The Decibel - The missing 2 billion trees Trudeau promised

Episode Date: May 3, 2023

In 2021, the federal government began a project to plant two billion trees by 2031. The goal of this project was to use these trees to help Canada reach its climate goal. However, a recent audit shows that the government is not on track to hit those numbers.The Globe’s energy and environment reporter Matt McClearn is on the show to walk us through the difficulties of the 2 Billion Trees program, and how its success or failure could impact our other pressing climate goals.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

In 2021, the federal government began an ambitious project to plant 2 billion trees over a decade. Tree planting has become a major initiative worldwide to help fight the effects of climate change. Can you describe what you're doing as you put the tree in? Well, we're planting an all-spruce block. Describe, like, the process. People like Anna are planting these trees across northern B.C. She's planting in a remote area that was heavily logged. Our intern, Andrew Hines, joined her.

What's going through your mind as you plant? Well, this block is pretty hairy, so looking for the best route to take. Then I'm finding a micro site and putting a tree in there and hoping it lives. But today I'm mostly thinking, I don't want to be here. Why not? It's just like a half day of planting. It's the end of the season. Everyone's bodies hurt. Tree planting is a grueling job and a couple of years into its 2 billion trees program, the government is learning that it's not doing enough to achieve this goal. Today, The Globe's Matt McClern is on the show to walk us through the difficulties of the 2 billion trees program, also known as 2BT,

and how its success or failure could impact our other pressing climate goals. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. All right. Thanks, guys. Bye. Come back soon. Will do. Matt, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. It's a pleasure to be here. So, Matt, to start off, Canada's climate goal is to reduce emissions to 40% below 2005 levels by 2030.

So how will this program, this 2 billion tree program, actually help us reach that goal? Well, this was introduced in 2019 by the federal government. And the program was funded in February of 2021. So it's been running for about two years now. The objective is to plant 2 billion trees over about a decade. And the main reason for doing this is as part of the federal government's plans to address climate change. Trees take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, but there are a bunch of what they call co-benefits that go along with that.

It's not just about carbon dioxide removal, but that's the main organizing thrust of it. Okay, well, how achievable are these goals then? Well, we're going to find out. The experiment is being run in real time. Two billion trees on its face would seem to be an achievable goal, but there's a whole bunch of things that have to happen in order to make that happen. The government is not going out and growing these trees and,

and planting them itself. It's working with a whole bunch of partners, including provinces and territories, landowners and indigenous groups. And all of these groups have to agree to, to, to plant trees and they have to be motivated to have this succeed. And there also has to be land available to, to do this. And, uh, although planting trees might

seem like a great idea, uh, there are other competing uses for that land. Uh, and so, uh, you know, it's, it's not clear at this point whether there's enough interested landowners who are prepared to, and this is a cost-sharing agreement too. So the government in most cases paying, I understand about half of the cost, but somebody else has to pick up the other costs.

So again, they have to have reasons beyond just being given a handout in order to plant these trees and particularly to preserve and monitor them after the fact to see that they're succeeding. But we must plant trees all the time in Canada, right? Like what do we plant on a usual year compared to the goals here? It's my understanding that we plant about 600 million trees or so in this country. A lot of that is the forestry. That's annually then?

Yes, that's right. And the government envisions that they'd be planting more than 300 million trees perhaps in the busiest years of the 2BT program. So you can see that that's a substantial increase in the number of trees. This also raises questions about whether the supply chain of trees in saplings in this country can really accommodate that. And that's a big concern for the success of this project is, will we in fact see that supply chain rise to the occasion? So we are going to get into the supply chain aspect of that later because that's interesting too. But first, I just want to ask you about the politics of this,

Matt, because this was an initiative announced by the Trudeau government, the federal liberal government. Why did they decide to pursue some of their climate goals by planting trees? I think that part of the answer is that it's good politics. So there are many other climate change initiatives that might get people upset. But planting trees is an idea that OnSpace has a lot of public support, and it doesn't upset too many people. So I think partly it's just good politics. And that's one of the reasons, I think, why so many other countries have also introduced programs to plant trees. Yeah, you don't have a lot of people lobbying against planting trees, right? That's a pretty universally accepted thing.

I think so. And the other issue that was happening around that time is that Ontario had a similar program called the 50 Million Trees Program, which had existed for many years. And in 2019, the government of Doug Ford killed that program. And I think that the federal government saw an opportunity to step in and fill a vacuum there with the 2BT program. But I think that that was part of the rationale. Okay, so we've now been a few years into this program, Matt. And there's actually been an audit looking at how effective it's been, how it's going so far.

What did that audit find? Well, the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development released a report that covered the period up until October of last year. And it found that if 2BT continues to operate as it had up until last fall, it's unlikely that it's going to meet its objectives. And a big part of this is they're just looking at how many trees the government said it would plant. In the first year, which was basically 2021, the government said it was going to plant 30 million trees. And that's a small amount compared to obviously the 2 billion that it wants to plant over a decade, but the plan was to ramp up planting. And in that first year, they basically made that 30 million tree target. But the following year, the 2022 planting season, there was a 60 million tree target. And the government's saying they are well, well, well short of that.

