the idea that those who have lived on the land and protected it for generations are best suited to do so into the future. Indigenous-led conservation is also a key part of the federal government’s push to conserve 25 per cent of Canada’s lands and waters by 2025 while working toward protecting 30 per cent by 2030.

Sakitawak’s stated goal, like those of the 52 conservation areas either established or proposed across Canada, is to promote sustainable development while protecting Indigenous ways of life and Traditional Knowledge and while preserving habitats for vulnerable species.

Sakitawak hasn’t been designated as a conserved area just yet. It’s currently considered a preliminary work project, meaning the group behind it — the Sakitawak Conservation Area management team — is establishing a framework that could allow it to become a protected area over the next decade. 

The management team is composed of community members including the mayor, Métis representatives, fishers and trappers. 

The team behind the Sakitawak project are busy consulting community members and those from surrounding areas, as well as businesses and environmental groups, and establishing a governing framework that involves the community. The team is also actively surveying the natural wealth of the fur block and making the case for why it matters. 

“We’re trying to do our best to build that argument through data and science because the [Saskatchewan] government has refused to acknowledge Indigenous Traditional Knowledge,” Kelly Patrick, the director of the Sakitawak project, told The Narwhal 

According to their data, the land stores 839 million tonnes of atmospheric carbon — equivalent to the carbon pollution released from driving approximately 180 million cars for a year. 

Water is central to the lives of those who live in the N-14 Fur Block, a 22,000 square-kilometre area, where locals have trapped, hunted and fished for generations. Locals worry the area is under threat from forestry plans they say have forged ahead without adequate consultation. Photo: Jeremy Williams / River Voices Productions

The team has catalogued traditionally used plants including medicines such as muskeg, lichen and rat root, and berries such as strawberries and moose berries. They’ve identified over 100 traplines still in use. 

The area is home to white and black spruce and jackpine, some stretching to 200 years old, practically geriatric for the boreal forest. Just over half of the fur block is covered in wetlands thanks to the convergence of the Beaver, Churchill and Île-à-la-Crosse rivers.

Peter Durocher, manager of the Sakitawak project, said it’s critical to protect that habitat and worries industry in the area has already chased away many of the caribou. 

“I’ve been a trapper for the last 40 years in Île-à-la-Crosse. I have a trap line that’s about 130 kilometres long,” he said. “And I haven’t seen no caribou tracks on that trap line for eight years now.”

By late January, he said, cameras in the woods to the east of the community still hadn’t captured a caribou for at least seven months.

Durocher worries about logging old-growth trees and about wildfire burning out of control in the area, thanks in part to a government policy not to fight fires more than 20 kilometres from a community and to warmer, drier summers.

But Patrick said establishing the area is not only about keeping the forest intact. It’s also about allowing more control over resources like the fishery and ensuring “generational sustainability” for the people who call the area home.

Outdated Saskatchewan fishing quotas doing harm: locals

That generational sustainability includes balancing economic opportunities for those in the area with preservation, something the Métis know well. Fishing is a big part of the equation.

Durocher said forests need to be protected, not just for those increasingly elusive caribou who thrive on the lichen hanging from the oldest trees, but also for the water and the fish that call it home. He points to flash flooding and mudslides on treeless slopes in B.C. during torrential rains last summer and worries about what that would do to their lake.

Durocher and Patrick said they’ve been trying to make a case with the provincial government that its quotas on the commercial fishery in Île-à-la-Crosse, first established in 1997, are woefully outdated and doing harm both to the ecological balance of the lake, but also the potential livelihoods of people in the region. 

“Because they won’t allow the locals to fish more walleye, the walleye are now eating up the whitefish and all the other fish,” Patrick told The Narwhal. 

The fishery, which supports a fish plant in the village, operates during the cold winter months, with jiggers under the ice catching up to 20 or 30 tubs of fish per day, according to Gardiner. Each tub, he said, holds about 68 kilograms of fish. The fish are left alone in the summer months following spawning in the spring. 

Sakitawak sits at the convergence of three rivers and is blanketed by wetlands and boreal forest, including this area along the Pine River. It’s estimated the land holds 839 million tonnes of carbon, which is just one of the reasons the community is hoping to see the area designated an Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area. Photo: Jeremy Williams / River Voices Productions

He doesn’t understand why the government has maintained its current rules, which restricts the plant’s operations to 230,000 kilograms. 

