But caribou experts in Alberta fear it may not be enough to halt the iconic animal’s precipitous decline in this province.

The Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement is expected to lead to more sustainable harvesting practices and protection of habitat in 72 million hectares of forest across the country. There will also be a suspension of new logging and road building on nearly 29 million hectares of boreal forest while the signatories develop conservation plans for endangered woodland caribou.

At the same time, the “do not buy” campaigns by ForestEthics, Greenpeace and Canopy will be suspended. Many of these campaigns have held the woodland caribou up as their poster animal, suggesting that the species would be wiped out if further logging occurred in the forests they inhabit.

In Alberta, signatory companies have committed to no harvesting or road building in almost 4.4 million hectares of caribou range for three years. But Stan Boutin, a University of Alberta biologist and a member of the Alberta Caribou Committee, said this alone will not be enough. “If we already have some pretty extensive oil and gas development, in terms of exploration and things of that nature, and already some roads in there from previous logging and stuff like that, then stopping any further stuff for just three years will have little to no effect on the caribou in those areas. It’s just a start, but it has to be recognized as a start. We would just be kidding ourselves if we thought this was going to lead to a reversal of the downturn in the caribou in these areas.”

Woodland caribou are by nature elusive and difficult to count, but there are approximately 3,000 of them remaining in Alberta, Boutin said. That’s about 20 per cent of what we had back in the mid-1990s, he said.“It’s really frightening how rapidly they are dropping.

Boutin added that though it was hard to make out the exact caribou areas set aside in Alberta in the agreement map, he’s willing to bet that there is pretty substantive development there already and that there is no merchantable timber in many parts of the forest inhabited by the caribou. “So it may not be costing the forest companies very much at all in Alberta. That may not hold for what you see in other parts of the country.”

Helene Walsh, who has long campaigned for the protection of woodland caribou in Alberta, is cautiously optimistic about the deal, which involves 21 member companies of the Forest Products Association of Canada (FPAC) and nine major environmental organizations.

“It’s good the forestry industry is committed to working in a positive direction here,” said Walsh, boreal campaign director with the northern Alberta chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. “One can only hope the government will follow. But unfortunately for the caribou range, there are a lot of companies that aren’t FPAC companies that log in critical parts of the caribou range. And so I’m hoping this kind of agreement and movement forward with some of the bigger companies will draw them in, but one never knows.”

Boutin added that the challenge is that it’s not just forestry affecting caribou habitat, but also the oil and gas sector. “I think a positive aspect of this agreement is that I think it’s a clear signal to the energy sector that the forest companies are willing to engage in collaborations with (environmental non-governmental organizations) and that the pressure in the future is going to come to bear on the energy sector stepping up and becoming involved in the same process.” Boutin said this must happen if there is any hope of saving the caribou in Alberta.

The signatory companies in Alberta so far are Alberta-Pacific Forest Industries, Canfor, Tolko Industries, West FraserTimber Co. and Weyerhaeuser. Companies that are not members of FPAC had not yet had a chance to see the agreement, according to Brady Whittaker, president and CEO of the Alberta Forest Products Association. He said he is facilitating a meeting in the next week or so for industry to come together and learn more about it. “The others may wrap their arms around it, [or] they may not. ... Having said that, the sustainability of our industry and our forests is the priority of all of our members.”

Richard Brooks, forest campaign co-ordinator with Greenpeace Canada, called the agreement the largest of its kind anywhere on the planet. He highlighted the importance of protecting the forest, which is home to 600 First Nations communities across the country. It is also the largest storehouse of carbon on the planet, banking more than 200 billion tonnes in its soil and trees, and is the source of freshwater for half of the country.

“This is the way everyone hoped the world could work,” said a buoyant sounding Avrim Lazar, president and CEO of FPAC, during a teleconference Tuesday. “Instead of fighting and having polarized discussions and trying to solve problems with win-lose, meaningless debates, we have agreed that tomorrow depends upon our ability to find solutions. Our ability to stop trying to win and start trying to solve.”

Lazar said everyone knows the forest industry has had a difficult time over the last few years. “We know in the forest industry that if we want to have jobs tomorrow we have to skate hard and fast to where the puck is going to be.” Not only does that mean improving productivity, diversifying products and penetrating the Asian market — it also means ensuring the Canadian forest industry has the best environmental reputation in the world, he said.

“We plan to turn this into a competitive advantage. We hope the customers will say to the illegal loggers, to the people whose products aren’t certified, to the people who can’t trace their products, to the suppliers of wood and paper that haven’t addressed climate change, we hope they’re going to say to those competitors of ours, ‘You’re at the back of the line.’ And those products that are world class in terms of the environment are at the front of the line.”

Key commitments in the agreement include:

Accelerate the completion of a protected spaces network that represents the diversity of ecosystems within the boreal region.

Develop and accelerate implementation of plans to protect species at risk in the boreal forest, with a priority focus on boreal caribou.

Implement world-leading, on-the-ground sustainable forest management practices that best reflect the principles of ecosystem-based management in the boreal forest.

Take action on climate change as it relates to forest conservation and forest product life cycles.

Take action to improve the prosperity of the Canadian forest sector and the communities that depend on it.

Work to achieve recognition in the marketplace for the environmental performance of the participating companies.

Brooks said environmentalists have tried all kinds of tactics over a long period of time, from marketplace engagement to public education to creative confrontation and science research. “We’ve been fighting this fight, the environmental community, for many years now and we have had some victories along the way. But we haven’t been able to achieve the results that we’ve all been hoping for. And this agreement really is going to achieve those results, and that’s why we’re behind it.

“This is our best and last chance to save woodland caribou in the boreal forests over a vast area that is twice the size of Germany,” Brooks said. “It is our last chance to permanently protect large areas of forest that will be durable in the face of climate change.”

It is estimated there are 36,000 woodland caribou left in all of Canada’s boreal forests.