BC Forest Carbon Debt: The Empty Cupboard
- John Profitt
- Jul 27
- 10 min read
Updated: Jul 30
Sixty-Five Years on BC's Land, 1960–2026.
Why old growth is next, and why that isn't a mystery...
Right now, while this is being written, the BC interior is burning. I've been driving this ground for months, along the Coquihalla, the Pennask Summit corridor, the Thompson-Nicola plateau where I live. This piece isn't a new survey. It's the ledger underneath the survey — a plain accounting of what has actually happened to this province's forests since 1960, and why the current push into old growth isn't a policy choice made from a position of strength. It's what's left to cut once everything else has been cut once already.
None of the numbers below are mine. They come from the BC government's own reporting, its own historical review panels, and the peer-reviewed science on how long a forest takes to recover what a clearcut takes away. Read together, they tell a single story with one ending.
1960–1987: the expansion
Industrial-scale logging on the coast was already mature by the 1960s. The interior expanded through the '60s and '70s — new pulp mills, new pulpwood agreements, and a deliberate change in utilization standards that lowered the minimum diameter of trees counted as merchantable. That change alone increased the allowable cut, because it let the same forest be measured as containing more usable wood than it had the year before.
This was not a hidden concern at the time. BC's own Forest Inventory Review Panel later documented that in this period, "past policies on deliberately liquidating old growth timber led to expressed concerns that wood supply shortages were imminent. Regenerating stocks were not sufficient to sustain harvest rates." That sentence was written about the 1960s and '70s. It could be written about today unchanged.
The province's total harvest climbed through this entire window, reaching an all-time peak of almost 90 million cubic metres in 1987 — the high-water mark of six decades of expansion built substantially on liquidating standing old growth.
1988–2000: the plateau, and a quiet tell
From 1988 to 2013, BC's annual harvest fluctuated around an average of 75 million cubic metres a year — a long plateau that looked, on the surface, like stability. But one number moving underneath that plateau gives away what was actually happening: the average volume harvested per hectare of Crown land fell from about 450 cubic metres per hectare in the 1970s to roughly 260 cubic metres per hectare in recent years.
That's not a footnote. It means that to pull the same volume of wood out of the province, loggers have had to clear an ever-larger area of land every year. The old growth being cut yields far more wood per hectare than the second-growth stands replacing it. The area disturbed has been quietly climbing even in years when the total volume looks flat. You don't need a forest to disappear overnight to know it's being drawn down. You just need to watch the area-per-tonne ratio get worse, year over year, for fifty years.
2001–2011: the beetle bulge
Then came the mountain pine beetle. The outbreak killed an estimated 726 million cubic metres of merchantable lodgepole pine across 17.5 million hectares — close to a third of BC's entire 60-million-hectare forested land base — in little more than a decade. The government's response was to raise the allowable annual cut aggressively to salvage the dying wood before it rotted or burned, pushing the province-wide AAC from a pre-beetle baseline near 52 million cubic metres up to a peak of 87.3 million cubic metres in 2007, and holding it near 86 million through the early 2010s.
That was, at the time, a defensible emergency response to a genuine ecological disaster. But it meant an unusually large fraction of BC's land base was clearcut within a single compressed decade, at nearly double the historical rate, all at once.
2012–2024: the crash
The wood ran out. By 2023 the allowable annual cut had fallen back to roughly 62 million cubic metres. By the end of 2024 it stood at about 61.5 million — and even that, provincial reporting notes, is likely an overestimate of what can actually be sustained. Actual harvest in 2024 came in at just 36.9 million cubic metres, barely more than a third of what was being cut at the 2007 peak, and well below even the reduced current AAC.
2020 was the first year on record that the actual cut fell below the province's own modelled mid-term harvest level — the volume its computer models say the land can sustainably support fifty years out. Premier David Eby has since described the result plainly: "exhausted forests."
The debt nobody accounted for
Here is the part the harvest-volume numbers alone don't show. A clearcut doesn't just remove standing timber — it releases a large pulse of carbon immediately, from disturbed soil and decomposing slash, that the regrowing stand then has to work off before the land becomes a net carbon sink again. BC-specific research from Sierra Club BC's field analysis found that clearcut land in this province takes roughly thirteen years before the carbon captured by regrowth exceeds the carbon still being released by the cut itself. International research on temperate and boreal forests brackets the same finding: 10 to 15 years to reach carbon balance again, and 20 to 40 years before the full carbon debt from the disturbance is paid back.
