This is the sixth part of Carbon Cache, an ongoing series about nature-based climate solutions.

The millennia-old red cedars of the Great Bear Rainforest, and the western hemlock, Douglas fir and Sitka spruce rubbing at their shoulders, capture a million tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere each year, holding onto it as long as the giant trees stand.

Since 2012, the work of the trees and plants of B.C.’s coastal rainforest have been generating credits — one credit for every tonne of carbon sequestered — that are bought by the B.C. government, companies and individuals wanting to offset their carbon emissions.

The goal is to create an economy that doesn’t rely on cutting down these carbon-sequestering senior citizens. In turn, the carbon credit revenue has helped to fund Guardian Watchmen programs in nine coastal First Nations. These Indigenous guardians patrol the landscape and conduct fisheries management and species monitoring.

The Great Bear Rainforest carbon project is the blueprint for carbon offset programs in Canada. And with nature-based climate solutions gaining traction globally, quantifying the amount of carbon Canada’s natural landscapes hold is an increasingly important task.

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2017 found the simple act of preserving wetlands, forests and grasslands could provide more than one-third of the emissions reductions needed to stabilize global temperature increases below 2 C by 2030 under the Paris Accord.

The federal government is now working to develop a national offset standard for the first time. While offset programs already exist in some provinces and via voluntary carbon markets, the federal standard will mark a new era of carbon markets in Canada.

Another big change is firing up the potential for carbon markets, too: Canada is now including nature-based emissions and sequestration in its biennial reports to the United Nations.

“Previous to 2020’s biennial report, we did not include any nature-based emissions or sequestration in our carbon footprint that we report to the Paris agreement or to Canadians,”  Joseph Pallant, director of climate innovation at Ecotrust Canada, told The Narwhal.

“How crazy is that? This is like six months ago that this has been changed.”

Joseph Pallant, director of climate innovation at Ecotrust Canada, says the development of a national offset standard creates a major incentive for governments to protect nature.

What that means in practice is that when humans impact natural landscapes (by, say, cutting down a forest or destroying a wetland), those emissions are now counted as part of Canada’s carbon footprint.

Pallant said that while some people aren’t fond of the idea of commodifying nature, the development of a national offset standard, along with the inclusion of nature-based emissions in Canada’s climate reports, creates a major incentive for governments to protect nature.

For example, Pallant is working on a forest carbon economy fund that will allow communities to unlock the value of carbon stored on the landscape, offering them options for revenue beyond logging and simultaneously helping Canada meet its climate goals.

“The goal is to make improvements in nature actually affect the Canadian federal government’s bottom line,” he said.

Carbon offsets could also “massively” help fund new Indigenous Protected Areas, according to Pallant.

While the Great Bear Rainforest is the leading example of how carbon offsets can work, it’s also an example of how things can get, well, complicated.

The Great Bear agreement has faced challenges in recent years, with the credits established in the forest struggling to find buyers. Across the country, various carbon offset programs have so far failed to get off the ground due to lack of demand for offsets and hefty costs to get projects underway.

Here’s what you need to know about carbon offsets and nature-based climate solutions.

What are nature-based climate solutions?

Nature-based climate solutions can look like a lot of different things in practice: carbon offsets from forest protection, designation of Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas and national parks, restoring coastal ecosystems like kelp forests or ranchers earning carbon credits for maintaining native grasslands on their properties, to name just a few.

What brings all of these concepts together is the ultimate goal of protecting or restoring nature in part due to its ability to store carbon.

Lisa Young — executive director of Unama’ki Institute of Natural Resources, which represents five Mi’kmaq communities on Cape Breton Island — noted that Indigenous people have been practising conservation for thousands of years but new opportunities are emerging through Canada’s desire to reduce emissions and protect biodiversity.

“Not only are they exploring those kinds of concepts around green economy that will also mitigate the impacts of what we’re doing to the climate, but also the land itself is healing that as well,” she says. “It’s a two-pronged kind of thing.”

Api’soomaahka, or William Singer, is working with Blood Tribe Land Management in southern Alberta to convert his cultivated land back to native grasslands. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

How do you monetize nature-based climate solutions?

One of the most fundamental issues at play around carbon offset projects is how greenhouse gas emissions are counted — and, more crucially, not counted.

“Nature is currently managed as a resource,” said Larry Sault, president and CEO of Anwaatin, a company that works with Indigenous communities on carbon sequestration projects. “Its value is only realized by its destruction.”

The concept is fairly straightforward: identify and protect an ecosystem that would otherwise lose its carbon sink functionality due to human impacts, calculate the amount of carbon presently or potentially stored in it and sell credits for the carbon the ecosystem sequesters to other entities to offset their own emissions.

Offsetting can include improved management practices of forests, farmlands, grasslands and wetlands, among others.

The federal government’s 2020 design paper for options for a federal greenhouse gas offset system requires offsets to be quantifiable, additional to a business-as-usual scenario, incremental to other incentives and verifiable.

Carbon credits garnered from offsetting can be sold in two types of carbon market: regulatory compliance or voluntary. On the regulated market, buyers are purchasing credits because of requirements by law to keep their carbon emissions below a certain threshold. If they fail to stay below that threshold, they can buy credits to offset their overage. On the voluntary market, credits are purchased voluntarily — say, to offset the emissions (and guilt) from a flight or a conference.

In terms of how credits are verified on those two markets, there isn’t a major difference, Pallant said. Some voluntary markets have more rigorous standards than some regulatory compliance markets, and vice-versa.

In October 2019, the carbon offset registry Climate Action Reserve adopted the Canada Grassland Protocol for the voluntary market. The Canadian Forage and Grasslands Association, which supported the creation of the protocol, is now evaluating the protocol by working with about 50 private land owners through a four-year pilot program. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

How do you create demand for carbon credits?

Currently, the B.C. government is the only province or territory that has committed to maintaining zero emissions, meaning the province itself purchases a significant portion of the made-in-B.C. carbon credits.

“It’s something other governments should pick up,” Pallant said. “It’s something where they can put their money where their mouth is and, importantly, it can seed the field for development of the other systems.”

