Alison Munson News Today

MONTREAL — About one million square kilometres of Quebec is covered by boreal forest, roughly 70 per cent of the entire province.

MONTREAL - About one million square kilometres of Quebec is covered by boreal forest, roughly 70 per cent of the entire province. In the north, where ecosystems are less likely to have been altered by human activity, those forests have been accumulating and sequestering immense quantities of carbon for centuries.

There are nearly 400 mining exploration projects in the boreal forest of the Eeyou Istchee, the traditional lands of the James Bay Cree. It is unclear how many will result in operating mines in the coming years, but there is potential, and the government wants to take advantage of it.

About one million square kilometres of Quebec is covered by boreal forest, roughly 70 per cent of the entire province. In the north, where ecosystems are less likely to have been altered by human activity, those forests have been accumulating and sequestering immense quantities of carbon for centuries.

In this week's issue of our environment newsletter, we look at what a prestigious medical journal says about climate change and children's health and examine what a tree is worth.

Canadian municipalities value trees in terms of monetary value, but experts say more municipalities need to start including the environmental benefits of trees, like carbon capture and cooling effects, in that assessment.

Article content We currently consider terrestrial vegetation, including forests, to be a sink, sequestering carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. The vegetation absorbs CO2 during the process of photosynthesis throughout the growing season. This sink is responsible for the absorption of 30 per cent of our anthropogenic emissions, that is, the greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions due to the combustion of fossil fuels related to human activity. Global warming is now threatening this important servi...