Just how green are The Greens?

In the long term, a sustainable forest management strategy aimed at maintaining or increasing forest carbon stocks, while producing an annual sustained yield of timber, fibre or energy from the forest, will generate the largest sustained mitigation benefit.

Australia is already in this position. Indeed, it could be argued that we have gone too far in reducing domestic timber production as only 7 per cent of Australian forests are still classified as multiple-use state forests in which timber production is a permitted use. Of this, only about half will actually be used for this purpose due to operational, productivity, and management constraints. After taking account of private land timber production, about 95 per cent of Australian forests are already acting as carbon storage which will never be disturbed by timber harvesting (although the natural prevalence of fire means that their carbon stores will inherently wax and wane).

That Australia’s ENGO’s refuse to accept this balance illustrates just how far out-of-step they are with the international environmental movement. This was recently noted by highly regarded Canadian architect, Michael Green, who visited Australia during September to speak at Wood Solutions 2010 forums in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

Green is known for his passionate advocacy of wood as a solution to climate change. He believes that increasing the use of wood in construction in place of steel and concrete is essential given that 7 to 10 per cent of the world’s CO2 emissions are associated with concrete use and 4 per cent of the world’s energy goes into the production of iron ore and steel.

As Green explained in a recent article: “If we use wood in our buildings we have a tool to store carbon for generations. If we ensure sustainable forest practices and manage the ecology and regenerate this brilliant natural material we have an opportunity to turn our buildings and our structures to a carbon neutral option.” According to Green, if we don’t act soon to increase the use of wood in construction “… Australia runs the risk of … missing out on wood as a fundamental tool in the war on carbon”.

Acquiescing to the demands of Australia’s ENGOs to totally end native forest wood production would substantially increase the difficulty of reducing concrete and steel use. This is due to Australia’s native hardwoods being amongst the strongest, most durable and decorative timbers in the world and being far better suited to a more prominent role in innovative building design and construction than plantation softwoods which have become our primary source of wood.

We are surrounded by examples illustrating the counter-productive impact of curtailing Australian native timber production in the battle against climate change - the shift away from timber to concrete power poles and railway sleepers are just two.

Australia’s first railway was opened in 1854 linking Port Melbourne with central Melbourne. From this small beginning, Australia’s rail infrastructure has grown to a point where there are now an estimated 50 million timber sleepers in service throughout the country.

The extent of forest reservation and related down-sizing of the native timber industry has meant that it will be impossible to maintain this level in perpetuity, and a program of replacement with mainly concrete, and some steel, sleepers is underway. Nevertheless, it had been planned to maintain many rail lines with timber sleepers and a maintenance schedule requiring 800,000 timber sleepers per year was in place.

However, more recent political decisions to remove timber production from various forests, including 150,000 hectares of Victorian and NSW red gum forests, has now reduced the supply of replacement timber sleepers down to about 300,000 per year. Evicting timber production from the rest of Australia’s currently available forests, as our ENGOs and Greens are advocating, would be the death knell for local timber sleepers.

This would undermine other efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The replacement of 800,000 timber sleepers with concrete and steel substitutes will substantially increase greenhouse emissions as concrete manufacture involves six to eight times more carbon emissions, while steel manufacture involves around 350 times more emissions.

In addition, the reduced availability of Australia’s most durable native timbers forced by earlier state government responses to ENGO campaigns has already increased the importation of directly substitutable rainforest hardwoods from developing countries where illegal logging, corruption, and deforestation are rife. For example, most Australian decking is now built using merbau imported from South-East Asia. This has substantially replaced jarrah which was traditionally used until the West Australian government was elected in 2001 on a “save-the-forests” platform.