The world's largest terrestrial biome and an underrated biodiversity hotspot — storing more carbon per hectare than tropical rainforest, and facing an accelerating wildfire threat rather than direct clearing.
The boreal forest — also called taiga — stretches across Canada, Alaska, Scandinavia, and Russia, representing roughly 27% of all forests worldwide and around one-third of remaining global forest cover. Despite its scale, it receives far less public attention than tropical rainforest.
Boreal forests store roughly twice as much carbon per unit area in vegetation, soils, and wetlands as tropical forests do — the Canadian boreal alone holds an estimated 208 billion tonnes of carbon, equivalent to about 26 years of current global fossil fuel emissions.
Source: International Boreal Conservation Science Panel; Woodwell Climate Research Center, 2025Much of this carbon is stored below ground, in peat and soil rather than in trees themselves, which makes the boreal biome's carbon vulnerable to disturbances — like fire and thawing permafrost — that don't require clearing a single tree to release it.
The boreal is a globally significant breeding ground for migratory birds, many of which winter in temperate and tropical regions far to the south — linking the health of the boreal directly to bird populations observed across multiple continents.
The boreal forest receives a fraction of the conservation attention given to tropical rainforest, despite storing comparable or greater carbon per hectare and hosting a comparably significant, if less charismatic, set of species. We consider this an underappreciated gap in public environmental awareness.
Remote, low-population boreal regions in Russia and northern Canada have less consistent long-term monitoring than accessible temperate or tropical forests, meaning wildfire extent and carbon-release estimates carry wider margins of error in the least-monitored areas.