Report on P.E.I. forests delayed, but also superceded by Fiona damage

The release of P.E.I.'s 2020 State of the Forest report has been delayed until mid-2023.

The report comes out once per decade, after assessing the health of the Island's forests through an analysis of aerial photography.

Minister of Environment Steven Myers began raising the alarm in the spring of 2021, telling the legislature that based on information gathered for the report, it would take a generation to repair damage done through deforestation over the previous decade.

According to Myers and officials from his department, a preliminary analysis showed the amount of forested land in the province had fallen 20 per cent since 1990, with most of that decline occurring between 2010 and 2020.

At the time, Myers said the province needed to develop incentives to encourage people to preserve and maintain woodlots, while looking at options to penalize land owners for clear cutting.

He also said the report from his department would be released in the spring of 2022, although officials said it could be later than that.

This past summer, officials said the report would be released in December 2022. Now they're pointing to June 2023.

CBC News asked multiple times to speak to the minister but he was not made available for an interview.

Fiona changed everything

Whatever the state of deforestation on P.E.I. might have been as of Sept. 23, 2022, by the next day post-tropical storm Fiona had changed everything.

Utility crews had to remove more than 35,000 downed trees just to restore power, a process which took more than three weeks for some customers.

Gary Schneider manages the Orwell-based MacPhail Woods Ecological Forestry Project, a demonstration woodlot he developed more than 30 years ago.

He said the aerial photographs from 2020 which will form the basis of the new State of the Forest report are out of date — and given how much time has passed, they would have been even without the damage from Fiona.

He said more data must be collected and analyzed if the province is to learn the lessons needed to build back more resilient forests, better able to withstand the next storm.

"We really need to use this as an opportunity to make things better," he said.

One of the recommendations to come from an emergency forestry task force struck by the province in late October is for the province to "acquire pre- and post-hurricane satellite imagery for the entire province" in order to "quantify the extent of the storm's impact on P.E.I.'s forests."

'What types of forests came down?'

But Schneider said the analysis needs to go beyond how many trees came down and where, to understand why.

"What types of forests came down? How old were they?" Schneider said. "If they were a lot of mixed forest, that's one thing to learn from. If there were a lot of plantations or old-field white spruce, that's another thing to learn lessons from."

Schneider says from what he's seen, shallow-rooted trees were the most likely to come down during Fiona, including stands of white spruce and entire plantations of red pine.

Why put all your eggs in one basket, right? You've got 26 species of trees here that are native to P.E.I., and we need to use those.— Gary Schneider

He said the province should provide woodlot owners with incentives to encourage mixed plantings — something to simulate the old Acadian forest that covered P.E.I. before most of it was cleared for agriculture. 

Schneider said those mixed forests would be more resilient in the face of climate change, which is expected to bring windier weather systems more often.

"Why put all your eggs in one basket, right? You've got 26 species of trees here that are native to P.E.I., and we need to use those."

Process forestry data faster, says Opposition

Opposition MLA Hannah Bell said given the importance of forests as carbon sinks in P.E.I.'s plan to reach net zero carbon emissions, the province has to get faster at turning around forestry data so that the information can be used to develop effective policy.

In terms of the amount of carbon that forests on P.E.I. are able to sequester, Fiona "fundamentally changed those numbers," said Bell. 

"There's a whole bunch of data that's going to have to be rethought now."

P.E.I. has committed to reaching net zero by 2040, and to reduce emissions to 1.2 megatonnes (Mt) by 2030. In the most recent year on record, 2020, P.E.I.'s emissions were 1.6 Mt.

"That's seven years away," said Bell. "We can't spend another three or four years talking about data."