The B.C. government recently announced a new five-year agreement to buy carbon credits from the Great Bear Rainforest, for example.

“By the government saying ‘we’re going to backstop demand’ and guarantee there’s demand for around 750,000 tonnes of emissions reductions per year in B.C. … that makes it worthwhile to set up a carbon offset system … and it creates a business case for Indigenous communities like the Coastal First Nations,” Pallant said.

As evidenced by the Great Bear agreement, this system can help build an alternative economy to resource extraction. Regulations that limit the amount of carbon industry can emit, such as cap-and-trade systems, also create demand because those companies that are unable to stay below the limit are forced to buy offsets.

Jordan Wilson, a Heiltsuk Coastal Guardian Watchman, aboard one of the nation’s monitoring vessels in the Great Bear Rainforest. Photo: Louise Whitehouse / The Narwhal

In Alberta, for example, there is a regulated market for carbon credits for companies that have to reduce their emissions under the province’s Carbon Competitiveness Incentive Regulation, which targets companies that emit 100,000 tonnes of carbon per year or more.

While B.C.’s government has committed to net-zero emissions, the cancellation of the province’s cap-and-trade program has been the source of the Coastal First Nations’ struggle to find buyers outside of government for Great Bear carbon credits. The province backed out of its cap-and-trade plan in 2011, meaning there’s no requirement for companies to keep carbon emissions below a certain threshold, so offsets are only sold to the government and on a voluntary basis to companies — resulting in a huge backlog of unsold credits.

Similarly, the cancellation of Ontario’s cap-and-trade system under Premier Doug Ford’s government in 2018 meant aspiring projects had only the voluntary market to sell into. It was a move that swiftly immobilized carbon offset programs that were in the works, said Jason Rasevych, president of the Anishnawbe Business Professional Association, which is working with several Ontario First Nations to develop carbon offset programs.

Putting a price on carbon stored by nature is an awfully complex task that has been attempted since the Rio Summit in 1992 and Kyoto Protocol in 1997 with varying success. Jessica Dempsey, a UBC geography professor and author of Enterprising Nature, said that most forest offset proposals have “failed miserably.”

“It seems simple: let’s just pay people not to cut down forests or clear bogs and then we’ll create an economic interest in it and it won’t happen,” she said. “But in reality, setting all of that up and monitoring it is really complicated and bureaucratic and costly and politically challenging.”

What is the federal government doing about carbon offsets?

Well, one of the biggest things they’re doing is mandating a price on carbon nation-wide through the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change. This creates the conditions for carbon offsets to potentially develop.

In early July, the federal government published a position paper on options for a federal greenhouse gas offset program. The government still has to develop a protocol for offset projects, which would include how emissions reductions should be quantified for each type of project — such as forest offsets — as well as monitoring and reporting throughout the project’s life.

Robert Gibson, professor at the University of Waterloo’s Department of Environment and Resource Studies, said the federal government’s new impact assessment legislation and strategic assessment of climate change includes a requirement for decision-makers to consider the direct impacts of a project on emissions and carbon sinks, but so far there has been “no serious effort” made to define how those considerations would be made or what implications they would have.

“We’ve been doing horribly on all matter of greenhouse gas considerations and assessments,” he said, noting that Environment and Climate Change Canada is expected to provide a technical guide to quantifying the value of a carbon sink in the near future.

An oilsands operation butts up against boreal forest in northern Alberta. Photo: Louis Bockner / Sierra Club BC

How can Indigenous communities tap into carbon markets? 

From Thunder Bay, Ont., Rasevych has watched the development of the Great Bear Forest carbon project closely.

“It’s something they do as innovators and leaders — and they are very inspiring for First Nations leadership in northern Ontario to look at and identify potential for opportunities here,” Rasevych said.

There’s no question that there are plenty of opportunities for Indigenous communities to build an economy around Great Bear-inspired protection of carbon sinks such as forests and wetlands. Canada boasts 2.7 million square kilometres of boreal forest, with 70 per cent of Indigenous communities located in forested regions.

Indeed, Indigenous-led, nature-based carbon offsets could be a pathway toward reconciliation — if they’re done right. (Australia’s Aboriginal Carbon Fund is working with the First Nations Energy and Mining Council in Canada to bring the concept here.)

“Given the overlap of Indigenous territories and carbon sinks in Canada, it is unlikely that nature-based solutions could be widely implemented without upholding Indigenous rights to lands and resources and respecting Indigenous governance and knowledge systems in climate change policy,” says a recent paper published in the Canadian science journal FACETS.

Sault of Anwaatin stresses the core challenge in bringing more carbon offset projects online is the matter of Indigenous jurisdiction.

He said many carbon-rich areas remain under provincial governance, and the only way to move forward on the issue is to honour the spirit and intent of treaties, resolve outstanding land claims and implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

‘It’s like paradise for us’: the Cree Nation’s fight to save the Broadback Forest

John Cutfeet, former band councillor for Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nation in northwestern Ontario and research fellow at the Yellowhead Institute, agreed: “All those activities like conservation and managing carbon sequestration are done and are premised on the fact that government owns the land.”

“But Indigenous people have said ‘no, we never gave up the land in those treaties, we need to share.’ As long as that whole notion that Indigenous people have no land is in place, that’s one of the biggest challenges that we’re going to have to overcome.”

Sault recommended the creation of agreements to ensure Indigenous people are the beneficiaries of revenues generated from offset programs — including a separate certification for offsets from Indigenous-managed lands, with explicit co-benefits such as Indigenous Guardian programs for fire management and pest control, or cultural revitalization including youth.

“Nature-based solutions policy and projects that are advanced without the partnership or consent of Indigenous Nations can generate significant opposition from communities who consider such actions as ‘carbon colonialism’ and a threat to inherent land rights,” noted the FACETS paper.

A river flows through an area of the Great Bear Rainforest known as the Kitlope. An innovative carbon offset program has helped to fund conservation in the forest. Photo: Alex Harris / Raincoast

What kind of challenges have people faced in creating carbon offsets?

