With climate change shifting growing zones north, officials in Canada’s sparsely populated Yukon territory are trying to lure farmers to the region with free land.
“Our territory is expected to get wetter and warmer,” said Rod Jacob with the Department of Energy, Mines, and Resources in the Yukon capital of Whitehorse. “We may see opportunity with an increased growing season.”
In order to be part of the program, which offers farmers a maximum of 160 acres, growers must pay for surveying, make certain improvements to the land, and promise to live there for six years before they make any attempt to sell it.
“Average temperatures in the Yukon have climbed by 2 degrees Celsius in the past 50 years due to climate change, said a 2016 Canadian study, more than twice as fast as the planet as a whole,” says Alaska Dispatch.
Only 40,000 people live in the territory, though it’s larger than Belgium, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands combined. Yukon officials have already doled out 8,000 acres of free land in the past decade, but they expect applications to rise as temperatures do the same.