Canada has long promoted itself globally as a model for protecting one of the country’s most vital natural resources: the world’s largest swath of boreal forest, which is crucial to fighting climate change. But a new study [funded by a grant from the Natural Resources Defense Council] using nearly half a century of data from the provinces of Ontario and Quebec — two of the country’s main commercial logging regions — reveals that harvesting trees has inflicted severe damage on the boreal forest that will be difficult to reverse. Researchers led by a group from Griffith University in Australia found that since 1976 logging in the two provinces has caused the removal of 35.4 million acres of boreal forest, an area roughly the size of New York State. …While in other parts of the world, deforestation has become a major threat, the challenge in Canada is different. “There’s been no deforestation in that sense,” Professor Brendan Mackey said. “But there has been a high level, ecologically speaking, of forest degradation.” [A subscription to the NYT is required to read the full story]
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