Thank you very much. It is a real pleasure for me to make this presentation here today.
Our three recommendations are for the committee to study and to look at in the coming months. We would like to focus your attention today on three areas. One is federal support for land use planning; the second is climate change in forests; the third is natural capital accounting.
You have our brief in front of you in both languages. Today I am going to touch on some of the highlights of our brief and try to maximize the time we have in our question-and-answer period.
Before I give you an overview, I want to tell you about the Canadian Boreal Initiative. You could look at us somewhat as an all-party committee on Canada's boreal forests. We span across industy, first nations, and conservation groups. We have formal agreements with industry associations, which we are very proud of, with the Forest Products Association of Canada, with the Mining Association of Canada, and others. We are reaching out to the banks. We are bringing the investment sector on board. We are reaching out to develop consumer demand for sustainably managed and marketed forest products. We stand behind the concerns of the industry that they be sustainable over the long term, and we are working toward a vision of balance across our boreal region in Canada, which spans over half of the country.
That is a balance across community sustainability, industry, and conservation. We blend all of those interests together around our table, and we're moving forward together.
I hope that gives you a good context for our focus here today.
Before we speak to our recommendations, we'd like to spend a few moments on the overview of the boreal region in Canada, which Jim Farrell began quite nicely.
There is growing international and national recognition of how important our boreal region is for communities. There are over 600 aboriginal communities that find this region their home. It spans an area from Newfoundland to Yukon. It's uniting to Canadians through many of the symbols of our nation, the art of our nation, and the culture of our nation, and it is the backbone of the industry, our economic sustainability, and it is very much an area of opportunity for conserving a region that is internationally celebrated.
Our boreal region is home to billions of migrating songbirds and some of the largest caribou herds in the world. I'm not sure if you are aware of this, but while the tropical rain forests get a lot of attention as being carbon reservoirs, in fact--and this has been studied--the northern boreal forests around the world are actually the largest land-based reservoir of carbon internationally. That is very significant for climate change in terms of what we can offer the world.
The three countries that have the largest intact areas of boreal forest are Canada, Russia, and Brazil. We all know which country has the best chance. Because of our stability and what we are committed to socially and otherwise, and because of our commitment to sustainability, Canada has the best opportunity in the world to advance a strategy for balance across this region.
The Canadian Boreal Initiative was formed to work across parties and to move forward more proactively on solutions because we don't have the benefit of time. The land base is changing very rapidly. The dynamics are changing very rapidly. And we call ourselves a living lab for solutions, to put solutions forward at a time in Canada where the region is in transition. We are working in partnership with resource companies.
Some of our leadership companies are Suncor, AlPac, and Domtar, and in the midst of this tough economic time that particularly the forest sector has been facing, our forestry companies remain committed to forest certification and have certified 42 million acres collectively in Canada. So to be able to certify and change logging practices is also a tool for sustainability.
We have over 15 first nations partners across Canada. The reason I am here solo today is that we have a first nations partnership meeting actually right now, this morning, in Edmonton. They are moving forward on some very exciting work, and the keystone of that work is called comprehensive land use planning. I will get to that in a moment. We are working very much in partnership with them to advance how they design across their traditional territories road maps for balance. We are working very closely with them.
We have agreements in development or finalized with various governments. In Newfoundland and Manitoba we're working with two federal agencies. We're working actively in all provinces and jurisdictions across the boreal region and we work very closely as well with conservation organizations, which are focused a great deal right now in terms of advancing protected areas.
One of the major regions we're focused on right now is the Mackenzie Valley and how we can bring balance collectively in the Mackenzie Valley. These decisions are being made now in advance of the proposed pipeline in that region.
I'd like to focus on three recommendations we would proactively support the committee in studying. We feel you have a very important role to play. We would very much like to work with you in the months ahead.
The first is restoring federal support for land use planning. One of the best solutions the Boreal Initiative and our partners are supporting is regional land use planning. This is where aboriginals--first nations and Métis--work on a government-to-government basis with the provinces and territories and at the federal level to design the future look of the landscape. Where do we develop? What do we protect? Where are the culturally significant areas?
Many of our industry partners are engaged proactively and say to us that this is a tool for business certainty. This is a way to map for the future, where we operate and where we do not. There are very positive initiatives in many jurisdictions, and we are supporting those very actively in a number of ways.
About 60% of Canada's boreal region is under some form of planning right now. The challenge there is that many of these exercises require significant costs to do well. The provinces are struggling to cover that. They feel the federal government has supported more in the past than they are now. We are working in partnership with a number of jurisdictions to try to bring the federal government back to the table more actively. It very much fits under the duty to consult. That is a responsibility at the federal level as well. We would really encourage you to look at this issue because it's a very important one. The jurisdictions and the first nations would like to see the federal government back at the table in a stronger way.
The second area is climate change and forests. We're not sure if you're aware of this, but under the Kyoto Protocol a decision needs to be made in 2006. That decision is whether Canada decides to include forests in its climate change plan or not. This is an issue right in front of us right now, and we would encourage the committee to look at this. This has been an ongoing issue for FPAC as well and many players from many sectors. We feel you can have a very interesting analysis of this, and it really has not captured the kind of attention it needs. It's an issue that has certain complexities. You can't just take energy solutions and apply them in the forest. Certain gains have been made by the forest sector in terms of renewable energy. We would like to look at how we incentivize taking that out into the field.
I have some basic statistics on this. Forests are now responsible for about 25% of all emissions worldwide. That's largely due to changes in forest practices. There are ways you can manage. As Marta said, you can manage your forest practices for climate change benefits. As an example, the Innu Nation, which is a partner of ours, has a forest management plan where they've reduced their carbon dioxide emissions by half--very fascinating. We think you could be very interested in that story. There also is a place for protected areas as carbon reservoirs. So it's very much a tool and an area of focus that can be applied across the board.
The third area is natural capital accounting. Of all the provinces and territories, Alberta has done the most work in this area. It looks at how nature provides an economic benefit, how we can protect those capital reserves for the future, and what kind of capital preservation and accounting strategies we should follow to make those a standard part of our decision-making framework. Right now, the recognition of ecosystems and the wealth that they generate for Canada is not accounted for on the balance sheets in our accounting systems at Statistics Canada, and we would very much support your looking at that. It's a very interesting area.
We did a study over the last two years. We contracted an environmental economist who actually advises China and Alberta most closely, and we came up with our own system of natural capital accounting, which showed--and this is preliminary--that there's roughly two and a half times greater overall non-market value from boreal ecosystem services than from capital extractions. So that's flood control, and that's carbon sequestration. We're not trying to denigrate the value of the other activities in the forest but just show you that there's a great value of, for instance, birds for pest control. That's a very interesting area.
There are real data gaps. There are fiscal and monetary policies that could be looked at in this area. It actually aligns with accountability to Parliament in terms of proper reporting. So we think this could be a fruitful area for you as well.
In closing, I just want to recognize that one of our partners, the World Wildlife Fund, has also sent in a letter encouraging the committee to look at issues in and around the Mackenzie Valley, an area of great importance that I referred to earlier. What we might suggest is that this could fit neatly into an exercise where you look at a live case study in a region--the Mackenzie Valley could be one--in terms of how you could look at forest practices, other activities, and protected areas, and how they could contribute to the greenhouse gas emission reduction agenda.
So thank you very much. I probably didn't save any time here, but thank you for allowing me the time to give you an analysis of the boreal region.