Rasevych works with three Indigenous communities — Eabametoong, Marten Falls and Aroland First Nations — that collectively harvest and manage the Ogoki Forest, about 400 kilometres northeast of Thunder Bay.

He said the First Nations are looking to take the next step to explore an offset project around more ecologically sustainable logging but currently lack capacity to conduct a feasibility study and create an up-to-date inventory of the stored carbon, biodiversity and harvesting volumes in the region. Without that, Rasevych said it’s impossible for communities to properly evaluate the economic trade-offs between commercial forestry and carbon offsetting.

Some money was available for First Nations to get started on this work through Ontario’s carbon pricing framework — until it was cancelled. The scrapping of the cap-and-trade system, Rasevych said, pretty well put an end to the funding for communities interested in developing offset programs.

A year after the Ford government cancelled the cap-and-trade system, a team of scholars from the University of Guelph convened a gathering of representatives from First Nations, Indigenous communities and environmental groups from across the country to hash out the impediments and opportunities in Indigenous-led conservation and carbon storage.

The battle for the ‘breathing lands’: Ontario’s Ring of Fire and the fate of its carbon-rich peatlands

Mary-Kate Craig, a PhD candidate at the University of Guelph studying Indigenous carbon markets and one of the authors of the FACETS paper, helped to host the gathering. She explained more than a dozen key barriers that were identified by participants, including: a lack of clarity about how to actually make carbon offsets work, absence of carbon markets to participate in, and concerns around financial and organizational capacity of Indigenous communities.

There are also hard-to-meet requirements for verifying carbon offset projects that can be a hindrance to them moving forward, she said. The “additionality” requirement, for example, means proponents have to prove protection or restoration of a forest, grassland or wetland could only have happened through the offset project and not by any other means. So, if there’s no threat, there’s no offset.

And the project proponent has to ensure the carbon emissions mitigated by the project aren’t simply displaced elsewhere — a form of “carbon leakage.” So the onus is on the proponent to prove managing its forest for carbon offsetting, for example, won’t just result in another area logged.

In order for the Great Bear Forest Carbon Project to come to fruition, the province had to sign an “atmospheric benefit sharing agreement” with the nine First Nations behind the offset project. B.C. is so far the only province or territory to sign one of these agreements that establish clear rules about Indigenous ownership of carbon that’s sequestered by their land, and their subsequent ability to sell carbon credits.

Heiltsuk Guardian Watchman Jordan Wilson, right, prepares salmon during “Salmon Days” on Heiltsuk territory in Bella Bella, B.C. Photo: Louise Whitehouse / The Narwhal

It also lays out who gets the benefits. In the case of Great Bear, the Coastal First Nations agreement allocates 80 per cent of revenue from offsets to First Nations and 20 per cent to the province.

Other proposed projects are lacking this critical element.

Take the Poplar River First Nation on the eastern shore of Lake Winnipeg, for example. Over the last several decades it has worked to conserve its traditional territory of Asatiwisipe Aki and collaborate with three nearby First Nations to establish Pimachiowin Aki, a 29,040-square-kilometre UNESCO World Heritage Site, in 2018.

A recent report by the International Institute for Sustainable Development explained that the area’s forests and wetlands store an estimated total of 444 million tonnes of carbon. Establishing a “payment for ecosystem services agreement,” through which the provincial government pays the nation for its work to conserve this carbon sink on a per-hectare basis, would enable a massive range of opportunities for the First Nation, including species and water monitoring, land-based education and jobs in fisheries, tourism and stewardship.

Establishing a carbon finance benefit-sharing agreement between Poplar River First Nation and the Government of Manitoba would mean offsets for the carbon sequestered by these lands could be sold to finance the First Nation’s work.

“They have so much information around the carbon, and they have done so much work to try to create a functioning offset,” said Mary-Kate Craig, a PhD candidate at the University of Guelph studying Indigenous-led carbon markets.

Yet so far, Poplar River hasn’t been able to formalize a conservation economy, which Craig said is “to do with the provincial government not giving them what they need to actually create that as a project.”

The International Institute for Sustainable Development found the forests and wetlands in Pimachiowin Aki store an estimated total of 444 million tonnes of carbon. Photo: Hidehiro Otake / UNESCO

Are carbon offsets just greenwashing?

Many people say that offsets need to be part of an energy transition plan in conjunction with large-scale emissions reductions in sectors like oil and gas extraction and transportation.

Shane Moffatt of Greenpeace Canada pointed to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s pledge to plant two billion trees with revenues from the Trans Mountain Pipeline as a worst-case scenario.

“They need to be in addition to drastic emissions reductions, not to somehow offset or balance them out,” he said. “That’s not going to get us anywhere and is just shuffling chairs on the Titanic.”

“Understandably, conservation interests have been pushing for recognition of the importance of maintaining the carbon sinks that we now have: wetlands and forests and so forth,” said Gibson of the University of Waterloo. “That’s fine, but we need to be much more ambitious than that if we’re going to get to net-zero.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau once promised to plant trees with revenues from the Trans Mountain oilsands pipeline, a strategy that doesn’t sit well with many environmentalists. Photo: Johann Simundsson

Are there more examples of successful carbon offset projects in Canada?

In 2011, three years after buying 136,000 acres of forest from a logging company in B.C.’s Selkirk Mountains, the Nature Conservancy of Canada sold its first round of carbon credits. That first sale through the Darkwoods Forest Carbon Project was for 700,000 credits — equivalent to 700,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide  — and netted more than $4 million on the voluntary market. The revenue from credits went back into conservation work on the property — and it continues to each year.

Pallant of Ecotrust Canada has been working for a decade and a half on forest carbon offset projects, trying to develop protocols and “clear the path” for successful projects.

He gives the example of the Cheakamus Community Forest, a collaboration between Ecotrust, Brinkman Climate, the town of Whistler and the First Nations of Squamish and Lil’watt.

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With so much action both from the federal government and Indigenous governments, Rasevych of the Thunder Bay-based Anishnawbe Business Professional Association is convinced the movement toward carbon offsetting only requires a few more sparks to ignite.

