July 2010

The Irish Parliament is calling on the EU to agree that the country can used forest carbon sinks to offset its non-Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) emissions.

Ten-year figures for the Brazilian timber industry show that production in the Amazon has fallen by 50 per cent.

The figures were published in a study carried out by the Brazilian Forest Service (SFB) and the Institute of Man and Environment (Imazon), entitled 'Logging Activities in the Brazilian Amazon.'

They show that in 1998, roundwood production in the region was 28.3 million cubic metres while the figures for 2009 show total production to be only 14.2 million cubic metres.

The combination of a gutted Forest Service, vast areas of not sufficiently restocked forestlands, a quirky loophole in the Kyoto Protocol and a provincial government ideologically driven to sell off public assets has created the perfect opportunity for forest industrialists to burn down the last barriers to privatization of BC’s Crown forests.

On August 20, 1910, a strong wind blew down off the Cascades and whipped hundreds of forest blazes into an inferno that extinguished towns and three million hectares of forests from Washington to Montana.