The Prairie View trail near Barrier Lake in Kananaskis Country, Alta. on Nov. 2, 2008.Lauren Krugel/The Canadian Press
Aviva PLC AVVIY is restoring lands in Alberta in partnership with a Canadian company that specializes in reforestation and carbon offsets, as part of the British insurance giant’s global effort to cut emissions from its operations and rebuild ecosystems.
Aviva and Edmonton-based Wild + Pine are set to announce on Wednesday an injection of $6.2-million into rehabilitating habitat in an area of 520 hectares in the central part of the province. The plan is to sequester 275,000 tonnes of carbon over six decades by replanting the region’s native vegetation, the partners said.
The effort, called StoneWoods Forest Carbon, represents the first such initiative that Aviva is embarking on in Canada. It has already undertaken similar projects in Ireland and Britain as part of a $126-million worldwide program.
Wild + Pine launched the project last year by acquiring lands northwest of Edmonton. It will generate verified carbon credits as it sequesters CO2, a key draw for attracting corporate investors. The project’s founding partners include HCMA Architecture, Telus Corp. T-T, Parkland Corp. PKI-T, Chandos Construction, Nature Conservancy of Canada and Edmonton International Airport.
Wild + Pine have “got long experience in afforestation, forest management and self-sustaining projects along this line,” said Paul Fletcher, chief corporate affairs officer at Aviva Canada, this week. “They align with our strategy as well around climate mitigation, and a lot of the work that they do can impact the risks that come from climate change, which is flood risk or fire risk.”
The carbon credits are also important to the insurer, as it seeks to lessen its climate impact, he said. The company is targeting net-zero emissions by 2040.
Established in 2011, Wild + Pine is a certified benefit corporation, set up to meet social and environmental performance standards along with its business objectives. It focuses on bolstering biodiversity by planting numerous types of native vegetation in a region, rather than just planting trees.
It does so by cultivating seedlings in what it calls a Bioprism Advanced Vertical Greenhouse, an artificial growing environment for trees and shrubs.
The company conceived the idea before Ottawa announced in 2019 a strategy to plant two billion trees across the country within a decade. It uses some of the technology developed to grow cannabis, said Chris Kallal, Wild + Pine’s chief executive officer.
“Whether it’s the forest products industry, whether it’s oil and gas industry and its land reclamation, and now carbon projects, the demand for these native plants, whether it’s trees or shrub seedlings, is exponentially rising,” he said. “So we needed to find new and better ways to grow trees even more effectively.”
The company says it verifies environmental impact of its work using “advanced technology and rigorous scientific methodology.”
Mr. Fletcher said Aviva is seeking other Canadian reforestation projects.
“Both climate and biodiversity are interconnected, inextricably connected, and part of tackling climate change means that globally we need to protect, preserve and rebuild the biodiversity assets that existed across the world and in Canada. So this is a big part of our agenda,” he said.