“There needs to be a starting point,” he said. “There needs to be one First Nation or a group of First Nations that work together on pushing that agenda. Because it is something that our communities have a common vision about — and it’s something that could assist us globally.”

— With files from Emma Gilchrist

The Carbon Cache series is funded by Metcalf Foundation. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, the foundation has no editorial input into the articles.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

This is the fourth part of Carbon Cache, an ongoing series about nature-based climate solutions.

To reach the Cree community of Waswanipi, where Mandy Gull grew up, you drive north from Montreal for eight hours on a trip Gull describes as “not for the faint-hearted,” especially in winter. 

You can’t miss Waswanipi; you’ll cross a long green bridge over the Waswanipi River and the community of 1,700 will be on your right, ringed by the boreal forest and further away, like the expanding ripples from a skimmed stone, by logging cut blocks. In Cree, Waswanipi means ‘light on the water,’ a reminder of the days when torches were lit with pine tar and sturgeon several metres long were speared and caught at the river’s dark mouth.  

In early August, Gull, the Deputy Grand Chief of the Cree Nation, returns from almost three weeks in her husband’s community of Whapmagoostui, on the Great Whale River at the shore of Hudson Bay. Great Whale, as the town is often called, is the most northern community in James Bay Cree territory, accessible only by boat or plane. 

Waswanipi, more than 600 kilometres away as the crow flies, is the most southern, sitting not far from where Highway 113 arcs east, as though it has consulted a compass and changed its mind about direction.

In between the two communities, beneath the clouds on Gull’s flight home, lies a dense forest of mature spruce and pine called the Broadback. 

The Broadback Forest is one of the few remaining large tracts of intact boreal forest left in Quebec. It stretches over more than 1.3 million hectares, an area considerably larger than Cape Breton Island. Map: Alicia Carvalho / The Narwhal

Untouched by wildfire for many hundreds of years, the Broadback Forest has never been logged or known the incursion of roads. The forest floor is coated in moss, with scarves of lichen draped over tree branches. The Broadback River, full of fish, bends through the forest as it jogs toward Rupert Bay, at the south end of James Bay. The forest is a sanctuary for wildlife such as migratory songbirds and at-risk woodland caribou, and it provides sustenance and meaning for the Cree.

“In the Cree identity when you say Cree you say Eeyou. And then when you speak about the Cree territory you say Eeyou Istchee,” says Gull during an interview on Zoom from her home. 

“Everything about our being, our language, the way that we learn language, everything about our diet, everything about our traditional activities is practised on the land.” 

Mandy Gull, Deputy Grand Chief of the Cree Nation, says the Broadback River Valley is one of the last untouched old growth forests for her community.

Invisible from the sky, amidst the tapestry of trees interwoven with blue lakes and wetlands, is another reason the Broadback Forest stands out. Sequestered in the deep soil and hidden in mixed spruce and pine stands — trees that were saplings long before Canada became a country — is a rich vault of carbon.

“If you look at a map of where the carbon hotspots are in the world, the Broadback is in one of the most carbon dense areas on the planet, around the Hudson Bay-James Bay lowlands,” says Jennifer Skene, author of a July 2020 report about unregulated emissions from boreal forest logging that are undermining Canada’s climate goals.

“This forest is playing a really, really major role in carbon storage and continued carbon sequestration,” says Skene, a lawyer with the U.S.-based Natural Resources Defense Council, which focuses on the rights of all people to clean air, clean water and healthy communities.  

Per hectare, the Broadback and the rest of Canada’s boreal forest store almost twice as much carbon as the Amazon and twice as much carbon as the world’s oil reserves, Skene notes. “So it is absolutely critical to the global carbon cycle.”

A map created by WWF-Canada for its 2019 wildlife protection assessment indicates the levels of soil carbon across Canada. The Broadback Forest is in one of the most carbon dense areas on the planet. Map: WWF-Canada

In contrast to the Amazon, where rapidly growing trees store the bulk of the region’s carbon, the Broadback harbours most of its carbon — more than 80 per cent — in the soil. 

“Because it’s so cold, things decay extremely slowly there. As leaves and other biomass fall to the ground, it gets trapped in the soils and locked up there for a really, really long time, sometimes in excess of hundreds or thousands of years,” Skene says.

For almost 20 years, the Cree have been working to protect the primary forest in the Broadback watershed from logging and other development such as mining and road-building. 

The Broadback — with its carbon cache and abundant wildlife — is one of the few remaining areas on Waswanipi Cree territory untouched by industry. Ninety per cent of the territory has been impacted by industrial development, Gull says, and close to 30,000 kilometres of forestry roads criss-cross through her homeland.

This spring, Ottawa announced what Gull says is a “significant” amount of funding to help the Cree establish and co-manage a network of new Indigenous protected areas, based on areas of importance to the Crees of Eeyou Istchee. The Cree’s proposed network of protected areas, designed to be hydrologically connected, would increase connectivity among existing protected areas and protect habitats for species at risk and culturally significant species, including woodland caribou. “The Broadback is a big part of that connectivity because it spans right across the territory,” Gull says. 

The Cree Nation has received federal funding to help establish and co-manage a network of new Indigenous protected areas. Photo: Greenpeace

Blueberry bushes lie low on the forest floor in the Broadback Forest in northern Quebec. Photo: Greenpeace

Dense vegetation covers the forest floor in the Broadback Forest in Quebec. Photo: Greenpeace

The funding is part of a federal government investment — called the Target 1 Challenge — in projects that can add to Canada’s conserved and protected areas, in keeping with the country’s international commitment to conserve 17 per cent of Canada’s land and 10 per cent of its oceans by 2020. Much of the funding has gone toward supporting proposals for Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas, which aim to safeguard Indigenous rights while conserving biodiversity and providing a space to practice traditional ways of life. The funding for Eeyou Istchee will be used to conduct studies and gather information throughout the territory about hydrology and connectivity, Gull says. 

The Cree call the Broadback watershed Misigamish, meaning a large body of water. Almost two decades ago, following extensive consultations, they developed a Broadback Watershed Conservation Plan to protect key areas for culture, carbon storage, clean water and biodiversity. About two-thirds of the land and waterways identified in the conservation plan have since been protected by the Quebec government.

