It's in this connection that I was talking about marginal land. In my talk I said, let us exclude classes 1 and 2. Let us not go into the highly productive agricultural lands. Let us focus these land use systems to classes 3 to 6, and we are blessed with 46 million hectares that are currently available.
Trees can reclaim those lands, depending on the type of system that you are talking about. I also work with the Canadian Wood Fibre Centre, for Natural Resources Canada, and we established a short-rotation willow plantation in 2009. By 2016, in about six years, they were sequestering at the rate of about five tonnes of carbon dioxide per hectare per year. That land was not considered for agriculture because it was considered abandoned land.
These land use systems can contribute not only to climate change mitigation and adaptation but also to ecosystem services. That is the other side of these land use systems.