Thanks, Mr. Aldag.
I touched on this. This is a map of the world's soil organic carbon. You hear a lot about the carbon above ground in tropical rainforests and how we need to save those forests, but the way carbon works in the world on land is that it's in one of three places. It's above the ground, in trees and other things—we're all carbon, by the way—or in temperate regions, where it's half in the soil and half in the vegetation, or in northern latitudes it's almost entirely in the soil.
Two of the greatest carbon storehouses in the world are in Canada around the James Bay lowlands and the Mackenzie basin downstream from Great Slave Lake.
Why is that important? If we mobilize that carbon by draining it, it goes into the sky and it becomes a huge source of emissions. Interestingly, there's a fantastic overlap between where carbon is in Canada and where caribou are. If we follow the science on maintaining caribou in the country, we need to keep two-thirds of the caribou range intact or we lose them. It's really simple. It's an ironclad thing. It's been agreed, even in federal-provincial-territorial agreements in the NWT, that if we fragment caribou habitat below a third, we lose them, period.
So the opportunity to get a twofer by protecting carbon in these two places and protecting caribou is fantastic. It's a really important climate change mitigation or avoidance strategy. Draining them will be a catastrophe for the earth.
Similarly, in the Amazon, we need to keep the forest there because the forest generates rain, not only because of the species that live there, but the intactness of the large tropical forests in the Amazon—and the Congo basin—actually generates rain. What that relationship has to do with you and me is that the rainfall in the Amazon drives the snow pack in the Sierra Nevada in California, which drives the production of vegetables that all of us eat in the winter from the central valley of California. There are some estimates that if 20% of the Amazon were cleared—and it's at 18% now—it would shut down and the system would lose resilience and flip to what's called a savannah, which would mean there would be the odd tree with a lot of grass and it would look like the Serengeti. In that case, that rain cycle would shut down and the consequences would be inconceivably bad.
The same applies if we mobilize this organic carbon in northern Canada. We need to think about nature not only as the species and the animals running around, but also as these values. These large wilderness areas generate these enormous values of storing carbon, giving us a stable climate, giving us rainfall. That's part of that third category I talked about in my remarks.
This is a map of the distribution of large mammals, carnivores and ungulates in North America in the past and in the present.
What you see is that in this part of the world there were a lot of large mammals. There were buffalo in Buffalo, New York, for example—or bison. What you see is a range contraction north and west. What happens as we fragment, as we farm, is that we lose large mammals. A really simple rule is the more we reduce their habitat, the more we lose them. In these regions especially, we need to keep big systems of interconnected protected areas. To give you an example, look at where those distributions are in the past, on the left, where the colours are hot; on the right, where there are none, in white. Those are the great farmed areas of the central U.S. That's where all the corn and wheat is grown. You can see a complete diminution, or the dropping out and loss of large mammals.
Where the colours remain hot is exactly where the large protected areas are, which is why the comment about large interconnected protected areas in condition two is so important. We simply won't keep large mammals if we don't have large protected areas that are interconnected.
We need to do the three things across the landscape, and that's my extra two minutes. Thank you.