BC’s existing forests, grasslands and wetlands are the largest and best defence against global warming in Canada.
The amount of carbon stored by BC’s forests is enormous – 88 times the total annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from all of Canada. A new report from the Land Trust Alliance of British Columbia (LTABC), Mitigating and Adapting to Climate Change through the Conservation of Nature, has calculated the impact of saving forests and other undisturbed greenspace. In terms of climate change, the carbon stored in BC’s forests is almost a thousand times the province’s annual GHG emissions.
Around the world, forests contain more than half of all terrestrial carbon. They account for about 80 percent of the carbon which is exchanged between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere.
British Columbia’s forests have some of the highest carbon stores in Canada, averaging 311 tonnes per hectare with some coastal forests holding 600 to 1,300 tonnes per hectare. If carbon had a price,this stored carbon would be worth an estimated $62 billion per year, $1,072 per hectare.
The report, Mitigating and Adapting to Climate Change through the Conservation of Nature, authored by economic and climate change experts, Sara J. Wilson and Dr. Richard J. Hebda, highlights the wisdom of conserving intact ecosystems. In British Columbia, virtually all proposed solutions to climate change are about energy, transportation, and other technological advances. Very little attention has been paid to the critical role that our forested lands, grasslands, and wetlands play in actively conserving vast stores of carbon-reducing GHG emissions to the atmosphere.
According to Wilson and Hebda, a BC coastal forest converted to tree plantation or real estate development may, at the end of 50 years, have released hundreds of tonnes per hectare of carbon as carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. “An equivalent area of replanted forest will not have had any positive effect on atmospheric CO2 for decades. Depending on the specific conditions, the replanting strategy may not even have caught up to the steadily accumulating benefits of removed CO2 by a conserved old forest for half a century. Like the proverbial turtle, the slow and steady CO2 removal benefits of a conserved old forest ends up ahead even of a replanted stand in the short and medium term.”
Conserving healthy ecosystems is also a cost effective way to ensure a reliable supply of clean water and mitigate inevitable extreme climatic events such as floods and droughts. These ecosystems also protect biodiversity and the ecological services that drive our economies, as well as less tangible values directly linked to the quality of life in BC.
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The report is available at www.landtrustalliance.bc.ca —Land Trust Alliance of British Columbia, January 17th, 2008