Trees are without a doubt the best carbon capture technology in the world. When they perform photosynthesis, they pull carbon dioxide out of the air, bind it up in sugar, and release oxygen. Trees use sugar to build wood, branches, and roots. Wood is an incredible carbon sink because it is mostly made of carbon (about 50%), it lasts for years as a standing tree, and takes years to break down after the tree dies. While trees mainly store carbon, they do release some carbon, such as when their leaves decompose, or their roots burn sugar to capture nutrients and water. Forests are an important carbon sink, since both trees and soils are able to store large amounts of carbon for a long time. However, carbon management is not just about deciding which trees to cut, but also where harvesting and planting occurs on the landscape. The Boreal Forest in Canada is the largest intact forest left on Earth.
The carbon that is sequestered in forests comes in many forms. For example, forest soils contain plant roots, leaf litter, and other dissolved organic material. The amount of carbon stored in forest soils is variable, and how much carbon soil can sequester is dependent on many local factors like geology, soil type, and vegetation. In some forests, like in Canada by the tundra, the soil holds more carbon than the trees, but in other forests, like the rainforest, the soil holds relatively little carbon and the trees store more carbon. This is because some soil types, like clay soils, can bind up a large amount of carbon, whereas sandy soils are not able to bind much carbon. Soils with more organic material (bits of wood, decaying leaves, or dead creatures) can store more carbon because organic material easily binds loose carbon molecules and the organic material itself is stored as carbon.
Forests in temperate climates, such as North America, offer an ideal middle-of-the-road solution. The trees grow relatively quickly and many species are long-lived. A recent NASA study estimates that tropical forests annually absorb 1.4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide out of a total global absorption of 2.5 billion metric tons. Researchers say that this is more than the amount absorbed by the boreal forest in Canada, Siberia and other northern regions. Forests capture and store enormous amounts of carbon, preventing it from escaping into the atmosphere and intensifying climate change. The Boreal Forest in Canada alone holds about 12 percent of the world’s land-based carbon reserves. Most forests store carbon in living plants, but the boreal in Canada holds up to 95 percent of its carbon riches in soil, peatlands and permafrost – features that can accumulate and hold carbon over the course of thousands of years.1
Why is the Boreal Forest so important? This Boreal Forest is the largest intact forest left on Earth. It holds 25% of the world’s wetlands. It captures massive amounts of carbon, preventing the equivalent of up to 36 years’ worth of global carbon emissions from escaping into the atmosphere and intensifying climate change. Canada’s boreal forest (over 270 million hectares) stores carbon, purifies the air and water, and regulates the climate. Because a large portion of the world’s boreal zone lies in Canada (28% or 552 million hectares), thus this country’s boreal forest affects the health of the environment worldwide. Most of the carbon in the boreal forest is stored in the soil – in the deep layer of organic material that has fallen off of trees and plants over thousands of years. The Boreal Forest serves as a giant shield in the fight against climate change.
About 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity is on lands managed by Indigenous Peoples. A University of British Columbia study looked at land and species data from Canada, Australia and Brazil and found that the number of birds, mammals, amphibians, and reptiles were highest on lands managed by Indigenous communities. In Canada, Indigenous Nations are already leading the biggest, most ambitious plans for sustaining healthy lands and waters. Three Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCA) created in the Northwest Territories since 2018 total over 50,000 sq km combined – about the size of Costa Rica. Scores of Indigenous Nations are in the process of creating additional IPCAs. Taken together, these proposed areas could conserve over 500,000 sq km. Harvesting is considered sustainable when decisions are based on silvicultural knowledge and follow a long-term management plan.
Ensuring Canada’s forests are a force for climate good is going to require a comprehensive, sophisticated, and sustained approach to fires and forest management. In spite of this vast potential, however, Canada’s forests have actually been a net source of carbon emissions for the better part of two decades, releasing into the air more carbon than they absorb, according to Natural Resources Canada data. In 2018, emissions from wildfires in B.C. alone were three times greater than the entire province’s annual carbon output. Currently, most fire management strategies do not include a focus on limiting carbon emissions from burning forests, which is by far the largest source of carbon emissions from Canadian forests in recent years. With hotter, drier summers increasingly the norm as climate change accelerates, minimizing as much as possible the number and severity of boreal forest fires becomes increasingly important, and will mean investing more in monitoring and fire suppression to limit fire size.
The amount of carbon released into the atmosphere from harvesting activity is small when compared to the amount released by forest fires through combustion and insect infestations that kill trees and cause premature decomposition. On average, areas affected by forest fires, for example, are 2.5 times larger than areas harvested, according to NRCan, representing a significant amount of carbon that goes up in smoke. The good news is that improved forest management can be a cost-effective way to meet climate targets. For example, a fire management regime in boreal forests that reduces the size of fires and their emissions could cost as little as $12 US per ton of carbon output avoided, according to Carly Phillips, the lead author of the Science Advances study. That is less per ton than generating electricity using solar panels or deploying other emissions-abatement technologies like carbon capture, utilization, and storage.
