Healthy forests, when carefully managed using ecologically based forest management, store more carbon and create more jobs and economic opportunities throughout rural Canada.
How can economic development prevent climate change, create habitat and clean water?
How can nature conservation create jobs, generate taxes and rebuild rural communities?
At CFI we’re working on answers to these questions.
We`re working to break down traditional barriers, bringing people together to meet today’s greatest challenges.
This is how we helped Canadian tree planters and a small rural island in Africa work together to plant more than 1 million trees.
And this is how national businesses operating in a global marketplace have helped small-scale organic farmers stay on their land, retire and help fight climate change.
These partnerships are helping to build a better future for us all.
Over the coming months, we will be rolling out another exciting partnership that we’re working hard to build.
This partnership is a uniquely Canadian one, built between Canada’s urban and rural communities to eliminate Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions by restoring the most defining of Canadian resources- our forests.
Our forests are dominated by trees. Trees are made of wood. Wood is made of carbon. By not clearcutting and by growing trees to an older age and larger size, we can pull more carbon out of the air.
Better yet, if we restore healthy forest ecosystems by growing older and larger trees and maintain those forests through ecoforestry, we store even more carbon in the forest ecosystem, soils and long-lived wood products.
Many of Canada’s forests have been clearcut too often to grow back into healthy forests, especially in the south.
But people only clearcut because it is the best way to generate immediate profits.
And these clearcuts store much less carbon than do healthy forests.
Therefore, by putting a dollar value on the carbon stored in living forests we can eliminate the profit motive that drives clearcutting. We can value our trees for the work they do when they’re alive.
We can value our forests for the life they sustain.
And healthy forests can do much more than store carbon. In addition to all the good ecological things, healthy forests support more jobs than clearcut forests do. It’s well known that larger, more valuable trees support 5 to 10 times more jobs per cubic meter of wood cut compared to smaller, less valuable trees from clearcuts.
So by growing healthy forests by valuing the carbon stored in those forests, and maintaining that carbon through ecoforestry, we can create jobs in rural, forest dependent communities.
This is how economic development can fight climate change, create habitat and clean water, and how forest conservation can create jobs, generate taxes and rebuild the economic fabric of our communities.
A uniquely Canadian partnership built between Canada’s urban and rural communities to eliminate Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions by rebuilding Canadian forests.
Keep in touch to watch as we unveil this exciting new partnership over the coming months.