“They just keep it there for the past 30 years, same quota,” Gardiner said.

“There’s so much walleye now, for the last few years, thousands of them, which is a money fish.”

The Saskatchewan Ministry of Environment said it is considering what, if any, changes to make to the quota in the future.

“In January, the ministry worked directly with the fishers and the local processing plant to collect data on the commercial catch, prior to processing, in order to assess the current status of the walleye population,” Chris Hodges, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Environment, wrote in an email.

“This collaborative effort between the ministry, the plant and the local fishers provides valuable data that the ministry will use to make an informed decision on walleye allocations for the coming seasons.” 

The fishery is seen as more sustainable than allowing logging on the land, even if done by an Indigenous company like Mistik Management Ltd. — one of the forestry companies granted a lease on the fur block, which has engaged the community about its plans and increased its investments for the community. 

“We said ‘well, you know, it’s great that you’re trying to give us a little bit more money. But if we allow you into the south end of the N-14 we are going against what we believe in, and that is to protect the whole N-14,’ ” Patrick said.

The trees themselves help tell the story of the fur blocks and what it might face in the future.

Blending scientific observation with Traditional Knowledge

Dave Sauchyn, a professor of geography and environmental studies at the University of Regina and the director of the Prairie Adaptation Research Collaborative, travelled to the area last summer at the request of the project team and took samples from the forest.

“We study climate change, and we say climate change [as in] both in the past and in the future,” he told The Narwhal.

“What they found most interesting was our work on past climate change, because the source of information that we collect is from the forest itself. So there is a record of climate change preserved in the forest in terms of tree rings.”

Sauchyn and his team extract a long section of the tree and take it back to the lab where they sand it, polish it and then scan it into a computer that can measure tree growth to one-thousandth of a millimetre. 

He found trees over 200 years old and was able to trace dry years and wet ones, and note their frequency, painting a picture of climatic changes and how they might be exacerbated by a warmer world. 

“What’s really cool about this type of project is, of course, there are people who have been living there for thousands of years and passing down their observations,” Sauchyn said. 

Dave Sauchyn, a scientist at the University of Regina, uses core samples to examine climatic changes revealed in tree rings from trees in the Sakitawak area. Sauchyn’s data can then be blended with Traditional Knowledge to get a sense of climate variability in the region. Photo: Jeremy Williams / River Voices Productions

“We’re just inferring one particular parameter, which is water levels, whereas they know everything to be known about those forests and so we’re able to blend, or compare, the observations of the hunters and trappers and fishermen and Elders with what the scientific evidence suggests about the variability of their climate.”

Armed with what they know, Sauchyn and his team provide not only a glimpse into the past, but projections and climate models showing how it might look in the future — less ice and snow in the winter, more fire and a greater range of extremes.

“There’s a huge area of research on natural infrastructure. Some of our best defence against a changing climate is to use nature to buffer the impacts,” he said.

“It’s very easy to argue that by establishing an [Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area] this community will be less vulnerable to a changing climate than it would be otherwise.”

To achieve that goal, the project will need the support of the provincial government, but that’s far from a given.

Talking to Saskatchewan government ‘like talking to a wall’: proponent

The Saskatchewan government must approve the plan for the protected area because the federal government turned over control for almost all Crown land to the province in 1930 through the Natural Resources Transfer Act, according to a legal analysis of the proposal by the Métis Legal Research and Education Foundation.

The community says it has not been consulted about the logging leases in the area and hasn’t been heard when it comes to their concerns about quotas for the commercial fishery. 

“We’ve had discussions with the government of Saskatchewan, but it’s just like talking to a wall because we get no dialogue from them at all,” Durocher said.

The province sent a written statement to The Narwhal when asked about allegations there has been a lack of consultation and asking about its position on the creation of an Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area.

“While the Ministry of Environment has had several discussions with representatives of Sakitawak, no formal proposal has yet been received,” Hodges wrote in an email.

As those discussions continue, Patrick said the community feels abandoned to fight all of the outside interests coming to bear on the area, but does not have the time or the money to fight legal battles.

