For example, the offset sites include 6, 000 hectares of forests establishing new de facto protected areas.
The State Forests of New South Wales, a government firm based near Sydney, has worked out a clever way to measure, and trade, the carbon dioxide stored in trees.
It was instrumental in designing the Clean Development Mechanism, which it is doing very nicely out of, and it fears that flooding the market for carbon credits with new supply from tropical forests would depress the price and destroy the mechanism.
The company agreed to donate 4, 000 acres in the middle of one of its pine forests for a new airport.
To the west of Newfoundland is New Brunswick, where great forests of maples, poplars and larches are busy turning bright shades of red, gold and fuchsia in the chilling air.
But as studies detail plans for thousands of miles of new pipelines and related infrastructure, the dangers to biologically rich forests that have rebounded since vast clear-cutting in the 1800s are taking on new urgency.
It says it will create a new public body that will hold in trust the nation's forests for future generations.
That proposal is aimed at dealing with suburban sprawl, while the new initiative is directed at restoring and protecting undeveloped, but vulnerable, forests, grasslands, beaches and marine sanctuaries, officials said.
The Republicans celebrated last month's triumph by fast-tracking several K-Street favourites: exempting older coal-fired plants from new anti-pollution rules, and making it easier to open national forests to logging and drilling.
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Environmental groups are already decrying new and expanding palm oil plantations in Borneo that they say are destroying rain forests and threatening orangutans.
Environmentalists, long vexed by the destruction of Indonesia's primal forests and the damage done to its vast marine life, believe that the new government, desperate for foreign aid, will at last allow them to do something to stop the depredation.
The flaw in their theory was that forests need periodic episodes of destruction to clear out old growth and dead wood so that new, more vigorous growth can flourish.
Centuries later, scientists would surmise that the Day of Darkness -- widely known as New Engand's Dark Day --- was the result of massive wildfires burning in the forests of Canada.
The High Biodiversity Wilderness Areas (Amazonia, the Congo forests of Central Africa, the Miombo-Mopane Woodlands of Southern Africa, the island of New Guinea, and the North American Deserts) are similar to the Hotspots in that they have very high levels of diversity and endemism, but unlike the Hotspots they are still largely intact.
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This approach shows promise: water consumers ranging from officials in New York city to private hydro-electric operators in Costa Rica are now paying people upstream to manage their forests and agricultural land better.
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