But the Broadback’s remaining rare primary forest, which includes white birch and trembling aspen, is open to industrial development such as logging and mining. Among other values, the unprotected Broadback Forest connects the Assinica and Nottaway caribou herds, fostering genetic diversity and providing a habitat safety net for the at-risk herds.

A young woodland caribou on a road in the Broadback Valley. The Broadback Forest is key because it connects the habitat of two caribou herds. Photo: Greenpeace

“The Broadback River Valley is one of the untouched old growth forests for my community,” says Gull, who is responsible for the Cree Nation’s conservation file. 

“For us, it’s really significant because the families that are actively hunting and trapping there are some of the few families that do not have to adjust activities in their harvesting seasons, due to commercial activities in the area. We have a lot of traplines that are impacted by forestry and mining.”

Like many Cree, most of Gull’s diet consists of country foods like moose, beaver and fish. Food is caught, trapped, harvested and hunted through traditional family trapline systems, each monitored by a tallyman, a caretaker of the land.

In Great Whale, Gull ate Arctic char. In Chibougamau, she’s been out picking wild blueberries. She brews medicinal tea from Labrador tea bushes, often found in swamps and bogs, and from pink fireweed plants. In the autumn, her husband hunts moose. Bear and beaver are also part of the Cree diet. Canada geese and snow geese are a staple in the spring. “Just about anything is fair game,” she says. “Pun intended.” 

Don Saganash has been working his traditional family trapline in the Broadback Forest ever since he can remember, harvesting everything from marten, muskrat, mink and beaver to walleye, trout and sturgeon. 

“When we’re there, it’s like paradise for us,” he says in a phone interview from his home in Waswapani. “We have all the trees, the water. You can still drink the water from the river. You don’t have to think about any contamination. The trees are still there. All the traditional portages and campsites are still recognized; they aren’t clear cut yet.” 

Saganash’s family trapline is on the north side of the Broadback River. He worries that roads are being punched through the forest ever closer to the river’s south bank, along which the Cree have requested a 10-kilometre buffer zone. “On the south side the loggers are coming, the developers are coming,” he says. “If they go right to the river, they’ll pollute the water.” 

Industrial forestry companies with tenures in the Broadback have respected a logging moratorium negotiated in 2009. But the Cree say logging could expand into the southern portion of the Broadback forest this year, under a five-year forestry plan that proposes a harvest of six million cubic metres of wood in Waswanipi territory. 

Fifteen years ago, Saganash’s father appointed him to be the family tallyman, a position generally passed down from father to son. “A tallyman has a big responsibility. You have to think about your family, your friends. You just take what you need — don’t overharvest.”

“Our grandfather, our great-grandfather, were recognized as caretakers of the land, to manage it properly,” says Saganash, whose diet is 90 per cent traditional food. “Our ancestors took care of it. Now it’s our turn.” From big moose to tiny mice, “every animal counts,” he says. 

“It’s not that we’re anti-development. We’re trying to protect what is left for the people of Waswanipi. We’re trying to protect the last 10 per cent.” 

Don Saganash’s father appointed him to be the family tallyman, a position generally passed down from father to son. “A tallyman has a big responsibility. You have to think about your family, your friends. You just take what you need — don’t overharvest,” he says. Photo: Greenpeace

When the boreal forest is logged, Skene says it becomes a “Pandora’s box of carbon” that is released into the atmosphere, jeopardizing international climate targets at a time when scientists warn the world is careening towards a tipping point for runaway global warming. 

The Natural Resources Defense Council conservatively estimates that the current rate of logging in the Canadian boreal releases 26 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, equivalent to the annual emissions of 5.5 million cars. 

In 2017, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that preserving forests, wetlands and grasslands could provide more than one-third of the carbon emissions reductions needed to stabilize global temperature increases below 2 C by 2030 under the Paris Accord.

A clearcut in Cree territory in northern Quebec. Photo: Greenpeace

“Releasing the carbon that is stored there [in the Broadback] would not be in line with the vision that was set for the Paris agreement and the role that Quebec continuously showcases, in highlighting that they are a province that seeks to achieve targets in the fight against climate change,” Gull says.

Gull’s family trapline, in the southern portion of Waswanipi territory, has been deeply impacted by logging over the past several decades. To hunt, fish, trap and harvest, extended family members now drive on forestry roads, passing logging trucks trailing clouds of dust and debris, past stockpiled trees and cut blocks, where they notice an unsettling dearth of wildlife.

The first time Gull travelled to the Broadback Forest, accessed after a five-hour car ride from Waswanipi, she was struck by the absence of roads. “We had to take a boat, we had to portage, we had to get through the forest because there was no disturbance,” she recalls. “I had become so accustomed to what logging a forest looked like, I hadn’t even given it a second thought.” 

Flying over the Broadback in the summer of 2014 in a helicopter, to get video footage, Gull marvelled at the “sea of trees that were tightly grown.” 

“That really shook me to my core and really made me realize the importance of why the tallyman wanted to protect his territory so much, why disturbing his trapline would have such a significant impact on the wildlife and on his trapline itself. It was something that really opened my eyes. And I really only understood when I went there. I had become almost desensitized to what forestry was doing to a trapline, because it was all I had ever really known.”

A view of the Broadback Forest in northern Quebec, one of the last remaining large tracts of intact boreal forest in the province. Photo: Greenpeace

The Broadback Forest is one of the few remaining large tracts of intact boreal forest left in Quebec. It stretches over more than 1.3 million hectares, an area considerably larger than Cape Breton Island. 

In July 2015, Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard and Grand Chief Matthew Coon Come, of the Grand Council of the Crees, announced the protection of more than 543,600 hectares of forests, lakes and rivers that were identified in the Broadback watershed conservation plan.

The newly conserved area expanded the existing Assinica Cultural Heritage Park, protecting a total of 913,400 hectares of the Broadback’s rare primary forest stands and waterways.

But the Quebec government stopped short of conserving the remaining 386,600 hectares, despite its 2015 commitment to hold “meaningful discussions … regarding options for protective measures,” in the remainder of the Broadback Forest.