When a tree is harvested and milled into lumber, a small amount of that carbon escapes, but most of it remains trapped within the cellular structure of the wood, effectively prolonging the effect of sequestration. Replacing dying or low productivity stands can improve a forest’s ability to capture and store carbon and contribute to climate change mitigation. This can be done by planting tree mixes that are more resilient and protecting young sprouts from damage after harvest. A U.N. report explains that the largest GHG emission mitigation benefit, in the long term, comes not from reducing harvest volumes but from adopting a sustainable forest management strategy aimed at maintaining or increasing forest carbon stocks, while producing an annual yield of timber, fiber or energy from the forest. Clearcutting disturbs soils, wetlands, and peatlands, releasing their vast carbon stores, and diminishes the boreal forest’s ability to sequester carbon from the atmosphere.
The combination of the “better utilization” approach (increasing the utilization of wood harvested and ensuring that a higher percentage of residues are used as fiber inputs and/or in bioenergy production), along with promoting the development of products that can store carbon for longer, was by far the most effective strategy for most Canadian forest locations. Managing forests through the growth and harvest cycles can also have an important role in carbon mitigation efforts. Forest management practices that would help lower emissions include using wood left after harvesting and trimming, which is currently burned in slash piles, and protecting more primary forests from logging. Generally, clear cut logging exceeds mining industry in negative effects. However, extraction is an essential component of the global movement toward electrification, and new mining projects are appearing on the horizon. The ones affecting forests need to be reviewed closely.
Among terrestrial ecosystems and their habitats, forests have the highest carbon sequestration rates, reaching up to three times that of wetlands and agroecosystems. Wyloo Metals estimates that, along with the nickel that it owns in the Ring of Fire, an area larger than Rhode Island, and the deposits of platinum, palladium, copper and chromite could be worth $67 billion. These deposits of rare metals are buried under a swampy expanse of spruce forests and rivers in northern Ontario. Here lies one of the world’s richest untapped sources of nickel, copper and cobalt – metals that are essential for making the batteries that power electric vehicles. But these precious commodities are buried under a vast ecosystem of peat bogs, known by local groups as “the breathing lands” that holds more carbon per square foot, than even the Amazon rainforest. Digging them up could trigger the release of more greenhouse gas than Canada emits in one year, turning one of the earth’s biggest carbon sinks into a major source of emissions.
The Hudson Bay Lowlands are often cited as the second-largest peatland complex in the world, after the Western Siberian Lowlands in Russia. Ontario’s lowlands squirrel away 30 billion tonnes of carbon and soak up more from the atmosphere every year. With threats to the boreal forest only growing as the climate changes, protecting these important lands is more critical than ever before. The world is facing twin crises: rapid biodiversity loss and climate change. The size of the challenge demands that we work at an unprecedented pace to conserve the natural areas that are our life support systems. Our collective actions will determine the nature that will be saved, and the nature that will be lost. Canada has an important role to play in meeting this challenge.2
Our actions must include processes that reduce inputs. The mining industry uses a large amount of water and land in their operations. Collective actions in the Ring of Fire region must adopt low-impact mining techniques that include the ability to reduce surface disturbance at mining sites and lower soil erosion. Low-impact mining techniques such as in-situ leaching will minimise soil erosion, reducing surface disturbance as well as moving less material needing backfilling. This is a positive solution for both the mineworkers and our environment. Up-cycling transforms waste and unwanted products into new or alternative products. For example, waste rock can be used as a material in landscaping projects or tailings, a common by-product of the mineral recovery process, can be given new life in the form of resins and glass to bricks and cement. Water can easily be recycled for use in the dust suppression process.
Canada’s boreal forest is often called “The Lungs of the Earth.” Spanning almost 300 million hectares, it is the Earth’s largest terrestrial carbon sink, has some of the most intact forest left on Earth, and provides habitat for countless species of plants and animals, including over 300 species of birds. Its deep peatlands capture and store carbon at the highest rates of any northern ecosystem. Andrew Forrest, the Australian billionaire owner of the most promising mining assets in Ontario’s Ring of Fire region, says the viability of the critical minerals project is at risk because of Canada’s regulatory burden, its cumbersome consultation process and persistent delays in building crucial infrastructure. On the other hand, to protect the secret of the forest: it is necessary to reduce outputs, implement proper waste disposal, reusing mine waste, use eco-friendly equipment, and rehabilitate mining sites. Basically, the project begins with adopting such processes as lower-impact mining techniques like in-situ leaching mining that can reduce the environmental impact.3
1 https://www.borealforestfacts.com/?p=550
2 https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/what-on-earth-ring-of-fire-peatlands-1.6388489