“So you have a poor community, in revenues, let’s just say, and financial opportunity for youth who still live off the land,” Patrick said. 

“They are fishing in the wintertime, they have a $4-million fish plant, they have berry picking, they do all those traditional things, and that’s what’s protected that area to date. But all these encroaching interests are happening very fast.”

Updated Feb. 25, 2022, at 2:10 p.m. MST: This story was updated to include a statement from the Saskatchewan Ministry of Environment regarding the fishery quota and walleye allocations.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Canada, along with more than 100 other countries, has committed at the UN climate conference in Glasgow (COP26) to halt deforestation by 2030, as a way to preserve the forests that are key to absorbing carbon dioxide and slowing global warming.

Forests are the lungs of the planet. They take up vast quantities of carbon dioxide and lock it away in trees and soil. These processes have helped make this planet habitable and, more recently, mitigate the impacts of our reliance on fossil fuels.

As ecosystem scientists, we think this pledge to end deforestation holds great potential. It is not, however, a new idea. At a UN climate summit in 2014, many of the same countries agreed to halt deforestation by 2030. It was a lofty goal, and it has been unsuccessful to date. Forest loss has increased by more than 40 per cent since the agreement.

The current COP26 commitment is less ambitious — countries aim only to end “net deforestation,” meaning harvesting and land clearing can continue so long as reforestation (replanting of trees) keeps pace. This falsely assumes that new forests serve the same function as old forests. That said, a major advance of the COP26 commitment is the focus on improving sustainability in the trades that have historically led to deforestation.

Still Canada has some work ahead if it is to make meaningful progress on this new pledge, and not find itself in an ongoing situation of continued forest — and carbon — loss. It must also find a way to protect its primary forests, those that have not yet been affected by logging, mining or other human activity, as these intact forests best provide critical ecosystem services, including carbon storage.

Forests slow down climate change

Forests take up carbon dioxide (photosynthesis) and release it (respiration). The balance between this uptake and release determines the strength of the forest’s “carbon sink,” or how much carbon is stored within it. While taking up carbon dioxide, forests lose water through their leaves (transpiration). Deforestation affects these processes and can produce strong feedbacks to the climate system.

Canada underestimating 80 megatonnes of emissions from boreal logging: report

Deforestation impacts the global carbon cycle — the exchange of carbon between the atmosphere and the Earth and back — by removing large quantities of carbon stored in the trees and increasing losses of stored carbon from the soil. If deforested areas do not recover, future uptake of carbon dioxide is also reduced.

The loss of large tracts of intact forest can have important effects on water at the local and regional levels. Deforestation can reduce cloud formation and rainfall, increasing the risk or duration of drought in places that are already experiencing the effects of climate warming.

Interpreting Canada’s commitment

Canada has some of the most carbon-rich forests in the world. Boreal forests hold on average more carbon than their tropical counterparts. Yet the scale of forestry and other extractive activities in Canada’s boreal forests is vast. Remote sensing indicates that forestry activities impacted 650,000 hectares (1.6 million acres) of forests annually between 1985-2010.

This means that changes in land management decisions and the associated reforestation of disturbed landscapes in Canada’s boreal region can play an important role in the country’s climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. But three central challenges must be considered in the planning, implementation and accounting for Canada to meet or ideally exceed the ambitions of its COP26 commitment to end net deforestation.

1. Forest loss in Canada is complicated

Human-caused climate warming is profoundly altering the frequency and extent of natural disturbances, such as fire or insects, in Canada. Specifically, boreal forest loss due to wildfire, permafrost thaw, drought and pest outbreaks is increasing. These forest losses are occurring in addition to forest harvesting and land clearing, and will continue to intensify as climate warming progresses.

Logging in a wetland in northeastern B.C. on Blueberry First Nation territory. Photo: Garth Lenz / The Narwhal

According to a recent report by Nature Canada, an organization that advocates for habitat and species protection, these natural disturbances are largely ignored in Canada’s forestry carbon accounting, potentially underestimating Canada’s forest carbon emissions by an order of magnitude.

