• Protecting Water and Farmland in Simcoe County

The Greenbelt: a critical weapon in fighting climate change

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Sep 8th, 2012
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What Ontario landmark stores as much carbon as annual emissions from 33 million cars?
By Faisal Moola David Suzuki Foundation August 14 2012
The David Suzuki Foundation released a study today that reveals the Ontario Greenbelt keeps a whopping 172 million tonnes of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere — locked away in the rich soils and vegetation of its wetlands and forests.
The massive amount of carbon in this relatively unheralded storehouse is equivalent to the annual emissions from 33 million vehicles, or the energy used by 15 million households. The report estimates that the economic value of this climate change fighting service is at least $2.4 billion.
The report was written by Dr. Ray Tomalty, principal of Smart Cities Research Services and an adjunct professor in the School of Urban Planning at McGill University.
While protecting nature has long been identified as a crucial strategy for fighting climate change, most political attention has focused on protecting wild spaces far from where most of us live. While iconic places like Ontario’s massive Boreal Forest and the Great Bear Rainforest in BC are crucial hedges against climate change, the study suggests that the benefits of protecting nature closer to home shouldn’t be overlooked.
With 80 per cent of Canadians now living in cities, the new study makes the case that protecting remaining carbon-rich forests, wetlands and agricultural soils near our urban areas will be critical weapons to fight climate change.
The study provides new evidence in support of the Ontario Government’s original inclusion of the Greenbelt in the Province’s 2007 Climate Action Plan, but argues that much more needs to be done to ensure that the natural climate mitigation capacity of the Greenbelt’s ecosystems are strengthened. This means stricter management of development activities within and nearby the Greenbelt, like aggregate mining, and expanding the Greenbelt further.
Scientists warn us that we ignore rising greenhouse gas emissions at our own peril. Climate change is already having a dramatic impact on our planet — devastating heat waves, rising flood waters, and the precipitous decline of wildlife populations are just a few of a plethora of challenges we are facing. But as our new study, and others science reports have shown, by protecting nature, like the Greenbelt — we are helping to protect ourselves and the planet.
David Suzuki reveals Ontario’s climate-change fighter
By Kenneth Kidd Toronto Star August 14 2012
A funny thing happened on the way to climate-change policy in Ontario — nearly everyone forgot their elementary-school lesson about photosynthesis and how plants remove carbon from the atmosphere.
That’s something the David Suzuki Foundation now hopes to rectify with “Carbon in the Bank,” a report released Wednesday on the greenbelt’s role in mitigating the effects of climate change.
“It’s a massive carbon storehouse,” said Faisal Moola, the Suzuki Foundation’s director of science.
Covering 750,000 hectares (1.8 million acres) from Rice Lake to the Niagara River, the greenbelt’s farms, forests and wetlands not only remove carbon from the atmosphere via photosynthesis, they store it in their biomass for extended periods.
The forests alone, which cover 24 per cent of the greenbelt, are effectively banking about 40 million tonnes of carbon, the equivalent of 147 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.
The wetlands store a further 6.7 million tonnes of carbon or roughly 25 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.
Combined, that’s the same amount of carbon dioxide released annually by 33 million cars and trucks.
“This is definitely low-hanging fruit, and yet it seems the role of the greenbelt (in fighting climate change) has been downgraded by the provincial government,” said Moola.
One problem, which the report seeks to solve, may be the traditional difficulty in measuring and putting an economic value on the amount of carbon that green areas remove from the air and store through photosynthesis.
Young forests, for instance, consume and hold a lot of carbon while mature ones mostly just store it rather make any net additions to their carbon content.
“There’s that adage that you can’t manage what you don’t measure,” noted Moola. “This report begins that process.”
The Suzuki study, prepared by McGill University’s Ray Tomalty, synthesizes a number of existing estimates and measurement models to come up with a total of 86.6 million tonnes of carbon now being stored in the greenbelt.
Estimates of how much all that carbon is worth — based on the damage it would do in the atmosphere — vary widely. So the Suzuki Foundation used the average of peer-reviewed estimates, or $53 per tonne of carbon (in 2005 Canadian dollars).
That puts the entire greenbelt’s carbon value at $4.5 billion or, treated like an annuity, nearly $370 million annually over 20 years.
Nor is this just an academic exercise. If Ontario adopts a cap-and-trade system for controlling carbon, then putting a value on the role of forests and green space in mitigating climate change will be crucial.
“If you drain, pave over and dug up wetlands or clear-cut old growth forests, all that carbon gets released back into the atmosphere,” said Moola.
But any moves to increase the greenbelt’s ability to store carbon could also have saleable value as so-called “carbon offsets” under cap-and-trade.
Farmers and large landowners, for instance, could create offsets by planting more trees on their property or adopting no-till farming techniques. Hence the need for established measurement tools to make sure the carbon offsets are credible.
“I think that’s going to be a game changer,” said Moola.
But the Suzuki Foundation also cautions that the greenbelt isn’t immune to threats. Proposals for new highways and quarries will reduce the greenbelt’s ability to act as a carbon sink.
And additional golf courses, through forest removal and ongoing maintenance (including fertilizer and pesticides) can actually cause a net increase in greenhouse-gas emissions.
By the numbers
24 — Per cent of the greenbelt now forested.
35 — Per cent the Suzuki Foundation would like to see by 2025.
7,100 — Number of farms.
$1.5 billion — Annual farm receipts
260 — Number of licensed quarries in and around the greenbelt.
41 — Number of golf courses on the Oak Ridges Moraine alone.

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