Trees Ontario: Trees: the most effective way to reduce emissions

It's hard to find anyone right now who is optimistic we can reach significant carbon emission reduction targets; most think the UN conference on climate change being held in Copenhagen is faced with seemingly intractable and complex problems.

But no matter what happens in Copenhagen, there is something we can do that will not only help reduce the effects of climate change, it will provide many other environmental benefits as well.

Plant more trees.

This sounds counterintuitive. Trees surround us. Many of us can drive, walk or bicycle to beautiful parks and forests.

But consider this. In the 1970s and '80s, we planted between 20 to 30 million trees each year on the rural landscape of southern Ontario. Now we are planting only about 3 million a year.

The reasons for this startling decline are simple: back then, trees were virtually free because governments of the day were directly involved in seed collection and germination, in running nurseries and in financing all parts of seedling production.

But in the early 1990s, governments refocused their priorities and got out of tree planting almost completely. As a result, Ontario's entire tree-planting infrastructure deteriorated and annual planting levels dropped to as low as 2 million.

So we've cut ourselves off from one of the easiest, cheapest and best ways to help mitigate the inevitable effects of climate change and protect our broader ecosystem.

Trees are the lungs of the Earth. Our older growth forests need to be protected because they're by far the most effective way to reduce air pollution – they absorb carbon dioxide and emit oxygen. Every year, a single acre of trees will compensate for 12,000 to 14,000 kilometres of automobile use – about a year for most of us.

Every 1 per cent rise in tree coverage results in the midday temperature falling by 0.2 of a degree Celsius. I'm not just talking about being in the shade of a tree in summer. Just by having one large tree to the west of a house and another to the south, air conditioning costs can be cut by 8 per cent to 18 per cent and heating costs by 2 per cent to 8 per cent.

In Ontario, we spend more than $30 billion each year on all of our energy costs. An average Ontario household spends about $2,000 a year on heating and cooling itself. With about 4 million households in Ontario and with energy prices rising, that's no trivial saving.

In short, trees cool our cities and towns. They purify our water and they certainly provide homes for plants, birds and wildlife. And their cost is far less than any industrial or technologically based remedial measure.

It costs about $5 to plant a seedling, taking into account the need to collect the seed, germinate it under proper conditions, plant it in the right place, look after the seedling once it is planted, and start making the necessary investments in capital and other resources needed to rebuild our tree planting infrastructure in southern Ontario.

So if we want to really reduce our carbon footprint, redeem Canada's environmental reputation and restore our landscape, we should plant a few million more trees, right?

Well, no. We actually need to plant more like a billion.

In some areas in southern Ontario, urban growth and other forms of deforestation have resulted in forest cover that is as low as 5 per cent. We have lost 99 per cent of our older growth forests, more than 94 per cent of our upland forests, and 70 per cent of our wetlands.

If we are to address these sobering facts and bring the average forest cover across southern Ontario closer to the 30 per cent level recommended by Environment Canada, we will need to plant about a billion trees across the landscape of southern Ontario.

Put another way – over the next 10 years, we'd have to plant about 10 million trees each year for the next 100 years just to reach what is regarded as a healthy ecosystem.

But will we? Can we?

In the last few years, the province of Ontario has begun to address this as part of its climate change policy. It has made a major commitment to plant 50 million trees by 2020, as its contribution to the United Nations' Billion Tree Campaign.

But we have long since passed the point where we can all sit back and expect our governments to solve these problems.

Spending the 10 million times $5 per seedling each year would be one of the wisest $50 million annual environmental investments we could make. That figure dwarfs what we're spending on new and alternative energy initiatives and, unlike many of them, trees are proven to work.

So before we despair about Copenhagen and complain that Canadians aren't doing enough to reduce our CO2 emissions, before we ask each other to dramatically change how we work, drive and play, let's look to one of the cheapest, safest, most effective and proven tools of all – a tree.