Just how green are The Greens?

Political circumstances have delivered the Australian Greens a key role in determining Australia’s response to climate change. This includes powerful positions for both Bob Brown and Christine Milne on the PM’s select Climate Change Committee which was announced last week.

Despite this coup for the Greens a media image accompanying the announcement, showing a beaming Dr Brown alongside down-cast Climate Change Minister Greg Combet, spoke volumes for the likely difficulties of this political marriage.

The Greens and their ENGO (environmental non-government organisations) support base have a long-standing reputation as idealists. Founded on concern for the environment, they are strong on what they oppose but care little for the flow-on implications or consequences associated with pursuing narrow aims. If allowed free rein, such an approach can lead to perverse outcomes - both socio-economically and environmentally. It appears that the government are all-too-aware of the problems this could present in formulating an agreed approach to effective climate change action.

The Greens’ position on Australia’s forests provides a striking example. The forests issue underpins the very existence of the Greens. Their ENGO constituents have waged uncompromising campaigns against Australian native timber production for more than 30 years. During the last 15 years, their objective has hardened from significantly reducing timber production to ending it completely.

Climate change has become central to the ENGO’s forest campaigns during the past five years in which the community has been repetitively assailed with the mantra that closing Australia’s native forest timber industry is the ultimate climate change “fix”: forests, they say, are worth more as standing carbon stores than as wood products.

During the recent Federal Election, the Australian Greens assumed hitherto unprecedented political power on a campaign platform which included a promise to end Australia's production of native forest timber, ostensibly as a climate change measure. Since then, internal Tasmanian negotiations on the future of its forest industry saw the major ENGOs release a set of principles calling for the total cessation of native forest timber harvesting in Tasmania by the end of 2010, with an expectation that this will lead to an Australia-wide cessation - an outcome that was to be promoted by a $million advertising campaign.

The ENGOs have subsequently been forced to concede that an immediate exit of the timber industry from native forests is not feasible due to existing commercial contracts which must be honoured. Nevertheless, their intent remains clear and it is certain that pushing for a phased-out end to native timber production across the nation will be central to Brown and Milne’s contribution to the PM’s Climate Change Committee.

The end of Australian native forest wood production would have a devastating socio-economic impact, particularly in Tasmania where the timber industry makes a very significant economic contribution. While it is often assumed that this would be restricted to rural and regional areas where jobs in timber harvest and haulage, forest management, and primary timber processing are located; the impact in urban Australia would also be substantial. There are many urban jobs related to forest planning, economics and marketing, research and development, secondary wood processing and timber retail. The latter two sectors reportedly involve 10,000 small and medium businesses which employ 80,000 Australians.

The community has been conditioned to expect that combating climate change will have significant socio-economic ramifications. However, it is entitled to expect that such pain would be a justifiable cost from actually reducing greenhouse emissions. However, ending native forest wood production will not reduce greenhouse emissions. Instead, it will increase emissions by fostering greater use of alternative materials and encouraging more timber imports from developing countries where deforestation is reportedly already responsible for an estimated 15 to 17 per cent of global greenhouse emissions.

Wood, unlike other building materials, is renewable and stores carbon. It also embodies comparatively very small greenhouse emissions in its harvesting, processing and manufacture compared to alternative materials such as steel, aluminium, and concrete. In Australia, the production of wood products is a renewable activity because forests are regenerated after harvesting. Accordingly, a recent Australian government study of 115 key industries found that only the forestry sector was net carbon-positive.

This flies in the face of the Greens’ insistence that ending Australian native forest timber production is a climate change “fix”. Elsewhere around the world, wood is regarded as the ultimate greenhouse-friendly material, with its renewable production considered to be integral to combating climate change.

This was articulated by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change when, in 2007, it stated that:

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.

Australian forest management is regarded as world’s best practice because, unlike many developing countries, we have a strong political and regulatory environment, a multi-layered system of land use planning, and an absence of corruption. Again, unlike many developing countries, harvested Australian forests are immediately regenerated to regrow into new forests and so our timber production is not associated with deforestation.

Unfortunately, these positive features of Australian forest management are either ignored or actively misrepresented by ENGO “save-the-forest” campaigns. They typically portray timber harvesting as a total carbon emission thereby ignoring the storage of carbon in wood and paper products, and the recapture of atmospheric carbon by post-harvest forest regeneration.

The Greens’ position on native timber production is also rooted in misrepresentations such as were recently articulated by David Jones, a Greens candidate in the upcoming Victorian state election. In the Weekly Times, he described timber production as the “wood chipping of our shared resources” in which “millions of tonnes of high-quality timber sent as low value woodschip boosts the profits of a few multi-nationals”.

While woodchips are indeed produced from small, crooked, and defective logs, as well as sawmill off-cuts, the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics’ latest forest and wood product statistics report that 2.6 million cubic metres of sawlog and veneer logs were harvested from Australian native forests during the 2008-09 financial year. From these logs, about 1 million cubic metres of hardwood sawn timber was produced.

If Australia stops producing this timber from its own forests it will down-size it’s only significant net carbon-positive industry - a course that is hardly likely to reduce emissions. In addition, it will turn thousands of taxpayers into social welfare recipients receiving unemployment benefits or taxpayer-funded compensation.

The recent political decisions to substantially close the NSW and Victorian red gum timber industries were accompanied by a $100 million compensation package. In terms of effective climate change action, this makes no sense. A far better course would have been to allow timber production to continue, while directing the same amount of money towards a large scale reafforestation program on degraded agricultural lands. Sadly though, political imperatives rarely equate with common sense.

Still, from the perspective of someone unfamiliar with the depth of opposition to Australian forest management, Canadian architect, Michael Green, remains hopeful. He believes that it is essential “… to get those who are opposed to forestry to the table to talk about the overall big picture we are facing from global climate change. People need to be open-minded about how we can move from steel and concrete to wood. Environmental groups need to support the greater use of wood in construction. Old assumptions have to be revised by those who want to protect the environment.”’

Unfortunately, ENGO’s opposed to forestry are already at the table and neither they nor their political arm, the Greens, are showing any signs of re-considering their ultimate demand that Australian native timber production be ended. Their determination to pursue this ideological ambition in the face of knowledge that it will actually be counter-productive to reducing carbon emissions, entitles the wider community to ask: just how “green” are our Greens?