In fact, they probably planted less trees in their second year than they did in the first. And so just looking at raw numbers, the commissioner is saying that it doesn't look good. And the original plan was to be planting more than 250 million trees a year by 2026, which is not that far into the future. So just as a numbers game, it doesn't look good. But there were some other findings as well. The commissioner's report found that it wasn't going to meet the greenhouse gas reduction targets it had from 2BT originally. And part of the issue is that in the early years of the program, even the planting activities could be net sources of emissions. And that's partly just because of emissions associated with preparing the land to plant.

Matt, it seems like the government is having a bit of a hard time planting these trees, getting this program done. And I mean, you'd think it'd be maybe one of the easier things, given that this is a country with a well-established forestry sector, we have lots of land. I guess, what does it say about our ability to accomplish other climate initiatives? Well, it's too early to say whether 2BT is going to fail or not. Although I think that planting 2 billion trees is a lot more complicated than some senior federal officials understood when they made the announcement. It's still one of the more – it seems to be one of the lower hanging fruit that we could pursue in achieving our climate goals. And so it strikes me that if we cannot do this, what does that mean for things that strike me as being much more difficult?

For example, there's been a lot of talk about a massive energy transition that is partly underway right now, where we are trying to take a large swath of our energy systems that are reliant on fossil fuels that obviously emit large amounts of greenhouse gases and converting all that to energy generated by renewable assets. That's a massive effort, very, very complicated, lots of ways to get it wrong, and much more complicated probably than planting 2 billion trees. Although, as I said, I don't think that planting 2 billion trees is an easy thing to accomplish. But if we can't plant 2 billion trees, then that raises serious questions about our ability

to take on some of these larger objectives, which are far more complicated. We'll be right back. All right, let's talk about how this is actually done, Matt. So, you know, where do these trees come from? Who plants them? I guess what I'm wondering is, like, what is the tree supply chain, so to speak? What does this actually look like? Well, again, it really depends on where you are in the country. It depends on what species you're talking about. But just generally speaking, if the government wants to increase the number of trees it's planting significantly, then first of all, there have to be people out there who will go out and collect the seeds. All right. Now, uh, seed collectors apparently are pretty specialized group. Um,

depending on the species, you know, sometimes you don't need a lot of skill for it, but apparently I understand from some conversations I've had that, uh, that some seed collectors really need to know what they're doing. They need to have access to land in order to do it. They need to be experienced enough that they can do so efficiently. But then you have to have nurseries that are taking these seeds and growing them into trees that reach a certain level of maturity so they can be planted. And that supply chain already exists because the forestry industry needs,

for example, if they clear cut an area or they cut an area, they need to be able to replant it. Usually there's requirements that they do so. The greenhouses and nurseries are very important players in all of this. And then you have tree planting organizations. And how does that work? So are people literally, they've got saplings and they're going out into certain areas of land and they're digging a hole and they're planting the trees then? Yes, sometimes. Sometimes. I also understand that in certain contexts, some of this is automated.

There are actual machines that are used for planting in certain contexts, but you can't always use that machinery, particularly, for example, in remote areas or where soil conditions aren't appropriate. And if you were, I guess, so you can use sometimes machinery, sometimes real people, which is, it sounds like a very labor-intensive activity. Like how many trees are we talking,

like per day can someone actually plant? You're asking the wrong person. I don't actually know. I've never done it myself. So our intern Andrew actually did speak to a few people who have planted these trees. So let's hear what they've planted. The most trees I've planted in a single day. The most trees I've planted in a day. The most trees I've ever planted in a day is 5,100. Is 4,500. Is 5,300. The most trees I've planted in a single day is 5,400. The most trees.

Most trees. The most trees. The most trees I've planted in a single day is 4,460. 3,900. 5,600. 4,200. Is 10,380. I have planted 5,260 trees in one day.

Wow. These are big numbers. Okay, so the idea here is that these trees are going to help us meet our climate goals in Canada. So let's actually get into the details of this then. Matt, how effective are forests when it comes to reducing greenhouse gases? Well, I mean, they're actually great at addressing this problem. But different forests perform differently. And, you know, mature forests with lots of older trees in them tend to perform better. And one of the issues here is that we're talking about restoring forests that may have been degraded or destroyed entirely.

And so, you know, a lot of these saplings that we plant won't be actually sequestering much carbon dioxide in the first many years of their lives. I'm certainly not an arborist or an expert in how much carbon the various species remove from the atmosphere, but certainly a tree that's 40 or 50 years old is going to perform a lot better than a tiny sapling, as you can appreciate. And how long would it take a tiny sapling that was just planted to reach, I guess, maturity or to be big enough that it would actually make a difference in that CO2 sequestering? Really depends on the species. But typically, you're looking at a matter of decades before the tree really is sucking a lot of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

And of course, when we think about our forests here in Canada, I mean, something that comes up every year around this time is wildfire season, right? A lot of our forests end up burning every year. How does that affect the ability for forests to help reduce greenhouse gases? Well, in fact, forest fires are one reason why Canada's forests right now are actually a net source of carbon rather than sucking them up.

