Twice the size of California, Canada’s Boreal Forest is being set aside to collect and store Carbon, effectively acting as a planetary lung.
Soaking up an incredible 22% of the carbon stored on the earth’s land surface, the Boreal Forest is a seemingly endless expanse of evergreen forests.
The conservation drive bans logging, mining, and oil drilling on some 250 million acres. The sheer scale of the forest conservation drive is somewhat of an anomaly for Canada, whose government has been accused of sabotaging the global climate change talks by its development of the Alberta tar sands and its refusal to make deep cuts in its greenhouse gas emissions.
A report by the International Boreal Conservation Campaign said the forests, with their rich mix of trees, wetlands, peat and tundra, were a far bigger carbon store than scientists had realized.
“If you look across Canada one of [the boreal forest's] great values to us globally is its carbon storage value,” said Steve Kallick, director of the Pew Environment Group’s International Boreal Conservation Campaign. “There is so much carbon sequestered in it already that if it escaped it would pose a whole new, very grave threat.”
It is unclear how long Canada’s forests can continue to serve as carbon vaults. “As the climate warms, the place is going to dry up. There will be a problem with insect infestation. There is going to be increased natural carbon release due to fire or wetlands drying up,” said Sue Libenson, a spokeswoman for the International Boreal Conservation Campaign.
But she added: “The general premise is that there is still a hell of a lot of carbon in there.” Its release would be a climate catastrophe.
Canada’s 1.3 billion acres of boreal forest store the equivalent of 27 years’ worth of current global greenhouse gas emissions, a Greenpeace study found. The destruction of those forests, scientists warn, would be like setting off a massive “carbon bomb” because of the sudden release of emissions.
“Canada is torn between wanting to promote the tar sands and make money off it now, and wanting to live up to its promises under the Kyoto accord. But as far as protecting carbon rich ecosystems, particularly the boreal forest, Canada is a world leader,” said Kallick.
Source: Guardian 
photo credit: 416style
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Sounds great, but there’s a lot of info missing: is this conservation effort a gov’t plan, a piece of legislation, an environmental organization’s dream? I can’t tell if it’s a done deal or a gleam in someone’s eye.