“We’ve submitted our proposals, we’ve done our work, we’ve identified the areas that we are seeking protection for,” Gull says. 

“Really, the last step is for Quebec to decide: ‘Are we going to legislate in creating a protected area?’ ” Gull says. “I strongly encourage them to take the initiative, to complete the work that’s been on the table for a number of years.” 

Nicole Rycroft, the founder and executive director of Canopy, a non-profit organization that works with international forest industry customers and their suppliers, is surprised the Cree have not been able to gain traction with the Quebec government to protect the missing piece of the Broadback.

“From our perspective it’s hard to see what the stumbling block is,” Rycroft says. “It feels like all the pieces are in place in this puzzle and there’s really just one piece left. And that’s for the Quebec government to actually move forward and protect this remaining swath of the Broadback Forest.”

Nicole Rycroft is the founder of Canopy, a non-profit organization that helps companies ensure their paper and other products are not produced by logging forests rich in carbon and biodiversity. Photo: Canopy

Canopy was already working on boreal conservation issues in Quebec in 2007, when Rycroft and other staff learned of the Cree’s efforts to secure Broadback Forest protection. 

“We started to highlight the Broadback Forest as one of the gems within the broader boreal landscape that presented a really unique conservation, as well as social justice opportunity,” Rycroft says.

Travelling to the Broadback in the summer of 2010, uncoiling herself from the car after a day-long ride, Rycroft stepped into fresh air, birdsong and a large gathering of Cree members from different communities, who welcomed her with warmth and generosity. 

“Everybody was camping,” she recalls. “There was a lot of food being prepared, off the land … To go from a car ride to fish and food coming straight from the land is pretty magical.”

 Canopy’s work is informed by the business adage that the customer is always right. The non-profit works with 750 large corporate customers in the forest products industry, including 320 large fashion brands, to advance conservation initiatives. Canopy’s corporate partners, which also include large commercial printers and large publishers such as Scholastic, use significant amounts of packaging.

“All of those companies have developed policies that commit to eliminate the sourcing of rayon or packaging from the world’s ancient and endangered forests — these high carbon, high biodiversity landscapes — and to give a preference to next generation solutions,” Rycroft says. Such solutions include using waste from grain and other food harvests for packaging, paper and fabric production.

Canopy helps companies ensure their fibre source is not derived from logging forests rich in carbon and biodiversity that form an integral part of Indigenous culture. It also enlists companies to support landscape-level conservation initiatives such as the Great Bear Rainforest agreement and the Broadback forest watershed conservation plan; corporations affiliated with Canopy write letters to the Quebec government calling for the Broadback forest to be protected.

In July, Canopy and the Natural Resources Defense Council also wrote to Quebec Premier François Legault, reminding him that, under the Aichi targets in the Convention on Biological Diversity, Quebec committed to protect 17 per cent of its overall territory by this year. Under the province’s Plan Nord, the Quebec government also pledged to protect 20 per cent of the province, with 12 per cent in the boreal.

“Without protection, roads, logging, mining and energy projects will continue to create market risk for the extractive industries and for their purchasers and continue to generate uncertainty around their operations,” the two organizations told the Quebec premier.

A clearcut in Cree territory in northern Quebec in 2015. Photo: Greenpeace

Log piles at the Eacom Timber Corporation lumber mill in Matagami, Quebec, in 2015. Photo: Greenpeace

Vancouver-based Hemlock printers, a Canopy partner, is among the companies advocating for conservation of the remaining 3,500 square kilometres in the Broadback conservation area. 

Protecting the Broadback, Hemlock told the Quebec government in a July 2020 letter, will position the province “in a positive light in the global marketplace, offering a story of hope and true benchmark for Indigenous-led conservation plans.” 

Hemlock, a family business founded 52 years ago, provides a wide range of printing services to customers in the Lower Mainland, other parts of Canada and the United States, where it maintains offices in Seattle and San Francisco. Customers include prominent multinational corporations such as Facebook, Microsoft, Columbia Sportswear, Ikea and Gensler. (The company also prints The Narwhal’s annual print magazine.) 

“We’re trying to build incentives for clients to pick lower carbon papers,” Hemlock president Richard Kouwenhoven tells The Narwhal.

“We have a broader goal to support forest conservation because we feel it’s critical as part of the solution on climate change … We need to find ways to preserve large intact landscapes that support a lot of biodiversity and help with creating a more stable climate. We want to be very active participants within that.”

But it’s not a sacrifice for Hemlock to place a premium on protecting biodiversity and carbon stores by supporting Indigenous-led conservation initiatives. “Ultimately it is really good for our business,” Kouwenhoven says. “It’s what our clients are looking for.” 

Skene says logging practices in Canada’s boreal also have direct implications for Americans, who buy products like toilet paper sourced from Canada’s diminishing boreal forest.

Americans care about the Broadback and the boreal because they are globally important ecosystems and the home of species beloved around the world, such as migratory songbirds and caribou, Skene says. 

“The fate of this forest is tied to our global climate … The birds that we’re seeing in our backyards are dependent on the protection and preservation of the boreal forest. A lot of people don’t realize that the vast majority of the exports that are coming out of the boreal forest are ending up in the United States.” 

Jennifer Skene is a lawyer with the U.S.-based Natural Resources Defense Council. She says the fate of the Broadback Forest has ramifications for the global climate because of the tremendous amount of carbon it holds. Photo: NRDC

Not only has Canada failed to regulate emissions from the forestry sector, despite regulating emissions from the oil and gas industry, but it has also failed to fully capture the dynamics of soil carbon emissions and carbon lost from thick mosses found in boreal forests like the Broadback, Skene says. 

Only a very small percentage of carbon from a logged old-growth tree is captured in a long-lived wood product like a table or a desk or a wooden house, according to Skene, who says even those products don’t capture carbon for significant periods of time. Much of the biomass that is removed from the boreal forest is manufactured into short-lived products for Americans such as toilet paper, paper towel and newsprint, which are used once and discarded.  