Think of each year's harvest as taking out a loan against future carbon uptake. In a stable industry, cutting a steady, modest volume every year, those loans are staggered — a new one opens roughly as an old one closes, and the total amount of land carrying debt at any moment stays small and manageable. That is not what happened here. The chart below shows what actually happened instead.
The top panel is the harvest history from the sections above: the slow climb to the 1987 peak, the beetle-driven bulge stacked on top of the plateau between 2001 and 2015, the collapse after. The bottom panel is what that pattern does to the debt. Instead of loans opening and closing in a steady rhythm, the compressed beetle-era harvest opened an enormous number of them within a single decade — and because each one takes 13 to 40 years to close, they are still sitting open together, layered on top of one another, right now. The red band is land still inside the 13-year dead zone, an outright carbon source. The wider tan band is land that has crossed that line but still hasn't repaid what the original cut released. On these figures, close to 2,700 million cubic metres of BC's harvested land base is still carrying carbon debt that hasn't been paid off. That is not a rounding error. It is most of what has been cut since the mid-1980s.
The forest most people picture when they hear "BC's carbon sink" is, on these numbers, still very plausibly running a deficit right now — not because of one bad year, but because sixty-five years of harvest decisions front-loaded a debt that the land is only now, slowly, starting to work through.
Push the same chart forward to 2050, holding harvest flat at today's already-diminished level rather than assuming any rebound, and the picture doesn't resolve itself. Clearcut forest functions as a net carbon source for approximately 20 years after harvest, and does not return to substantial net sequestration for up to 40 years across BC's interior — a conservative, engineer's reading of the published research, not a worst case. Even under a flat, no-rebound harvest path with no new large-scale disturbance, roughly 1,770 million cubic metres of BC's cut land base is still projected to be short of full carbon repayment in 2050. This is not a forecast of a future problem. It is a description of a debt that has already been incurred and is now simply working its way through the calendar, regardless of what policy does next.
This isn't a reconstruction standing alone, either. Researchers at the University of British Columbia modelled BC's interior forests directly, using the Canadian Forest Service's own Carbon Budget Model, the same tool the federal government uses for its own national accounting, and found that the region has been a sustained net carbon source since 2003. Over 2000 to 2018, mountain pine beetle and wildfire together caused an estimated 367 million tonnes of carbon emissions. Harvesting, over the same period, transferred 153 million tonnes into wood products but caused an additional 343 million tonnes of direct and decomposition emissions of its own, a number of similar magnitude to the beetle epidemic and wildfire combined. That finding was published in a peer-reviewed climate journal in 2022. It has not, as far as I can find, reached a single sales floor, marketing department, or LinkedIn feed connected to the industry it describes.
One honest limit on all of this: the recovery windows used above are historical averages, and this projection assumes no further weakening of global carbon sinks or other external climate trends. It doesn't hold. A study published in Nature in November 2025, led by Pierre Friedlingstein of the University of Exeter, found that climate change has already made the world's land and ocean carbon sinks roughly 15% weaker over the past decade than they would otherwise have been, accounting for about 8% of the total rise in atmospheric CO2 since 1960. If BC's own regrowth is slowing under the same warming and drought pressure driving that global decline, and if the atmosphere's overall capacity to absorb a lingering regional debt is shrinking at the same time, then the numbers in this piece are, if anything, the optimistic case, not the worst one.
Why old growth, why now
None of this is abstract when you look at what's actually being logged in 2025 and 2026. BC's own independent Old Growth Technical Advisory Panel identified 2.6 million hectares of the most at-risk, highest-productivity old growth in the province as priority for deferral. As of 2025, only about 1.2 million hectares — under half — have actually been paused. That leaves roughly 1.36 million hectares of the best remaining old growth still open to harvest. Reporting from March 2026 documents active BC Timber Sales cutblocks planned directly over areas the province's own technical panel had flagged for protection. Protests over old-growth logging at Walbran Valley on Vancouver Island have been ongoing since August 2025. The Fairy Creek deferral, extended to protect roughly 1,200 hectares at the request of the Pacheedaht First Nation, runs out at the end of September 2026.
