Canada is a giant carbon sink. Why don’t we get credit?
The United Nations Paris Agreement and its predecessors are a complete failure and they discriminate against Canada, which is why Canadians should demand changes immediately, or withdraw. There are two main reasons why.
First, the agreements exempt the world’s biggest polluters. They do not require all the countries that signed on to reduce emissions. So, of course, they haven’t: to date, of the 192 countries that signed on to the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, only 37 developed countries have reduced CO2 emissions by seven per cent and the rest — led by China and India — increased emissions by 130 per cent. This is not an accord, it’s a joke.
Second, the agreements measure countries based on emissions, but ignore the other side of the environmental balance sheet, which is carbon absorption and offsets. Canada only emits 1.6 per cent of global carbon emissions now, but probably would not have any net emissions if its gigantic “carbon sink” — its inventory of forests, muskeg, water and soil assets that absorb carbon — were taken into consideration.
Canada, in fact, is one gigantic carbon sink — an empty land mass with very few people and an abundance of natural features that decarbonize the world.
Take the trees, for instance. There is a global campaign underway to help save the planet by regrowing one trillion trees. Canada already has one- third of a trillion trees. We have the third- largest forest area in the world ( after Russia and Brazil), spread across 4.9 million square kilometres. Forests cover 34 per cent of Canada’s land mass and constitute an area the size of the European Union and Venezuela combined. But the Paris Agreement is silent about trees.
Then there’s Canada’s vast farmland and its Arctic muskeg and tundra. Fly over Canada’s southern portion and it looks like a gigantic patchwork quilt of farms, crops and grasslands. Soil is one of the biggest carbon stores on the planet and Canada has the seventh- largest arable land base in the world, covering 459,000 square kilometres, which is equivalent in size to Spain. But Canada gets no credit for this either, nor do any other countries.
Fly north and Canada’s vast landscape is dotted with lakes and spongy muskeg, which is Cree for “grassy bog.” These swampy, peat- filled, uninhabitable regions cannot be cultivated, but store massive amounts of carbon. Their unspoiled conservation counteracts the release of CO2 and greenhouse gases. These lands cover 12 per cent of the country, or 12 million square kilometres, an area the size of South Africa.
Canada has reportedly tried to make a case at the UN to fully include and properly evaluate our carbon absorption contribution, but to no avail. If true, that makes Ottawa’s negligence worse. The Government of Canada serves Canadians, not an international organization, and should never have taken no for answer.
Clearly, Canada’s federal government bought into a rigged, inaccurate system, when it should have insisted, at the very least, on an audit mechanism to quantify these carbon sinks and publish valid net- emissions figures. If done, that could become the basis for a world market for carbon- offset credits, where CO2 absorption becomes a saleable asset that polluters must buy.
Such a carbon- offset market could create billions in cash flow to compensate Canada’s Indigenous peoples, provinces, territories and land owners for their stewardship of the forests and lands. Instead, Canada’s carbon sink is not recognized, much less quantified, and, as such, is given away for free.
Environmentally, Canada has absolutely nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to correct … except for the federal government’s complete capitulation to an agreement that’s based on foreign propaganda and agendas.
NATURAL FEATURES THAT DECARBONIZE THE WORLD.