Forests provide a critical buffer against climate change, Rycroft points out. “They’re 30 per cent of the climate solution. They’re 80 per cent of habitat for terrestrial species. For us, working to help support the conservation and secure the conservation of landscapes like the Broadback is really critical both for stemming climate change and stemming the precipitous decline that we have in species.” 

“We’re in a turn-around decade for our planet and for our species, for our climate. And we need to be moving faster and at larger scale.”

The scientific community is calling for 30 to 50 percent of the world’s forests to be protected by 2030.  Canada, Rycroft says, is one of only three countries in the world — along with Russia and Brazil — that is uniquely positioned to be able to make significant contributions to forest protection at that scale. 

“I think particularly for the Canadian government and, in this case, for the Quebec government, there’s a need to move faster on large-scale conservation, particularly conservation opportunities like the Broadback that have been sitting on the books just waiting for finalization.”

In an emailed response to questions from The Narwhal, the Quebec Ministry of Environment and the Fight Against Climate Change said it will hold discussions with the Cree Nation government in the next few weeks “to plan the next steps towards the selection of future protected areas.” 

The ministry said the provincial government and the Cree Nation government are “in the process of planning to protect 20 percent of the Eeyou Istchee James Bay territory” by the end of 2020 — an area totalling 2.8 million hectares — as part of Plan Nord, an economic development strategy for Quebec’s natural resources extraction sector north of the 49th parallel. Representatives from both governments are discussing the Broadback Valley area, the ministry said. 

Talks are taking place in the context of the Grande Alliance, a long-term agreement between the two governments signed in February that aims to promote long-term economic development in accordance with traditional values. “It includes the identification of protected areas,” the ministry stated. 

A member of the Waswanipi Cree walks along his trapline near the Broadback river. Photo: Greenpeace

For Saganash, protecting the missing piece of the Broadback Forest will help keep Cree culture alive for his twin eight-year-old grandchildren, a girl and a boy. “It’s very important for the next generation to see how our great-grandfathers lived. If they clearcut the area, I won’t be able to explain it to my grandchildren.” 

Every place in the Broadback forest is significant for the Cree, Saganash explains. “All the rapids, the campsites, the valley, the creek, it all has a meaning.” 

Saganash often thinks of his father’s message on the day he found out he had been appointed the new tallyman: “Try to save our trapline.” 

In early August, Saganash returns to Waswanipi after a weekend of fishing in the Broadback River in his trapline area, a five-hour drive and then a two-hour boat ride from his house. He brings back walleye for his family, including for his 95-year old mother. 

“I would like her to see the day when we save the Broadback,” Saganash says. “That would be really touching.” 

Updated at 10:10 a.m. PST on Aug. 24, 2020. An earlier version of this story included a photo of a different Don Saganash than the one quoted in this story. That photo has been removed and replaced with a photo of the Don Saganash who was quoted. A photo caption was also updated.

The Carbon Cache series is funded by Metcalf Foundation. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, the foundation has no editorial input into the articles.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

This is the first part of Carbon Cache, an ongoing series about nature-based climate solutions.

Well, it’s 2020 now and the techno-fixes are, rather unfortunately, not in. 

No promise to geoengineer the skies or seed the ocean with iron or suck carbon out of the atmosphere has really come to fruition. 

Yet, all along, Canada’s seaweed, dirt and trees have managed to do something that’s seemed impossible for the world’s most advanced technocratic nations: provide a legitimate, ongoing and cost-effective climate solution.

It’s with no irony that the world’s foremost scientific institutions are now recommending that to save nature what needs to be done is, well, save nature.

Perhaps the biggest boost to the idea of these so-called ‘nature-based climate solutions’ came in late 2017 when a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the simple act of preserving wetlands, forests and grasslands could provide more than one-third of the emissions reductions needed to stabilize global temperature increases below 2 C by 2030 under the Paris Accord.

For countries looking to make quick climate gains, the idea of these nature-based climate fixes created quite the buzz.

Those findings also thrust Canada — home to 25 per cent of Earth’s wetlands and boreal forests, as well as endangered prairie grasslands and the world’s longest coastline — into playing a vital role in the global fight against climate change.  

Indigenous-led approaches to conservation

In early 2020, before the pandemic hit, hundreds of people from across the country gathered in Ottawa to discuss what a pivot to nature-based climate solutions in Canada might entail. 

In a cavernous, bright conference room — booked and rebooked several times as numbers expanded from dozens to more than 400 attendees — Environment and Climate Change Minister Jonathan Wilkinson delivered the keynote address.

“Nature-based solutions give us the opportunity to tackle the challenges of climate change and biodiversity at the same time,” Wilkinson said to the more than 400 attendees.

In addition to its global climate commitments, the federal government has also set a goal of protecting 30 per cent of lands and oceans by 2030.

As part of its 2019 election platform, the federal Liberal Party pledged to spend $3 billion on nature-based climate solutions, including the planting of 2 billion trees and other land-use projects that naturally sequester carbon. 

But at the conference another voice emerged to urge Canadians to think beyond the terms of “land-use” when it comes to nature’s role in the battle against climate change. 

“Land relationship planning,” Steven Nitah, Dene leader and former Northwest Territories MLA, pitched to the crowd. 

“Think of the phrase ‘land-use planning,’ ” he challenged the audience. “Land use — how we use the land. That doesn’t talk about land relationship planning.”

Nitah was the chief negotiator for Łutsel K’e Dene First Nations during the creation of Canada’s newest national park, the Thaidene Nëné National Park Reserve. The protected area, which covers 26,525 square kilometres of lakes, old-growth boreal forests, rivers and wildlife habitat, was uniquely designed with Indigenous land management in mind.

Steven Nitah, the Lutsel K’e Dene First Nation lead negotiator for Thaidene Nene National Park. Photo: Pat Kane

Nitah argued the concept of “land relationship planning” should enter the collective vocabularies of Canadians as the country imagines pathways forward for nature-based climate solutions. 

It’s a phrase that got stuck on the tongues of the crowd for the rest of the conference as various experts pooled around tables and in the halls to discuss Indigenous protected areas and undervalued grasslands and how farmers are reimagining their relationship with soil to be better carbon stewards. 

