At 5.6 million square kilometres, Canada’s boreal region is one of the largest forests in the world and one of the Earth’s most important forest carbon storehouses, making it critical to the global effort to address climate change. The boreal forest contains almost twice as much carbon per unit area as tropical forests.

In addition to the carbon stored in surface vegetation, carbon has accumulated and been conserved over millennia in the soils, wetlands, peatlands, and permafrost – all of which are integral parts of the boreal forest. Taken together, the boreal forest and associated soils and wetlands store an estimated 208 billion tonnes of carbon – the equivalent of 26 years of global carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. Read the full article here.