Home to indigenous peoples for millennia, Canada’s boreal forest is where hundreds of First Nations and indigenous peoples communities live to this day. This “Serengeti of the North” is also the breeding ground for more than three billion North American birds, from whooping cranes to the great gray owl, and the home of many endangered animals, including the boreal caribou. The forest is also a critical tool in the fight against climate change: More than 300 billion tons of carbon is stored within the forest’s trees and peatlands—the equivalent of 36 years’ worth of world fossil fuel emissions.
But this enchanted forest is no fairy tale. Logging, oil, gas, and mining companies are exploiting the land—clearing more than one million acres on average each year—in some cases plowing roads through ancestral hunting grounds and jeopardizing animal migratory routes.
For more than two decades, NRDC supported conservation leaders and indigenous communities in their quest to protect the boreal. By pushing stronger policies and working with local partners, we can safeguard the planet’s largest old-growth forest and all the people and wildlife that rely on it.