Many of these disturbed forest lands may recover naturally, but this is not guaranteed. There is increasing evidence that the boreal forest is becoming less resilient in the face of climate warming and associated disturbances.

We may not be able to rely on the full recovery of forests and their functions as we have in the past. We need to account for these human-caused, climate-associated changes in addition to forest harvesting and land clearing in an honest and transparent way.

2. Underground storage is a slow process

In boreal forests, 80-90 per cent of carbon is stored below ground, in contrast to most other forest ecosystems, where carbon is stored in the trees. Carbon recovery in boreal forests is not fast, nor is it as straightforward as replanting trees where deforestation and/or land degradation has occurred.

The battle for the ‘breathing lands’: Ontario’s Ring of Fire and the fate of its carbon-rich peatlands

Instead it requires the rather slow recovery of the processes that support peat accumulation and the large below-ground carbon stocks that characterize boreal landscapes. These remediation tools are under active development, and there have been some successes.

The targeted protection of regions with deep peat deposits is of great importance and urgency. Some of the most carbon rich places in Canada include the Mackenzie River Basin and the Hudson Bay Lowlands, regions that are also rich in natural resources.

Could an Indigenous conservation area in Hudson Bay also be the key to saving carbon-rich peatlands?

3. Deforestation is linked to extractive industries

Mining, forestry, hydroelectricity and oil and gas are central to Canada’s economy. The COP26 commitment by the Trudeau government will not stop these activities, nor will it protect Canada’s old-growth forests.

This commitment only requires that net forest cover remain constant, and the replanting of harvested forests is already common practice in much of Canada. There is, however, ample evidence of the impact of these extractive activities on the benefits and services provided by forests in Canada. For example, roads and seismic lines associated with forestry and oil and gas increase carbon loss and fragment the landscape leading to declines in species such as boreal caribou.

For this commitment to have a meaningful impact, Canada must continue with reforestation and prioritize protection of its intact, primary forests. We can hope the Trudeau government will use this commitment as a push to rapidly transition away from extractive practices toward more sustainable economic activities, and dovetail these efforts with the goals of conservation and reconciliation.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

The annual carbon pollution from Canada’s logging sector is at least 80 megatonnes higher than what the industry reports, according to new research published on Thursday by Environmental Defence Canada, Nature Canada, Nature Québec and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The report, entitled “Missing the Forest: How carbon loopholes for logging hinder Canada’s climate leadership,” identified the undercounted emissions from logging practices in Canada’s boreal forest, which the report notes is “the world’s most carbon-dense terrestrial ecosystem.” 

“While Canada has made leading commitments to a broad portfolio of natural climate solutions, the logging industry continues to clearcut more than 400,000 hectares of the boreal each year — about five NHL hockey rinks every minute — much of this in irreplaceable primary forests, which have not been previously impacted by human disturbance,” the report states.

Eighty megatonnes is equivalent to the annual emissions from all the buildings in Canada, or the annual emissions of 17.4 million passenger vehicles. 

The report’s co-authors, Jennifer Skene and Michael Polanyi, said the federal government has created accounting and regulatory loopholes that are responsible for the massive underestimates of industry’s carbon footprint.

“The Government of Canada has drawn a curtain over the logging industry’s carbon emissions, allowing the sector to escape scrutiny for its substantial climate impact,” Skene, natural climate solutions policy manager for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said during a press conference Thursday.

The co-authors said Canada takes a “biased approach” in its emissions reporting by, for example, excluding emissions from logging roads or damaged forests but including emissions reductions from undisturbed forests that have never been logged and so, the author’s argue, cannot be legitimately included in the accounting.

Canada has committed to be carbon neutral by 2050, but the authors warn these findings, which have not been peer-reviewed, cast doubt on Canada’s ability to meet its carbon reductions targets — just days before the UN Climate Change Conference known as COP26. 

But they still see room for Canada to be a leader in tracking and reducing emissions.

“Canada should lead a global effort to protect and enhance forest carbon stores,” co-author Polanyi, policy and campaign manager for Nature Canada, said.

“Generations to come rely on [us] accurately accounting and reporting … carbon emissions. It’s a necessary place to start.”

