Carbon in the Bank: Ontario’s Greenbelt and its Role Mitigating Climate Change

The Greenbelt’s forests, wetlands, and agricultural soils capture and store considerable amounts of carbon and, as such, can play a role in mitigating climate change. Carbon in the Bank: Ontario’s Greenbelt and its Role Mitigating Climate Change, produced in collaboration with the David Suzuki Foundation, quantifies the amount of carbon captured and stored by its ecosystems and translates these services into economic values. 

Estimating the value of benefits provided by the natural capital in the Greenbelt can be useful in the context of policy making, investment choices, and other types of decision making that affect the Greenbelt and surrounding areas

It examines a number of threats to the long-term ability of the Greenbelt to serve this climate regulation function and argues that the province’s climate change policy framework should be revised to strengthen its ability to protect essential functions and even enhance the Greenbelt’s natural capacities as a carbon sink.

Key findings include:

– The Greenbelt’s forests, wetlands, and agricultural soils store a total of 86.6 million tones of carbon, which translates into $4.5 billion, or over $366.7 million per year over 20 years.
– The total amount of carbon sequested each year by the Greenbelt’s forests, wetlands, and agricultural soils is 206,065 tonnes, which translates into $10.7 million per year.

Estimating the value of benefits provided by the natural capital in the Greenbelt can be useful in the context of policy making, investment choices, and other types of decision making that affect the Greenbelt and surrounding areas. This study begins to build the case for the importance of the Greenbelt as an instrument of climate change mitigation and provides useful information to policy-makers, planners, and other stakeholders interested in the Greenbelt and climate change mitigation to consider.