This is really what we see as a strength of what BIOCAP does and why we've been able to keep so many industry sponsors with us for seven or eight years now. We focus on working as a bridge between the upstream and more applied research and linking it to the needs of industry. That's really our focus within BIOCAP. Some of the technologies exist, and we put as much emphasis on taking existing technologies and communicating them and helping industries understand their opportunities, as we do on developing new technologies.
You ask what the mechanisms are. I think we do need an emissions trading system. That will provide an economic environment in which a lot of the technologies that are very close—for $10, $15, or $20 per tonne of carbon dioxide emission reductions—could be achieved. It could change animal production systems and renewal management and change how fertilizers are used. There are lots of different technologies. Co-firing could fit in there, for example. That doesn't necessarily need a trading system. It just needs a regulatory environment in order to make it happen.
Secondly, the sorts of incentives that have already been talked about by virtually all levels of government in terms of 5% fuel standards for biofuels makes a lot of sense. Green biofuels or biofuels that have a minimum greenhouse gas benefit would be especially very useful. There are lots of opportunities there, and they would really provide incentives. Those technologies are very close to implementation. If we want to see them implemented in a few years, we need that sort of regulatory environment.
We need to seriously look at forestry opportunities. We have significant problems in the forestry sector in terms of economics and the viability of that sector. We've been working with many in the forestry sector, and there's a lot of interest in the possibility of seeing forestry as an energy sector more than a traditional forest policy pulp-and-paper sector. It's going to require policy changes at the provincial level. It's going to require a coordination of the federal and provincial. It's going to require a recognition of the carbon benefits and the incentives that are not currently covered under Kyoto. It's going to require policy decisions that have to be integrated in a post-Kyoto world.
That last one is a longer-term one, but we need to start working on it now so that we know what to negotiate for in an international framework, if we want to take advantage of our hundreds of millions of hectares of forest land to really help us meet our environmental commitments.