Thank you.
I'm on page 5, on biological sequestration. By way of background, I want to talk about a couple of ways to reduce greenhouse gases, of which carbon dioxide is the main one.
One way we can do this in Canada is to reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide into the air. That can be achieved in a number of different ways: cleaner fuels, energy efficiency, and technological and process improvements. Marta mentioned the success story of the forest products companies in Canada as a whole; since 1990 our companies, our pulp and paper operations specifically, have reduced carbon dioxide emissions by over 20%, while increasing production by over 50%. If you do the math, that is a dramatic decrease in emissions intensity over our operations. We're quite proud of that, but the fact of the matter is that to get from where we are--and probably where we're going to be--in terms of energy consumption to where we want to be in terms of emission reductions, there needs to be another factor in the equation. Emissions reduction won't do it on its own.
The other factor in the equation is the capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide from the air. That can be achieved in two ways. One way is through geological sequestration, which is basically pumping carbon dioxide from the air into the ground. It's a dramatic and kind of cool way of doing it, but there's another way that is every bit as effective, although perhaps not quite as dramatic: biological sequestration. Biological sequestration is the capture of carbon dioxide into our natural resources--agriculture, oceans, forests. We are the tree-growing company, as Chris mentioned, so I'm here to talk about trees.
During its lifetime a tree will breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen, sequestering over a tonne of carbon dioxide over the life of the tree. Forest management, as has been mentioned by Mary, is a way of increasing the amount of carbon dioxide sequestered by the forests.
I'll move on to page 6, forest management. What is it? There are a couple of ways of increasing the number of trees on a piece of land and thereby decreasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. One is to take a parking lot and plant trees on it. You would increase the number of trees on the land.
Another more subtle approach is what we're doing, which is taking the forested land we already have and increasing the intensity of forest, the intensity of trees, on that given piece of land. J.D. Irving is the leader in the industry in forest management.
There are many things you can do that I won't spend a lot of time talking about in terms of forest management. We've made substantial investments in such things such as tree planting; tree improvement, which is creating faster-growing trees through breeding; vegetation control; fire and pest control; and pre-commercial spacing of our natural forests.
We've also planted over 750 million trees, more than any other private company in Canada. The result is that there are clear and quantifiable benefits to the environment happening now and projected into the future.
I'll go on to page 7. We say it's quantifiable; what does that mean? You can't measure the amount of carbon dioxide that's being sucked out of the air by a tree with a meter. There is scientific research that has shown the extent to which certain forest management activities will increase the carbon stock and thereby increase the amount of carbon dioxide that is being and will be sequestered by trees.
Since 2003 our company has been working closely with the Canadian Forest Service on a model that will assess the future net decrease of carbon dioxide in the air. We've used this model, a carbon budget model, with the Canadian Forest Service to estimate on our land--the land we own and the land we manage--how much carbon dioxide we are taking out of the air through forest management. We're planting trees and we're harvesting trees, but on a net annual basis we are taking 1.2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the air. That's the amount of carbon dioxide we are taking out of the air on a net basis.
I'll move now to page 8. We've done a lot--we're industry leaders, as I mentioned--but we can do more, and we intend to. There are other countries that lag behind us in what they have done and what they can do, so there's a lot of low-hanging fruit out there yet to be picked. There's a lot more that can be done in Canada in terms of forest management and carbon dioxide sequestration. There's enormous untapped potential to achieve additional greenhouse gas reductions through forest management in our company and, more significantly, across the national forest inventory.
I'll move to page 9 now. Just yesterday--hot off the presses--there was a report released by the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy. They looked at the potential role of land use, land use change, and forestry. It predicts that in the next 40 to 50 years these things could contribute a net sink of over 100 million tonnes of sequestered carbon dioxide per year. That's an enormous potential. The report goes on to say that this impact could make a significant contribution to achieving overall climate change policy objectives.
With that, I'll turn it back to Mr. MacDonald to close.