Because when you burn a large swath of forest, all that carbon that was stored, or the vast majority of it anyway, gets released into the atmosphere. And now you also have an area of forest that's, there's no trees there, or there's very few. And, and so it's the annual carbon dioxide that it removes is far less than it was before. In fact, it's my understanding that largely the amount of carbon that gets released

in forest fires in Canada isn't included in our national emissions that we disclose. Really? This was something that was actually raised in the commissioner's recent report, was that that's not being accounted for. And if we did, it would be a substantial increase in our overall national emissions. It's not inconsequential, that's for sure. It's really interesting because we think always just the forests as kind of helping us, you know, take in carbon dioxide, but really this is a huge source of carbon dioxide emissions now.

Well, particularly when large swaths of forest are burning in the way that they have in recent years. So you have an event like, for example, the 2016 forest fires in and around Fort McMurray. That represents a large release of greenhouse gases, yes. Yeah. Okay. I want to talk about tree longevity here. So how long do the trees have to stay standing in order to get these benefits? Well, it really depends on what you're growing and where you're growing it again. In terms of tree survival, the first few years are pretty crucial. You've got to plant the right tree in the right place and you've got to monitor it. And if problems develop, you've got to be willing and able to address that. So a lot of these programs that have – where they failed, there's a whole bunch of reasons why they fail. One of them is if the right monitoring isn't done, then you don't even

know that you've failed, right? Or you don't know you're failing until it's too late. And are there any rules in place to make sure that these trees don't get cut down at any point? Well, this is one of the more controversial aspects of this particular project. So my understanding from the administrators is they looked into whether they should get legal covenants put into the agreements they were signing with landowners, basically, that would say that you are not allowed to cut down these trees at some future date. And what they heard back from people they were talking to was if you do that, the program will not be successful. And the reason is because many landowners may balk at that.

And so for whatever reason, the government had decided that that was just too risky and they're not doing it. So there's no guarantee that all these trees were planting, that a significant number of them won't be harvested at some point. Okay, so let's go back to the audit, Matt. So this report about the audit was released just last month. How has the government responded to this audit that says it's unlikely the goal is going to be met here? I don't think that the government was particularly surprised by the criticisms. And when I talked to the administrators of this program, and we are already addressing many of the concerns that the commissioner raised in that report. So I guess the proof will be in the pudding, though.

We will see in May of this year, we should have the final numbers from the second season of 2BT. And in future years, we'll see whether the steps that the government is taking now will significantly improve performance. So if we're struggling to plant 2 billion trees, and if the audit found it won't remove as much emissions as initially thought, and these trees can potentially be cut down after a few years, I mean, this plan doesn't seem to be working as well as it's supposed to. It just makes me wonder because, of course, we already have a lot of forests in Canada. I mean, are we also focusing on protecting the forests and the trees that we already have? It's a difficult question to answer because there are certainly people in this country

who are working to preserve forests. I'm speaking recently with a charity out of New Brunswick called Community Forest International, and they work with landowners in New Brunswick to protect mature forests. And like many people in that sphere, they say this is actually far more important than trying to restore damaged forests after the fact and will deliver better results. But when you start getting into that sphere, now you're potentially going to get into conflicts with the forestry industry. So I think that area becomes more politically difficult. I mean, especially if you're talking about, okay, we're going to put place restrictions on the forestry industry. And that's not something that we've done a ton of. Yeah. Yeah. In 2021, Canada's forestry sector

added 34 billion to the GDP. So not nothing. I mean, it sounds like politically it's easier to plant trees maybe than it actually is to protect them. I think that's an astute observation. Matt, what happens if we don't actually get to 2 billion trees? Like, will it all be for nothing if we only plant 1 billion? Well, the government has painted itself in a corner here by sending a numerical target, right? So numbers aren't everything in this game. It really depends on whether the right trees are being planted in the right place at the right time.

If you plant 2 billion trees in the wrong place, then you won't get much benefit at all. And in fact, there have been cases internationally and probably in this country as well where the wrong trees have been planted and they've become an invasive species and they actually cause net harm. So although there's a lot of focus on the numbers here, when we're looking back at this in two decades, it's probably not just the numbers that we will be looking at. We'll be wondering about what the health of these forests are and what they're actually accomplishing. Matt, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. It's been a pleasure to be here. Before we go, a quick update. Last week, we told you about the crisis happening in Sudan right now,

and we spoke with a couple, Ahmed Osman and Isra Fadl, who were stuck in the capital, Khartoum. Well, late last week, Isra and Ahmed got back in touch with our producer Rachel and told us that they were evacuated on a Royal Canadian Air Force plane to Kenya. So they've now gotten out to safety. In Sudan's capital, though, the fighting between the military and the paramilitary force, the RSF, is continuing into its third week. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms.

Our interns are Wafa El-Rayis, Andrew Hines, and Tracy Thomas. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.