Grant: Alliance Grants

Thanks to its capacity for stocking carbon in both soil and vegetation, the boreal forest could be a particularly useful tool for helping industrial manufacturers offset their greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions and for Canada to respect its international commitments. Researchers and economic actors from the private and public sectors have thus joined together to create an Institutional Research Chair on Forest Carbon Management based in Sept-Iles, in order to provide regions like the North-Shore and Abitibi-Témiscamingue with a large-scale ecological counterbalance to the GHG emitted by their industries. The goal of the Chair and of its research program outlined here is to provide answers and solutions for the implementation of strategies for maximising carbon sequestration in managed forests and in harvested wood products. These goes beyond traditional afforestation projects. Rather, they involve integrating carbon management into forest management and silviculture practices, or in other words, improving the forest industry's carbon balance. In addition to offsetting industrial emissions, this would help improve forest stand productivity while taking into account the impacts of global climate changes on the boreal forest, as forest carbon dynamics will be affected directly by changes in growth and decomposition, as well as indirectly through changes in natural disturbance regimes. As industrial regions with a number of significant GHG producers, Abitibi-Témiscamingue and the North-Shore have everything to gain from implementing a dynamic and innovative research group with the goal of eventually offsetting the atmospheric emissions of industrial activities through a new vision for the boreal forest and the improvement of its contribution to climate change mitigation.