For climate solutions in particular, reimagining the relationship between humans and the land has never been more urgent.

Earth has regulated its own carbon cycle for eons, and it has only taken humanity 150 years to throw that cycle out of whack. Fortunately, the systems that balanced carbon in the atmosphere, in soil and the oceans, in living beings and inert rocks, still exist and still have the potential to recover. But doing that requires space.

“The capacity for nature to bounce back is incredible,” said Lara Ellis said of ALUS Canada, a national charity that works with farmers on projects that restore and benefit the natural landscapes, such as wetlands or good habitat for pollinators. 

A shrinking window for climate solutions

Protecting a forest is easier than recreating an entire forest, which itself is easier than building a machine to suck an equivalent amount of carbon from the air and store it. But the result, less carbon in the atmosphere, is the same.

The same holds for wetlands: artificial, built wetlands are both 150 per cent more expensive and significantly worse at storing carbon than simply protecting a wetland to begin with.

As climate change intensifies, many of the opportunities to harness nature’s own climate regulation systems are dimming. 

Canada’s forests have begun to emit more carbon than they store as wildfires, droughts, pests and diseases rage within them. Coastal wetlands are shrinking and flooding, while inland ones are facing droughts and fires. 

A map created by WWF-Canada for its 2019 wildlife protection assessment indicates the levels of forest biomass across Canada. Map: WWF-Canada

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that as many as 30 per cent of the planet’s species could be at risk — even in an optimistic 1.5 C temperature rise scenario. 

Because of the urgency of the climate emergency, it is necessary to rethink conservation efforts not just under the banner of preservation but of restoration.

The United Nations has already declared the years between 2021 and 2030 as the “decade on ecosystem restoration” in the fight against climate and the growing threats to human survival.

“There is still time to work with nature, not against it,” said Patricia Fuller, Canada’s ambassador for climate change, standing before the Ottawa conference.

“But the window to do so is shrinking rapidly.”

In that shrinking window, scientists, Indigenous leaders, experts and policy advisors have begun identifying the most critical regions in Canada for the implementation of nature-based climate solutions. 

Canada’s secret weapon: the boreal forest

The concentration of carbon in the soil follows the boreal forest almost perfectly as it swoops across Canada, dipping from northern Yukon east around Hudson Bay and spilling out to cover much of Quebec, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador. It’s a globally significant store of carbon that holds almost twice the carbon of the planet’s tropical forests.

A map created by WWF-Canada for its 2019 wildlife protection assessment indicates the levels of soil carbon across Canada. Map: WWF-Canada

But with that storage comes the potential for release when the land changes: as much as 15 per cent of global carbon emissions come from deforestation. Destruction of peatlands accounts for 10 per cent as well, while farming accounts for another 10 per cent.

“The boreal forest is one of the largest intact forests in the world,” James Snider, the vice-president of science, research and innovation for World Wildlife Fund Canada, told The Narwhal.

“That establishes us in an important place to be leading the charge to show how nature-based climate solutions ought to be implemented.” But the boreal’s effectiveness at storing carbon has to do with what’s happening to its landscapes — logging, climate change and wildfires have all emerged as threats to the boreal and its carbon storage potential. 

Canada’s boreal forest is a globally significant store of carbon that holds almost twice the carbon of the planet’s tropical forests. Photo: Stand.earth

Protecting those lands delivers other benefits to humans too. Forests purify the air, stabilize soil and provide places for recreation. 

Wetlands are exceptional water filtration systems that also provide habitat for birds and amphibians, while absorbing excess water, thereby protecting land from floods. 

Grasslands are home to the pollinators that keep agriculture alive. As an added bonus, the places that hold the most carbon are often the places that support the most biodiversity.

Building Canada’s resilience to climate change

Protecting an area isn’t always enough, if climate change and its impacts are coming for the landscape and its wildlife regardless.

The solution, Snider says, is to make sure those ecosystems have the protection they need to be more resilient. He points to the Hudson and James Bay Lowlands, an area five times the size of New Brunswick on the southern edge of Hudson Bay. On a map of the richest areas of carbon storage in Canada, the Hudson and James Bay Lowlands is clearly outlined in the deepest possible shade.

“That’s an area that’s accumulated carbon over thousands of years,” Snider says. “How do we avoid that becoming future emissions?” 

Canada is home to the world’s largest peatland carbon stores, with peatlands covering about 12 per cent of Canada’s total land area. The area is also mineral rich and being eyed for future mining projects.

Nature as part of Canada’s COVID-19 recovery

A big part of the protection required for Canada’s carbon-rich landscapes is likely to come from Indigenous protected and conserved areas, something the Cree Nation is working toward establishing. 

To date, the nation has protected 15 per cent of its territory in northern Quebec, which is home to vast tracts of boreal forest, and is seeking to reach 30 per cent. Such big protected areas create resilience by having interconnected systems that protect one another.

Looking for opportunities to work with communities on the landscapes they already inhabit is key to coming up with practical, workable nature-based climate solutions, Graham Saul, executive director of Nature Canada, said in a webinar months after the Ottawa conference.

“We can ground people who care about climate change in their own landscapes,” he says, adding that efforts to build buffers against climate change can actually restore people’s relationship to the land. 

This has become all the more important in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic devastation, Saul says.

A poll, released Tuesday and conducted by Pollara Strategic Insights for the International Boreal Conservation Campaign, found 70 per cent of 3,019 respondents across Canada want to see conservation of nature included as part of the economic recovery. The poll also found 72 per cent of respondents believe the government should invest in Indigenous stewardship as part of the economic recovery. 

Inspired by the Great Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps in the U.S., some are asking for the establishment of a corps of workers dedicated to nature-based climate projects as part of federally funded relief programs.

Others are calling for Indigenous-led conservation efforts to be recognized as part of coronavirus resilience and recovery efforts. 

“How do we ensure that nature is part of the recovery process?” Saul asks.

In the coming weeks, The Narwhal will look at the role of Canada’s natural landscapes in the fight against climate change. This Carbon Cache series is funded by Metcalf Foundation. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, the foundation has no editorial input into the articles.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.