None of this is a coincidence sitting alongside the harvest numbers above. It's the same story told from the other end. Sixty-five years of liquidating the highest-volume, highest-value stands first — coastal old growth in the early decades, beetle-killed interior pine in the 2000s — has left a shrinking, lower-volume, still-indebted second-growth land base as the only thing standing between the industry and zero. Old growth isn't being targeted because it's suddenly become more valuable. It's being targeted because, on the province's own numbers, there is very little else left to cut.
What this means
I recently drove past an Indigenous community fairground hosting an exposition of logging equipment — feller bunchers, mill machinery, hauling trucks, all brand new, all for sale, an entire industry standing in one field with exactly one thing on its mind: sell more capacity to cut more trees. That image is worth sitting with against everything above. Sixty-five years of harvest data say BC cannot support another generation of this industry at anything resembling its current scale. The equipment on that field says nobody has told the market that yet, or the market has decided not to hear it.
This isn't a case against the people running the saws and driving the trucks. Most of them are lumberjacks and carpenters trying to feed their families and keep a mill running, and they didn't set the allowable cut or approve the beetle-salvage surge. But an entire economic structure — government policy, industry marketing, equipment finance — is still selling the idea that expansion is the answer, in a province whose own numbers say the opposite. That gap between what the land can actually give and what the industry is still being sold to extract from it is not a difference of opinion. It is the same gap this entire paper has been documenting, just standing in a field instead of a spreadsheet.
The province's own inventory panel warned in the 1960s that regenerating stocks weren't sufficient to sustain harvest rates. That warning was correct then, and the numbers say it's still correct now. The difference is that in 1970 there was old growth left to absorb the shortfall. In 2026, there mostly isn't — and on a carbon basis and a volume basis both, there is no appreciable timber supply left in this province to carry another generation of harvest at anything close to today's scale.
That is a hard thing to say to people whose entire working life is built around the opposite assumption. It needs saying anyway. If the industry, the government, and the workers inside it don't reckon with this now, the land is going to force the reckoning later, on terms nobody gets to choose. The forests are already telling us what the ledger says. The only open question is whether anyone still selling equipment on that fairground is willing to read it.
Note: This paper is independent research, unfunded and free of commercial sponsorship, offered in the spirit of open collaboration.
About the Author
John Profitt, B.Sc., P.Eng., GSC, LEED AP® is Principal of Nextlevel Modular Inc., a BC-licensed residential builder and USGBC member company operating from a repurposed shipping container and timber frame home in Vinsulla, British Columbia, Canada. He holds individual membership in the Canada Green Building Council and is registered as a Professional Engineer with Engineers and Geoscientists of British Columbia. He brings nearly four decades of construction and geological engineering experience across North and South America, including field work with Indigenous communities across Canada and Mexico.
References
BC Forest Carbon Debt: The Empty Cupboard — Source List
BC Forest Inventory Review Panel, Technical Background Report (the "deliberately liquidating old growth timber" quote):
BC harvest volume history (1987 peak, 1988–2013 plateau, post-2014 decline) — Environmental Reporting BC:
AAC vs. actual cut, 2000–2024, including the 2024 harvest figure of 36.9 million m³ — Forest Trends / Evergreen Alliance:
Mountain pine beetle destruction (726 million m³ across 17.5 million hectares):
Premier Eby's "exhausted forests" quote:
Sierra Club BC, "Clearcut Carbon" report (13-year carbon debt finding):
Giles-Hansen & Wei (2022), Environmental Research Letters — UBC/Canadian Forest Service Carbon Budget Model study, BC interior as net carbon source since 2003:
Friedlingstein et al. (2025), Nature — global carbon sink weakening:
Old Growth Technical Advisory Panel, 2.6 million hectares identified / current deferral status:
Fairy Creek deferral extension to Sept. 30, 2026, Pacheedaht First Nation:
AI Transparency Disclosure: This paper was prepared with AI writing assistance from Anthropic Claude (claude.ai). All observations, data collection, evidentiary interpretation, primary arguments, analytical conclusions, and professional judgments are the sole work of John Profitt, B.Sc., P.Eng. AI assistance was used for drafting, editing, and structural organisation of the written text. The author takes full professional responsibility for the content of this paper.
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