Canada is looking to its Indigenous communities to help manage its boreal forests, the world’s largest intact forest system.
The world’s largest remaining intact forest, the Canadian boreal forest is being lost at a rate of 1 million acres per year. That’s the equivalent of one and a half football fields every minute, according to CTV News Canada.
Saving the boreal forests would keep intact their vast stores of carbon that, if disturbed, would release carbon dioxide and contribute to global warming. Canada’s forests store at least 208 billion metric tons of carbon and are considered one of the world’s largest terrestrial carbon vaults.
The U.S.-based Natural Resources Defense Council, in a timely report, said, “Across the world, forests are being cut down to become throwaway tissue products such as toilet paper, facial tissue, and paper towels. Most of the time, these products end up in the trash can or toilet after one use – their toll on the environment forgotten or ignored.”
The United States is the world’s biggest consumer of toilet paper, with one estimate putting the average American’s toilet paper consumption at 141 rolls per year, or about double the rate of Italy and France.
Most of the toilet paper used in the U.S. is made from wood pulp, and most of that pulp comes into the country from Canada. Canada has more than one billion acres of boreal forest, while more than one million are affected annually by industrial logging.
Indigenous communities managing the boreal forests
The Canadian government, in part to meet its climate goals and in part to further reconciliation with Canada’s Indigenous communities,, according to the New York Times has been turning to them more and more to help manage boreal forests by ceding more of the forest land to Indigenous groups.
Last year, the Canadian government set aside $340 million to support areas protected by Indigenous groups and networks of Indigenous experts.
Under this program, more than 50 Indigenous communities across the country have received financing to establish and oversee areas for conservation.
The program also turns them into stakeholders entrusted to not only resist deforestation but also to safeguard their carbon sinks. The program will also support Indigenous people who will oversee these areas.
Over 71 percent of the country’s Indigenous communities call the boreal forests their home, and historically, they have an intimate knowledge of the forests and their ecosystems.
“Within the past five years, I have seen a shift and an openness, particularly at the federal level, where I think they’re starting to understand that traditional knowledge acquired over sometimes millennia is as valid as Western science,’’ said Mandy Gull-Masty, the grand chief of the Cree National Government, which represents the Cree communities in Quebec.
The federal government is also financially backing the Crees’ efforts to create a network of hydrologically connected protected areas with habitats for endangered animals like the woodland caribou.
“They did information sessions, they did mapping exercises,’’ said Ms. Gull-Masty, referring to tallymen and other local experts from the Cree communities in the north. “These protected areas will help mitigate climate change by protecting forests and waterways, reducing the risks of forest fires, and conserving wildlife,” she added.
Marcel Darveau, a forestry expert at Laval University in Quebec City, said Indigenous groups have both an “ancient and actual knowledge’’ of boreal forests “They keep watch over the territory and are its guardians,’’ he said.
Close to 12 million acres of land have recently been set aside in the Northwest Territories under various acts. Another 6.5 million acres are under consideration for conservation withdrawals.
In the Yukon, 13.8 million acres were recently set aside for the Peel River watershed, with another 9.8 million slated for the Dawson region, and nearly 5 million acres along the Yukon North Slope, according to Yale Environment 360.
“The scale of these land withdrawals is certainly far exceeding even the imaginations of conservationists in the U.S., or really from most of the world,” said Jeff Wells, vice president of boreal conservation for the National Audubon Society.
Gerry Antoine, regional chief for Northwest Territories in the Assembly of First Nations of Canada, believes that setting aside as much of the boreal forests as possible not only helps to protect traditional ways but helps us to better understand what threatens northern ecosystems and to preserve major portions of the lands from resource development.
“That’s really the best way of dealing with climate change,” he says.
