Two more lots of forestry

Two more forests the size of Belgium have made the news this week.


Firstly UNESCO has recommended a tract of Canadian forest as a World Heritage site.  It was reported by the Globe and Mail newspaper.

The Pimachiowin Aki, 33,400 square kilometres of mostly untouched wilderness (about the size of Belgium), is home to one of the largest herds of woodland caribou south of Hudson Bay as well as many other species of animals, birds, insects and fish.


And the largest private forest owner in Europe (a company called SCA) uses an area the size of Belgium to make personal hygiene products. This was reported by CNBC.

One of the additional gems for SCA is that it owns 2.6 million hectares of forest land, equivalent to the size of Belgium, making it the largest “private forest owner in Europe.

A lot of forestry

There has been a burst of forest-related references to Belgium recently.

The Vancouver sun reports on the historic forest fire of 1919.

“In 1919, the biggest forest fire in recorded Canadian history swept through Alberta’s boreal forest just south of where Fort McMurray now suffers. That fire burned through 30,000-square-kilometres of timber and razed Lac La Biche, the town now providing safe haven for evacuees from the north.

The fire began near Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. It blackened an area the size of Belgium.”


 

The New Zealand Listener reports on how much forest would be needed to evaporate a lot of milk.

“Robert Spurway, Fonterra’s managing director global operations, says the company wants to “transition away from coal” and is trialling renewables such as miscanthus – a tall grass with high biomass properties – geothermal, wind, solar, biogas and wood biomass. But he says there are “no viable alternatives” to coal in the South Island at present. The sheer volume of energy needed to dry milk into powder is such that shifting from coal to wood in its South Island plants would require “an area the size of Belgium” – about three million hectares – to be planted in trees, he claims.”


 

Finally the Earth Touch News Network seems out of touch with the true size of Minkébé National Park, even though they included a link to the Wikipedia article about it in their report.

“Minkébé National Park in northern Gabon has been of particular focus in recent years. An area the size of Belgium, it was once home to tens of thousands of forest elephants, and still contains a large proportion of Gabon’s total population.”

In fact it is only one quarter the size of Belgium. The publication has repeated the error in a 2015 BBC article (mentioned on the Bloopers page of this blog). There is however an interesting video of an elephant charging the camera in the article.

 

116 Residents in Area the Size of Belgium

Academic website The Conversation has a report on the Australian local government councils.

“The 565 councils in Australia range greatly in size. The largest, Brisbane City Council in Queensland, has an annual operating budget of A$2.9 billion and serves a community of just over a million people. It covers an area of 133,809 hectares.

The smallest, Sandstone Shire Council in Western Australia, comprises a population of 116 and covers a land area of 3,266,650 ha. This is comparable to the size of Belgium. It had an annual operating budget in 2014 of $3.4 million.”

 

Hainan, China’s island province is the size of Belgium

Donald Trump’s comments about China’s island-building in the South China Sea attracted some analysis by the US-based fact-checking site Politifact. The article mentions the province of Hainan.

“Hainan Island, which is roughly the size of Belgium, is not one of the contested territories.”

Our Ruling

Hainan at 12,822 square miles is close to the size of Belgium (11,787) but a more accurate measure would be Moldova at 13,068 square miles.

We rate Politifact’s claim to be “Mostly True”.

Sharks secured in a Belgium-sized area

The Guardian reports today that

“Ecuador creates Galápagos marine sanctuary to protect sharks. Belgium-sized area around northern islands of Darwin and Wolf will be off-limits for fishing in bid to conserve sharks and unique habitat. 

Some 15,000 square miles (38,000 sq km) of the waters around Darwin and Wolf – the most northern islands – will be made off limits to all fishing to conserve the sharks that congregate there and the ecosystem on which they rely.”

38,000 sq km is in fact the size of Bhutan, not Belgium (30,000 sq km) but it is easy to confuse the low-lying EU country with the mountainous Himalayan kingdom.

MH370 search zone is “four times the size of Belgium”

The Daily Mail published a Q & A article about the status of the search for missing flight MH370. According to the article, which was sourced from AFP “So far, they have covered about 70 percent of a designated search zone four times the size of Belgium and are expected to be finished within months. “

An area of 4 x Belgium is roughly the same as

  • 6 x Israel
  • 3 x The Netherlands
  • 3 x Switzerland
  • 1 x North Korea
  • 1/2 x The United Kingdom

So why did the journalist choose Belgium?  I doubt we will ever find out.

 

Preparing to defend Belgium against Russian annexation?

In a BBC Newsbeat report today …

Royal Marines train US forces in Arctic over fears of Russian aggression

British Royal Marines are training their American counterparts in Arctic warfare for the first time.

The new Arctic training for US marines is happening in an area the size of Belgium.

The article does not explain why the training zone is the size of Belgium, but consider what happened to the Crimea, which is often reported as “a territory about the size of Belgium“.

“Canada Just Protected A Rainforest Twice The Size Of Belgium”

The title is in quotes because they are taken from  a headline in The Huffington Post.

The article continues “Environmentalists are hailing the Canadian government’s landmark deal to protect 85 percent of the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia from logging and development — an area more than twice the size of Belgium.”

It is remarkable how yet again we see a multiple of Belgium being used when the 6.4 million hectares being protected are close to the actual size of Latvia or Sri Lanka.