Byron Greens -> articles -> report

Native Forest Are Still The Answer

Report from Nature Conservation Council of NSW (NCC) forum on Carbon Forests. by Sandra Heilpern October 2008 As I was down in Sydney last week, I went along to this NCC forum to see how our city brothers and sisters organised a climate change event. The answer is Extremely well!! It was professional, informative and each speaker was an expert and showed great commitment and enthusiasm. All of this is very important. To keep just a 50% chance of stopping a 2 degree rise in global warming, we have to keep the carbon content of the atmosphere at the current 385 parts per million (ppm) or stop it at 400 (ppm) which it is heading towards right now. To do that, we not only have to stop emitting so much of the gas, but we also have to go big time into capturing as much as possible and the most obvious way to do that is by planting more vegetation. Of course we have to stop deforestation and land clearing too.

There is overwhelming evidence as to why Australia should be capturing carbon in native forests by creating new ones, looking after regrowth ones and conserving old growth ones.  It is carbon sequestration without having to pump carbon dioxide mega kilometres in pipe lines to holes under the ground somewhere a long way away from the coal fed power stations.

 

Any forest will not do.  Plantations are a poor second to native forests as carbon sinks. They lock up less carbon.  They are usually monocultures that ignore biodiversity.  They are usually logged for timber in relatively short cycles. Yet, as far as the Kyoto Protocol is concerned, and the Garnaut Report as well, they will attract the same benefit under carbon emission trading.  They are more commercially attractive, especially to the woodchip industry, but just not good enough for large scale carbon trapping.

 

In the south west corner of Western Australia, Greening Australia has started a big commercial venture buying up huge tracts of land, planting native forest and selling it to companies for their carbon emissions under the carbon emission trading scheme (CTS).  Although there are strong arguments for a carbon tax instead of this CTS, we dont have a carbon tax in Australia and are unlikely to get one.  We also dont have a nation-wide plan to do this sort of planting and conservation of native forests in a co-ordinated way, to preserve a variety of forest types and to take into account wildlife corridors and the optimal sustainable sizes of forests.  So this good idea is growing very slowly, and in a very ad hoc way.

 

There is no doubt we have a better national government than we used to.  But in this regard they are not good enough.  On the one hand they are handing out exemptions to their coal and aluminium mates for their carbon emissions, and on the other they could be stopping huge scale native deforestation for woodchips and embarking on a huge scale native reforestation program.