Carbon-rich wetlands in the Northwest Territories. (Chad Delany, Ducks Unlimited)
CBC.CA
November 11, 2009
by Sharon Oosthoek
Boreal forests store more than double the carbon originally thought, yet policy-makers overlook their role in fighting climate change, says a report released Thursday by an international conservation group.
“For reasons that are unclear, boreal forests seem to be the carbon the world forgot,” write the authors of a report published by the Seattle-based International Boreal Conservation Campaign (IBCC).
When climate change negotiators consider forests’ carbon storage potential, they usually look at tropical forests because they are being logged at a faster rate than the northern boreal, said ecologist and report co-author Jeff Wells.
But soil in boreal forests — like those found in Canada’s north — is much deeper than in tropical forests and hence stores much more carbon, said Wells, a visiting fellow at Cornell University.
Yet scientists have only recently taken into account the boreal’s deeper soils and slower rate of decay of leaf litter, which also stores carbon.
