Canada owns about 10% of the world's forests.
Three quarters of our forests are boreal forests and we have
a stewardship responsibility to understand how these
forests contribute to the global carbon cycle
in the exchange of greenhouse gases with the atmosphere.
The research that we are doing with the Canadian Forest
Service and in collaboration with provinces and even
internationally is aimed at quantifying the contribution
of Canada's forests to the global carbon cycle.
One of the differences between managed and natural forests
is that in the natural forest carbon is taken up from the
atmosphere by trees and recycled back
into the atmosphere through decomposition
and forest fires.
In the managed forest, we take the wood and the carbon
to meet society's needs.
A managed landscape tends to store somewhat less carbon
than a natural forest landscape,
but because it's generally younger forests,
that landscape takes up much more carbon
from the atmosphere.
Some people argue that we should conserve forests
for the sake of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The problem with that argument is that unless we reduce
society's needs for timber, fibre and energy,
these will have to be met through other means.
That means we either go somewhere else to harvest
or we use alternative products such as aluminium,
steel and concrete to meet these demands and all of these
have high fossil fuel emissions associated with them.
Canada has a long history of sustainable forest management
and as it turns out, the objectives of sustainable
forest management are generally compatible
with the objectives of good carbon management.
We have opportunities through the management of forests
to increase sinks and reduce sources and we need to explore
how we can develop mitigation strategies to help us address
global climate change through the management of our forests.
One of the goals of sustainable forest management
is that we achieve a balance between the amount we harvest
every year and the amount that is re-growing every year.
A sustainably managed forest can have stable carbon stocks
while at the same time providing, every year;
energy, fibre and timber to meet society's needs.
That is in the long run how we achieve the greatest
mitigation benefit.