Media Clipping — Thursday, November 15, 2001 The Daily News, Halifax

N.S. trees worth more standing than as pulp or lumber – study

By Stephen Bornais

GPI Atlantic turns its new economics to the forest industry

Nova Scotia’s forest can no longer be viewed as a simple wood factory, say the authors of a report released yesterday in Halifax. The report, GPI Forest Accounts, says the province’s 3.7 million hectares of woodlands are worth more to the province standing than if they are just cut down and turned into toilet paper.

“Increased clearcutting and the loss of natural forest diversity are rapidly diminishing the value of these forest ecosystem services in the province,” say authors Minga O’Brien, Linda Pannozzo, Sara Justine Wilson and Ron Colman.

Using calculations prepared by other researchers, the two-volume report estimates Nova Scotia’s standing forest generates a minimum of $1.7 billion a year for the province by regulating the climate, creating soil, providing wildlife habitat, and encouraging recreation and tourism.

Forest products such as pulp and paper or lumber generate about $1.3 billion in revenue annually.

In Nova Scotia nearly 70,000 hectares a year are clearcut.

Colman, executive director of GPI Atlantic, said by traditional measure, the economic value of the province’s forest seems enhanced by the rapidity with which it is cut down. But this industrial-forest model places no monetary value on the wider variety of forest functions, he said.

“We’ve lost a lot of value in the forest because we’ve been measuring the wrong things,” he said.

GPI Atlantic, which commissioned the study, is a Halifax-based non-profit research group working to develop a new measure of economic well-being, a ‘genuine progress index,’ that would take into account a wider range of variables than used to produce the gross domestic product index. The forest report is the latest of a series the agency has produced over the last four years.

After 200 years of taking the best and leaving the rest, Colman said Nova Scotia’s forest are now producing lower-quality products for industry and reduced benefits for the rest of the population.

“The loss of standing capital is starting to have market impact,” he said.

As well as a litany of past and current sins, the report also proposes several new models for the future, ones that would ensure Nova Scotia’s over-stretched woodlands don’t suffer a similar fate to the exhausted groundfish stocks.

“There is no reason we have to see the whole thing fall apart before it gets better,” Colman said.

Wade Prest, past president of the Nova Scotia Woodlot Owners and Operators Association, said many of the province’s 25,000 landowners are looking for guidance, something he thinks the GPI report can provide.

“A lot of them are questioning what they see around them, but in the absence of anything else, they buy into that industrial forestry model,” Prest said.

The report GPI Forest Accounts says Nova Scotia’s woodlands are under siege.

• To feed three pulp mills, dozens of sawmills, thousands of woodstoves and export markets, the province cuts six million cubic metres of wood a year, double what it cut in the 1970s.
• The bulk of the cutting is done in clearcuts that have expanded rapidly in the last 10 years to almost 70,000 hectares a year.
• Over the last 40 years, the percentage of Nova Scotia forest older than 80 has fallen from 25.1 per cent to just one per cent. And trees older than than 100 have become reduced to scattered groves
• There has been a sharp reduction in valuable species such as yellow birch and white pine as more areas are replanted with faster-growing softwoods.

Copyright © 2001, The Daily News