Thank you, Mr. Chair, and members, for the invitation to present as a witness to this group. Our organization has presented a few times on other topics. We want to maintain our role as being kind of a third party, factual and science-based organization.
I believe everybody has a copy, French and English, of the brief. I will start in French and finish in English.
Good morning, Mr. Chair. Thank you once again for inviting me to testify before the Standing Committee on Natural Resources.
My name is Jean-Pierre Martel. I am vice-president, strategic partnerships, at FPInnovations. I am accompanied by my colleague Patrick Lavoie, our senior researcher, sustainable development. He is one of our researchers, one of our experts on life cycles and on the subjects we were talking about earlier.
At FPInnovations, our vision is of a world where products from sustainable forests contribute to every aspect of daily life, including housing and infrastructure. Our vision is for the long term, and we are working with all the various sectors to move that vision forward.
FPInnovations is a public-private partnership seeking to improve the competitiveness and accelerate the transformation of the Canadian forest sector. FPInnovations has 170 member companies. We have an annual budget of around $75 million and 450 employees in five laboratories, including one located in our headquarters in Montreal. There is another one in Quebec City. There is a big lab in British Columbia on the UBC campus. There is another in Thunder Bay, working on bioeconomics. The final lab is in Hinton, Alberta; it conducts research into forest fires.
On the next slide, slide 4, sometimes scientists make things complicated when we talk about carbon and the carbon cycle. The U.S. EPA some time ago developed a kind of common approach to try to explain how carbon works and how CO2 works. They call it the bathtub approach.
The bathtub is basically the atmosphere, and we're trying to achieve some level of concentration within the atmosphere. The faucet is basically what we put in. Emissions from the use of fossil fuels or deforestation contribute to bringing in more carbon or CO2 into the atmosphere.
With regard to dealing with it, one solution is to reduce the incoming, so turn off the faucet a bit. The other way is to deal with the drain. Drain comes from the absorption of CO2 by the ocean and by the land, of which the forest is a key part.
When we think about a bill like this, we take into account the role of the forest and forest products. It's important to consider where it fits in the global solution around climate change and CO2 mitigation.
For the next part, I'll leave that to the experts to talk about the forest carbon cycle.