Canada is failing to track the true climate cost of clearcut logging in boreal: report

Canada ‘manufacturing a carbon sink’

The more intact a forest is, the more carbon it can naturally store as a carbon sink, which means it absorbs more carbon than it releases. When forests are damaged they release carbon, and act as a carbon source rather than a carbon sink. 

Article 13 of the Paris Agreement requires countries to report on emissions in an annual national inventory report to the  United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. As part of this report, Canada measures emissions from its “managed” forests, which means lands where human interventions take place, according to standards set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But the report found Natural Resources Canada has been including primary forests — areas that have never been logged — in its “managed” forest area. 

“They’re basically trying to take credit for the carbon sequestration of the wild primary forest that they have nothing to do with planting or managing,” Ken Wu, executive director of the Endangered Ecosystems Alliance, told The Narwhal after reading the report.

But Natural Resources Canada only includes primary forests when it will “benefit” its greenhouse gas inventory, the co-authors argue, and excludes from its accounting primary forests that could increase inventory emissions, such as those impacted by fire, insects and disease. 

Canada is “manufacturing” a false carbon sink, Skene said.

While Canada does not include emissions from forests impacted by wildfire, the researchers found Natural Resources Canada will add these areas to the inventory when the forest has reached “commercial maturity,” on average 76 years after a wildfire.

Canada also excludes some emissions entirely from the accounting process, like those from areas cleared for logging roads.

Scars from logging operations show Canadian deforestation far worse than previously thought

Natural Resources Canada, the federal ministry responsible for tracking forestry emissions, did not provide comment in time for publication. In a 2020 policy note that outlines how the government reports on forestry emissions, the ministry said its model “is internationally recognized and used in many countries around the world to estimate and understand forest emissions and removals.”

The policy note says the ministry collects data from a number of sources, including “statistics on natural disturbances such as wildfire and insect infestations.”

A 2021 study found that globally, a gap of 5.5 billion tons of carbon emissions exists between countries’ reported annual emissions and those calculated by independent assessors, underlining the need for more rigorous and standardized accounting systems.

Kate Lindsay, senior vice-president at the Forest Products Association of Canada, told CBC she is “disappointed [with the report] knowing that the forest carbon accounting in Canada is very highly regarded globally.”

Derek Nighbor, president and CEO of the Forest Products Association of Canada, told The Narwhal via email “the Canadian forest sector is committed to contributing to Canada’s goal of net-zero by 2050, and forestry is a unique sector that can play a large role in both mitigating climate change, as well as increasing resiliency in Canada’s forests.”

Forests can help mitigate climate change by storing carbon if they are healthy, but if they are impacted by wildfire, insects and disease, they can release more carbon than they store. Because of the impacts of climate change, Canada’s forests have been emitting more carbon than they absorb since 2001.

Canada has opportunity for ‘a leadership role’

The co-authors make a series of recommendations, including making another federal ministry — Environment and Climate Change Canada — responsible for forestry’s carbon accounting.

“Natural Resource Canada’s mandate [is] to support and promote industry,” Polanyi said. Moving the responsibility to Environment and Climate Change Canada would avoid conflicting mandates, he argued.

The authors call on Canada to make improvements to accounting and regulating carbon emissions, and to prioritize Indigenous leadership of forest protection and restoration through the creation of Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas.

They also argue forestry should be included in Canada’s carbon pricing framework and added to the federal carbon pricing system regulations, noting that “in failing to put a price on logging’s forest carbon impacts, the Government of Canada is effectively subsidizing one of its largest sources of emissions.”

“We see a real opportunity here for Canada to step out into a leadership role to be changing its own practices,” Skene said.

Wu would like to see similar research done beyond the boreal forest, especially in the coastal forests in British Columbia, which has garnered international attention this year due to the Fairy Creek blockade, where over 1,000 people have been arrested trying to halt logging of some of B.C.’s last old-growth, making it the largest act of civil disobedience in Canada’s history.

Slowing down logging is essential, he said, because “the climate crisis doesn’t have 200 years to wait” for secondary growth to reach its full carbon sequestering potential.

“The best thing we can do is log less and protect a lot more.”Updated October 28, 2021 at 6:41 p.m. PT: This article was updated to include comment from Derek Nighbor, president and CEO of the Forest Products Association of Canada.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.