Tag Archives: World Resources Institute

Mongabay: Timber harvests to meet global wood demand will bring soaring emissions: Study

Extensive logging of remote mountains on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada, feeds the timber industry. Many of the trees taken here are old growth, more than 200 years in age. Timber companies typically replace the natural forest with monoculture tree farms that lack biodiversity and sequester far less carbon than the original natural forests. Image by Justin Catanoso.

ECOLOGISTS and climate activists spend a lot of time, justifiably, decrying the always-growing rate of international deforestation. What they rarely look at, evaluate or consider, is the impact of global logging for the timber and biofuel industries. This story describes a major study published in July 2023 in the prestigious journal Nature about the impact that logging has on contributing far more to global carbon emissions than ever imagined.

The study, by a several researchers backed by World Resources Institutes presents staggering figures involving current and future demand for wood products and the impact is/will have on global tree cover, and thus, carbon sequestration from intact forests. It is, like too many of my stories, startling and dispiriting, especially when you consider the many “treaties” nations have signed, as recently as COP26 in Glasgow, to halt deforestation. Of course, those treaties always involve loopholes the logging industry has demanded and received.

The summer of 2023 has brought every single day a reminder of the climate catastrophes people are the world are enduring — massive wildfires in Canada, record temperatures in Mexico and the US Southwest, vicious storms and flooding in the Northeast, deadly heatwaves across southern Europe and India. Every forest felled for short-term profit makes the earth less able to slow the rate of warming, and the rate of calamity. This study in Nature makes clear that policy changes in logging are a near-term requirement, and even points to solutions that are close to plausible while actually preserving most of the forests policymakers have pledged to protect.

Note: this is a major study by top scientists with a leading NGO published in the most prestigious scientific journal. The Times and Post and others have been busy reporting every day on the horrible weather events this summer. None bothered to cover a significant root cause and potential solutions. That’s not how we get out of this climate crisis.

This 52-acre native forest in Edenton, North Carolina, U.S., was clear cut in late 2022 for both timber and for whole trees chipped to make wood pellets for bioenergy. The site was cleared for industrial development. Only trees for landscaping were to be replanted. Clear cuts like this around the world diminish global carbon storage. Image by Justin Catanoso.

Mongabay: COP24: Trumpers tout clean coal; protesters call it ‘climate suicide’

Protesters, for the second year in a row, bring the surreal Trump Administration’s fossil fuel message at the UN climate summit in Poland to a halt with a long, loud, boisterous outburst.

In November 2917 in Bonn, Germany at COP23, I managed to get into the Trump Administration’s only public event at the conference. I called it one of the strangest panel discussion in COP history. Trump representatives, heedless of the perils of climate change and its causes, urged the use of more fossil fuels and essentially advertised that the US has plenty to export. This year, as I report here, the administration held only one event again, and once again touted the use of fossil fuels. Both years, protesters interrupted the event, chanting loudly and then marching out, leaving the room half empty (as planned). My story here at COP24 in Katowice, Poland focuses on the outraged responses to Trump’s villainous attitude toward the environment.

Mongabay: COP24 – World’s nations gather to grapple with looming climate disaster

For the fifth consecutive year, I will attend and cover a United Nations climate summit, my fourth for Mongabay. The 24th climate meeting in Katowice, Poland — a coal city in the EU’s second-largest consumer of coal for energy (behind Germany) — is a paradoxical choice. It also highlights the challenges world leaders face in what is no question the most important climate meeting since Paris in 2015. The link to my story is here.

There has been precious-little urgency among nation’s since the Obama Administration led the drafting and signing of the Paris Agreement. Plenty of action is taking place at the non-state level among mayors, governors, and corporate leaders. That’s all good. But something important is missing, as one of my best sources told me for my story:

“It’s easy to blame these leaders, and they deserve some of the blame,” Phil Duffy, executive director of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, U.S., said in an interview. “But at some level, there has to be popular support for action to be taken. And people aren’t clamoring for it.

“When I look at the properties of Hurricane Florence [which flooded the North Carolina coast], I see the signature of climate change. But somehow that doesn’t get through to the public. And leaders aren’t motivated to tell the truth, or to say that we really need to undertake radical, societal change. They believe correctly that it wouldn’t fly” with the public,” said Duffy.

Mongabay: Land rights, forests, food systems central to limiting global warming: report

This gigantic mahogany is Cocha Cashu is a rich target for illegal timbering. If were to fall and be burned, it would release tons of sequestered CO2 and no longer provide the ecosystem service of absorbing air pollution. (That’s me in the background.) Photo by Jason Houston

On Oct. 8, 2018, the International Panel on Climate Change  (IPCC)  raised a bright red flag of warning for world leaders. In essence, the 91 climate scientists from 40 nations decried in a major report the lack of action on climate mitigation internationally. It made clear that time is running out. They warned that irreversible climate damage could lock in as early as 2040, not decades later, as previously hoped.

This story of mine, posted one week later, is largely in response to the IPCC report and is based on the research stemming from another group of climate scientists and advocates with the acronym CLARA — Climate, Land, Ambition and Rights Alliance.

As one source told me: “Our study is not meant to either contradict or complement the IPCC report,” said Doreen Stabinsky, a co-author of Missing Pathways. “The IPCC looks very generally at pathways to 1.5 degrees C. We dive into the literature to find what would be useful, specific contributions from the land sector to stay within a 1.5-degree pathway.” 

Interesting context. Mongabay special editor Willie Shubert emailed me Thursday morning, Oct. 11, to ask if I could turn a story around quickly on the CLARA study and have it ready to post by Monday, Oct. 15. I agreed. I put calls out early Thursday afternoon and arranged for three telephone interviews on Friday. I knew Hurricane Michael, a climate-change-fueled monster, had made landfall in northern Florida at 155 mph a day earlier; I didn’t realize it was heading to central North Carolina. By Thursday afternoon, winds in Greensboro hit 50 mph as Michael swept through. Trees fell all over the Triad. Power and Internet went out in my neighborhood and around the region around 3:30 pm Thursday. It would not be restored until Sunday afternoon.

A sincere thanks to HQ Greensboro, the co-working space in downtown Greensboro, which never lost power or Internet service. I spent all day Friday, Saturday and Sunday there, doing my reporting, conducting my interviews, grading my Wake Forest assignments, and finally, writing the story linked here. My editor, Glenn Scherer, liked the irony that I was writing about climate mitigation while being directly affected by a climate-influenced event.

 

 

Mongabay: China flexes its new climate action muscles in Bonn; Trump administration blinks

Top officials celebrate after the Paris Agreement was signed in December. But critics see no acceleration.

Top officials celebrate after the Paris Agreement was signed in December 2015. Trump’s threats to withdraw from the agreement has touched off a hostile global response, especially from China. Photo by Justin Catanoso in 2016.

A good source with World Resources Institute in Bonn, Germany, tipped me off to this story about China’s disgusted reaction to Trump’s repeated threats to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. After a conversation with Mongabay editor Mike Gaworecki, we agreed to a quick follow up given that the mainstream media has not reported the news yet. They will. We just have it early.