Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm Derek Nighbor, president and CEO at Forest Products Association of Canada. My colleague Mahima Sharma is with me. She is our VP of innovation, environment and climate policy, and she's our in-house chemical engineer. We're going to talk a bit about some of the energy transformation happening in our sector, and her expertise and experience will be valuable to that discussion.
I look forward to talking about how we can work more collaboratively and in an impactful way with the federal government to accelerate decarbonization and to strengthen economic prospects for individuals and families in our mill communities, which—as most of you know—tend to be in more rural and northern parts of our country.
You heard a bit about it earlier today, but our sector is very much an integrated sector, so our pulp and paper mills and biorefineries are dependent on sawmills for their leftover wood chips or what would otherwise be wood waste. That's what feeds them, and for the sawmills, the sale of those chips provides an important revenue stream to strengthen their bottom line. It's our own little circular economy, if you will, in forestry.
The goal is to minimize waste and to get value from every part of the harvested tree, and in parts of the country that are more vulnerable to fires—and we're seeing that right across the country, unfortunately, with a very early start this year—finding a market for these chips means they're not piling up to become kindling for the next fire season.
I'll say a couple of quick things on the forest management side of things. Our sector plants 400 to 600 million seedlings annually to regenerate our forest landscapes and to keep them as forests forever. About 50% of Canada's forests are unmanaged, so the sector is actually operating on about 50% of our forested land base. Given our commitments to conservation and biodiversity, sustainable management, whole-of-ecosystem management and community values management, about half of our managed forest today is under some kind of a conservation measure.
Mill GHG emissions are down by about 60% since the early 1990s. We have an opportunity to do more with your support.
One of the things we actually talked to Minister Wilkinson about last week was the importance of a clear industrial action plan for the forest sector to accelerate decarbonization and economic growth. I think we've seen a lot of energy around the oil and gas sector, critical minerals and electric vehicles and batteries, but we think there needs to be a similar play with forestry in the weeks and months ahead, and our international competitors in those countries are doing just that.
I'll pass it over to Mahima.