It’s a place internationally synonymous with the fight against climate change, but Japan’s Kyoto — the place where the landmark Kyoto Protocol was adopted — is desperate to cut down its trees.

As a swathe of maple leaves flame an autumnal red in Kyoto prefecture, tourists flock to watch the annual spectacle. Residents, and students of Kyoto’s only forest research course, watch too, wistfully.

Over 70 per cent of Kyoto’s area is privately-owned forests. But with the current emphasis on protecting the environment, and with little protection against the influx of cheap foreign wood, local businesses of logging and crafting the delicate, sand-coloured Kitayamasuki — Japanese cedar — are getting strangled.

Ironically, this is also leading to a rise in ‘wood mileage’ — an increase in the carbon footprint and resource load of the wood that has to travel long distances to reach Japan. According to estimates by the local administration, one cubic metre of foreign wood used in Kyoto emits 150 kg of carbon dioxide.

Kyoto now wants to remind the world that before the Protocol and the import industry, its chief occupation was logging the trees that fill its forests today. The city government of Kyoto prefecture is offering a subsidy to builders who choose Kyoto’s native cedar over foreign wood.

“Many of these forests are man-made. They need to be logged periodically so the forest can be healthy. We have to go back to what we did. The foreign imports have ruined the home industry,” said Natsuko Fujita, one of the 10 girls in senior grade at Kyoto’s Kitukawada senior high school’s forestry research section.

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