What sort of system would it take to filter billions of litres of water, produce soils and restore nutrients, store carbon, generate oxygen, control flooding and erosion, support hundreds of different species (including humans), and cost us nothing to run? The boreal forest handles these “jobs” or ecosystem services every day. These vast forests have a huge impact on the lives of people throughout Ontario.
This map demonstrates the importance of the boreal for carbon storage |
Scientists are now calling attention to a critical – and increasingly important – role of the boreal: slowing global climate change. The boreal provides a critical brake on the trend toward an increasingly unstable climate by storing carbon in its soils, trees and peatlands. It may be matched only by the world’s oceans in its ability to absorb and store carbon.
Boreal peatlands store massive quantities of carbon. |
However, this carbon storage capacity can be damaged if the peatlands dry out or forest soils are disturbed. If this happens as a result of industrially driven landscape changes, we risk accelerating already rapidly advancing climate change. There is also a large risk of reversing processes that absorb carbon everyday – turning the boreal region from a giant carbon sink into yet another carbon source.
Renewal by fire and insects are a natural and critical part of a healthy boreal ecosystem, but global warming is already accelerating this natural cycle, causing increased greenhouse gas emissions. Industrial activity also increases emissions by removing forest biomass, changing hydrology, and physically damaging soils. While carbon emitted by natural processes varies year to year, we must limit emissions resulting from human activity.
The broad green mantle of boreal forest lying across the top of Canada also plays a key role in moderating our temperatures and increasing atmospheric moisture throughout the year. Without intact and naturally functioning boreal forests, Ontario would be hotter and drier, affecting everything from food production to water supplies.
Peatlands are very vulnerable to climate change |
The Ontario Government has recognized the important role that the boreal plays in controlling climate and has made protection of its natural carbon capture and storage abilities a key part of its climate action planning. “Solutions to ensuring the survival of species and ecosystems as they are forced to move north to adapt to our warming planet require protection of very large unfragmented blocks of habitat like what we see in northern Ontario. And making these areas off limits to industrial uses helps ensure that the carbon there now doesn’t get released and make things worse,” points out Dr. Terry Root of Stanford University, co-lead author for the United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change.
Ontario’s actions also set an important precedent in a world where roughly 20% of global carbon emissions are estimated to result from deforestation and the degradation of forests.
Forests and climate facts:
- Ontario peat lands cover over 27 million hectares – that’s about five Prince Edward Islands. There are more than 1,270 tonnes of carbon stored in every hectare of peat land. Therefore, Ontario’s peatlands currently store roughly 35 billion tonnes of carbon. To offset the release of that much carbon into the atmosphere, all Ontarians would have to cut their CO2 emissions by half for the next 350 years just to maintain the status quo.
- The tree-covered portion of the intact boreal forest covers approximately 17 million hectares and stores on average 177 tonnes of carbon per hectare.
- Converting an intact forest into a managed forest for logging loses up to 25 per cent of the carbon stored in that forest.
- Ontario’s peatlands sequester or capture carbon at a rate of 0.273 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year if left undisturbed. That adds up to about 7 million tonnes stored each year.
Birds and climate change
Climate change is already thought to be having a major impact on bird species. Some species are shifting their ranges further north in response to a decade of record-setting warm temperatures. A recent study of seven warbler species found, for example, that they had collectively shifted their range north by more than 120 km. over the past quarter century.
Other species are migrating earlier in response to warmer-than-normal spring temperatures: Studies have found that some species were arriving in their summer territory up to 21 days earlier in 1994 than they were in 1965.
But these adaptation strategies have some severe limitations. Birds may be able to shift their ranges northward faster than the ecosystems they rely on. There is a much lower ability for forests to march northward to accommodate birds looking for their normal temperature ranges.
And arriving early may leave birds badly out of sync with the ecosystems they rely on: They may arrive to find snow cover and ice still locking away food sources or may miss insect and pollination cycles that have also changed in response to a changing climate.
Birds are going to need every advantage they can get to cope with these challenges. Protecting critically important breeding grounds throughout the Boreal is a great first step.
For more on birds and climate change, click here.
