Interview: A Landmark Agreement To Protect Canada’s Boreal Forest

Canada’s boreal forest stretches from British Columbia to Newfoundland, covering 2.2 million square miles, an area nearly 60 percent the size of the United States. Much of that forest is intact, making it — along with Russia’s northern forest and portions of the Amazon — one of three great tracts of forest on the globe. In recent years, however, industrial activity, including Alberta’s massive tar sands mines, has been nibbling away at the Canadian boreal forest. In an effort to preserve it, nine environmental groups and 21 forest products companies have signed the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement, which calls for a suspension of logging on 70 million acres of boreal forest and the introduction of improved logging practices on an additional 106 million acres. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Steven Kallick, director of the Pew Environment Group’s International Boreal Conservation Campaign, which brokered the accord, explains that it is part of a much larger effort to fully protect 50 percent of Canada’s boreal forest from industrial development.

Read the interview