Scientists push to preserve Canada’s boreal forest
Posted on December 15th, 2008By Lauren Morello
Climatewire: At 1.4 billion acres, Canada’s broad belt of boreal forest is one of the largest sinks, or storage places, for carbon dioxide on Earth — bigger even than the Amazon rainforest. A group of U.S. and Canadian scientists has begun pushing hard to keep it that way.
Organized last month under the auspices of the Pew Charitable Trusts, a 14-member panel of researchers is lobbying leaders of Canada’s provinces to protect half of the nearly pristine forest land from logging, mining and other development.
The effort comes after more than 1,500 scientists around the world signed a March 2007 letter asking Canadian government officials to protect the forest, which they said was “under siege.”
“I think the news is that we scientists have often sat and said, ‘We wish people would listen to us,’” said Stuart Pimm, a panel member and a conservation ecologist at Duke University. “On the boreal, we’ve spoken up and governments are listening to us.”
Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty announced in mid-July that he would preserve at least 55 million acres, leaving half of the province’s boreal forest off-limits to development.
McGuinty’s plan would prohibit new mining or logging projects until local native communities approve land-use plans.
“It’s unspoiled and undisturbed, and if there’s one thing we know for sure, it’s not going to stay that way forever unless we do something,” McGuinty told reporters when he introduced the plan.
Last month, Quebec Premier Jean Charest announced a similar pledge to set aside at least half of Quebec’s boreal forest and create five provincial parks. Charest also committed to planting 100 million trees on 100,000 hectares — about 250,000 acres — to create a new carbon sink of at least 80,000 metric tons of carbon.
The boreal forest, stretching from Alaska in the west to Newfoundland in the east, is already the world’s largest land-bank carbon sink. It sequesters or stores about 186 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide — roughly equal to about 27 years’ worth of global carbon emissions, scientists said.
Nature’s largest land-based carbon capture and sequestration project
It’s also home to large freshwater lakes and serves as an important wintering ground for many songbirds that spend the rest of the year in the United States. Bears, moose, caribou and lynx make their home in the forest.
But as it now stands, just a fraction of the forest — about 10 percent — is protected from logging, mining and other development, including the extraction of tar sands in western Canada.
That’s of concern, given that about a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions result from logging, Pimm said.
Now he and others are trying to pitch protecting the forest as an advantage in the climate fight. They’re also planning to undertake new research on the boreal ecosystem to aid future planning by government officials, native tribes, industry and environmental groups.
“The amount of carbon sequestration occurring in those forests is vast,” said Jeremy Kerr, an ecologist at the University of Ottawa. For Ontario and Quebec, which participate in the Western Climate Initiative, preserving the forest could help ease efforts to cut their carbon emissions.
“It’s a certainty that you cannot balance the carbon budget without these forests,” Kerr said. “It’s a titanic advantage for these provinces.”
In the west, the campaign to protect the boreal forest may be a harder sell, the scientists said, due to tar sands development. But the benefits of protecting the forest will extend beyond provincial borders, to the United States and the world, Pimm said.
“The action we need is regional,” he said. “The results will be global.”