What percentage of Canada's land is forest?

Canada's forested area is approximately 38 to 40 per cent of the country's land, covering about 347 million hectares. Canada has the third-largest forest cover in the world after Russia and Brazil, and produces softwood lumber, pulp, paper, oriented strandboard, plywood, biomaterials, and bioenergy at industrial scale. Approximately 90 per cent of Canadian forest is publicly owned, with provinces granting long-term tenures to commercial operators in exchange for stumpage fees, reforestation obligations, and silvicultural management.

The boreal forest is the largest single forest ecosystem in Canada, covering about 270 million hectares (about 75 per cent of Canadian forest). It runs in a continuous belt from Newfoundland and Labrador across northern Quebec, Ontario, the Prairies, Yukon, and the Northwest Territories to the Pacific. The boreal is dominated by spruce, pine, fir, larch, aspen, and birch. Canadian boreal forest is the largest unbroken boreal forest in the world and contains 25 per cent of the world's wetlands and a quarter of the world's remaining intact forest.

Other major Canadian forest ecosystems include the Pacific coastal temperate rainforest of British Columbia (about 10 million hectares, with old-growth Douglas fir, western red cedar, western hemlock, and Sitka spruce), the Acadian forest of the Maritimes (mixed conifer and deciduous with red spruce, balsam fir, and yellow birch), the Carolinian forest of extreme southern Ontario (deciduous with sugar maple, beech, oak, and the northernmost reach of species like tulip tree and pawpaw), the montane and subalpine forests of the Cordillera, and the boreal-tundra transition (taiga) of the far north.

Canadian forests provide significant economic and ecological value. The forest sector contributes about $25 billion to GDP and supports more than 200,000 direct jobs. Indigenous-led forestry has grown through joint ventures, equity stakes, and Indigenous-managed tenures including the 2024 Tla'amin Final Agreement provisions and the British Columbia Old Growth Strategic Review (2020) recommendations. Climate change is reshaping the forest sector through wildfires (the 2023 wildfire season was the worst on record at 18.5 million hectares burned), the mountain pine beetle infestation that has killed about 50 per cent of British Columbia's mature lodgepole pine, and policy shifts toward old-growth forest protection. Canadian forests sequester an estimated 70 to 80 billion tonnes of carbon, playing a central role in global climate regulation.