Winds of Change Newsletter, February 2006     See sidebar for table of contents

Intact Forests Worth TRILLIONS

Canada’s boreal forests store 67 billion tons of carbon, a “bank account” for the future preservation of Earth worth an estimated $3.7 trillion, says the first report to assign a dollar value to those ancient groves.

Counting Canada’s Natural Capital: Assessing the Real Value of Canada’s Boreal Ecosystems argues the unquantified benefits of boreal “ecosystem services,” such as water filtration, carbon storage, flood and pest control, are 2.5 times greater than the net market value of any forestry, mining or hydroelectric extraction allowed in the region.

If the untapped worth of the ecosystems was taken into account, they would have made a 10.5 percent contribution to Canada’s gross domestic product in 2002 - more than double the 4.2 percent input to the GDP of traditional activities like timber harvesting and mining.

The findings echo those of a United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment published last spring, which warned the failure to factor “natural capital” into land-use decisions is a key factor responsible for declining ecosystems around the globe.

This is OVEC saying, we need the same study done on Appalachia’s mixed mesophytic forests, one of the most biologically diverse temperate forests in the world. Mountaintop removal destroys these forests forever, robbing future generations of the huge wealth of ecosystem services, and saddling future generations with the untold and unknown costs of ecosystems destruction.