For more than 30 years, Werner Kurz has been studying forests and carbon, wrestling with questions such as how much carbon trees absorb as they grow and how much they emit as they die. This year, he’s tracking a milestone: A season in which greenhouse gas emissions from wildfires in Canada are expected to exceed the combined emissions from all of Canada’s economic sectors. …Dr. Kurz and colleagues looked at how salvage logging and replanting after wildfires in B.C. could reduce greenhouse gas emissions compared with a “do-nothing scenario” that relies on natural regeneration. They found modest benefits that would take at least 20 years to be realized. …“We spend six or seven dollars on response costs for every one dollar we spend in mitigation,” said John Davies with Forsite Consultants. “If we had that much money to put into prevention, into mitigation, we’d be way further ahead right now than we are.” [to access the full story a Globe and Mail subscription is required]