Environment committee  Yes, it can be. I agree.

Environment committee  Animals, of course. In countries like New Zealand, the biggest source of methane is from livestock. Of course, there have been experiments in Alberta where they try to reduce methane gas from livestock production by changing feed, for example.

Environment committee  What I'm suggesting is that fire management by aboriginal peoples, historically of course, was when they were nomadic. We heard from, I think, Cathy earlier in the conversation, that a nomadic people would—in the thousands of years of history of this—set fires after they used a certain area to help in restoring the ecosystem.

Environment committee  I think that it would be appropriate in a limited amount. We do have private companies operating like this, for example, on Vancouver Island right now. I would say that we are going to have to be judicious and smart. We will, in some cases if the land is right, become tree farmers and be more focused if we want to participate in a forest sector, yes.

Environment committee  Reservoirs and dams, that's another good point. I think this is the conversation going on in Labrador at the moment about Muskrat Falls, to remove the biological material. It's not just methane, of course. In that case, I think, the conversation is about mercury. Yes, there are things we can do—

Environment committee  I think it's a national matter and the provinces need a partnership role in that. Importantly, aboriginal communities need a partnership role in this, because a lot of the management strategies that I see moving forward are consistent with the aboriginal approach to managing the landscape.

Environment committee  Quite often, and you can see this in our education system, engineers will come up with a different solution than a biologist. I'm an applied biologist. It means if I want to deal with, say, emissions coming out of a smokestack, I can put in a scrubber and clean up all the emissions, or I could plant more trees.

Environment committee  I don't have that number in my head, but I can tell you that there's certainly far more carbon stored in the existing forests than we expend every year, and the potential is there for us to essentially, within biological systems, offset all of the emissions that we produce in Canada.

Environment committee  I think we should probably revisit some efforts the federal government made 20 or 30 years ago when it came to realizing that forest resources are important to us and we need to invest in them. As I mentioned, and this goes back to my early days as a graduate student, there were large programs and up $1 billion allocated to helping out in provinces such as New Brunswick after the spruce budworm outbreak, and those dollars were invested back into forests.

Environment committee  Okay, I'll stop there. The same can be said on the disease losses, then of course we can increase growth through different strategies with biochar, with fertilization, a whole bunch of things that could be done to increase growth and reduce losses at the same time. It's a broad spectrum of things that could happen.

Environment committee  We distinguish between sequestering and storage. What you're referring to in the old trees is that they are storing more carbon. That is also legitimate, and has to be brought into the carbon accounting to figure out the best and smartest ways for us to meet our targets in climate change.

Environment committee  Peer-reviewed? Yes, there would be some. It's spotty. Certainly there's been a strong team within the federal government that has tried to address this question, led out of the Canadian forest service, with a whole team of people on carbon accounting. They have made a lot of progress.

Environment committee  For example, they have a Canadian carbon budget model. Many papers have come out of the Canadian forest service. One of the lead authors is Dr. Werner Kurz. The big hole in the analysis, and they would readily admit it, is on all the wetlands and all the carbon stored in the wetlands, which as I mentioned comprise 12% of the land base, which is very significant, and also in soils in general.

Environment committee  The answer is yes, I would say. I've been working with geneticists for the last eight years on different tree breeding techniques, and I can easily demonstrate for most of the boreal forest, for example, that with good tree breeding programs and putting the right tree on the right site, we could probably get a 30% gain in growth.

Environment committee  Younger trees grow faster, which means they sequester more. So yes, younger trees, maybe not when they're babies but, say, in 10 years to 50 years, they would be sequestering quickly.