Climate Commission needs to re-think forest carbon

It should really be a no-brainer that sustainably producing wood from a portion of Australia’s forests is integral to an overall carbon abatement strategy. Wood is one of few renewable resources: it stores carbon; it embodies much lower carbon emissions in its life cycle compared to alternative materials; and these emissions are recouped as forests are successively harvested and regrown.

These benefits are widely recognised by the international forest science community and were articulated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its 4^th Assessment Report in 2007 which 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 (carbon) mitigation benefit.”

The forests and timber sector is Australia’s only carbon-positive industry sector and could expect to be supported by a Climate Commission with the stated purpose of helping the nation “...move to a competitive, low pollution Australian economy”. In view of this, it is not only surprising that the Commission’s recently released report, The Critical Decade, says nothing about the benefits of wood production, but alarming that it implies that native forest wood production should cease to allow all forests to grow old and store carbon.

Even more troubling is that the Commission’s stance on forests mirrors that of Australia’s major ENGO’s who have aggressively adopted ‘forest carbon’ as a weapon in their enduring campaigns to end Australian native forest wood production ostensibly to conserve biodiversity. These campaigns are based on erroneous presumptions including:

• Timber harvesting is far more extensive than it actually is;
• Forests, if not logged, will inevitably reach ‘old growth’ status that will maximise carbon storage in perpetuity;
• Timber production is a total carbon emission; and
• Carbon retained in standing forests is more valuable than wood products.

In recent years, these misconceptions have been given unwarranted credence by several academic papers published by a small cadre of authors from the Australian National University (ANU). By far the most influential of these papers was the first one published in August 2008, entitled ‘Green Carbon: The Role of Native Forests in Carbon Storage - Part 1’.

The ‘Green Carbon’ paper focuses on southern Australia’s wet eucalypt ‘old growth’ forests, which are amongst the largest in the world and store a lot of carbon. It advocates ending ‘industrial logging’ to both preserve the existing ‘old growth’, and allow regrowth stands to eventually reach ‘old growth’ thereby maximising their carbon storage potential.    

In reality, wet eucalypt forest types comprise less than one per cent of Australian forests and so are highly atypical of the greater forest landscape. Nevertheless, ENGO’s, particularly the Wilderness Society, have deceptively extrapolated their presence to make them central to campaigns advocating an end to all Australian native timber production, citing the ‘Green Carbon’ paper as the scientific support for this position.

The 'Green Carbon' paper itself has been mired in controversy since even before it was published. Apart from a questionable methodology, its integrity has been challenged because:

• The paper received financial-backing from the Wilderness Society through a formal partnership with the ANU;
• The lead author was a member of the Wilderness Society’s Wild Country Science Council;
• The paper’s key findings were publicly launched by its lead author at a Wilderness Society function held at the U.N. Climate Conference in Bali in November 2007, some nine months before the paper was published;
• The findings were being widely spruiked in the media by both its authors and the Wilderness Society before peer review had been completed;
• The paper contained no technical detail to support its findings and yet was able to satisfy peer review standards; and
• Prior to its publication, the paper’s findings were made available to both the Australian Greens and the Wilderness Society to assist its members in making submissions to the Garnaut Climate Change Review.

Amongst Australian forest scientists, the ‘Green Carbon’ paper is widely regarded as having been prepared at the behest of the Wilderness Society to support its political agenda, with the paper’s authors having acted as ENGO forest campaigners rather than objective scientists.

It is therefore highly significant that the ‘Green Carbon’ paper’s lead author, an ANU ecologist, sits on the Climate Commission’s Science Advisory Panel and is listed on the Commission’s website as its only advisor with ‘expertise in forests and carbon’. The Commission’s lack of wider expertise in forest and timber management is evident in The Critical Decade and raises concerns about the quality of advice the Commission receives and the apparent lack of rigor exercised in seeking to guard against potential biases amongst its selected advisors.

It is also curious that the ‘Green Carbon’ paper is not cited as a reference in The Critical Decade. Instead, a lesser follow-up paper, Keith et al (2009), has been cited. This was authored by three of the four academics who wrote the ‘Green Carbon’ paper, including the ecologist advising the Climate Commission, and draws heavily on its findings.

Specific references to forests in The Critical Decade confirm that the Climate Commission has a very limited understanding of Australian forestry and are suggestive of a determination to avoid any consideration of the benefits of wood products in carbon storage. These specific references include the following: “This framework underscores the importance of eliminating harvesting of old-growth forests as perhaps the most important policy measure [my emphasis] that can be taken to reduce emissions from land ecosystems”.  

This statement is made following a brief discussion about the development of a framework for identifying forests with high carbon storage capacity. Notwithstanding that it ignores the benefits of sustainable timber production as a carbon abatement measure: it ludicrously elevates a very small-scale renewable activity which occurs on just 1500 hectares per year, as having a greater impact than agricultural activities which occur on tens of millions of hectares of cleared farmland. This misconceived significance of ‘old growth’ logging damages the Commission’s credibility.

In reality, only about 0.03 per cent of Australia’s more than five million hectares of ‘old growth’ forest is harvested each year. Almost all harvesting occurs in Tasmania, although even there, 79 per cent, or 973,000 hectares, of the state’s ‘old growth’ forest is contained in conservation reserves that will never be harvested. No ‘old growth’ forest is harvested in NSW, QLD or WA, and almost none in Victoria. There may be valid reasons for ceasing Australia’s small ‘old growth’ forest harvest, but an expectation that it will significantly aid the battle against climate change isn’t amongst them.

“Although a fast-growing, mono-culture plantation forest may have a rapid rate of carbon uptake for the years of vigorous growth, it will store less carbon in the long term that an old growth forest or a secondary regrowth forest on the same site.”

This statement again ignores the benefit of sustainable wood production as a vehicle for transferring carbon stores from the land into the community. The average Australian pine plantation is harvested and replanted every thirty years and may produce seven or eight harvests over the 250-years that it may take for a natural forest to approach or attain the ‘old growth’ stage.

Regularly harvesting and regrowing plantations maintains a constant state of vigorous growth and high carbon sequestration compared to a natural forest which grows quickly in its early years, and then progressively slower thereafter. So, even though each plantation crop is never allowed to store as much carbon on-site as an ‘old growth’ forest, the contribution that it makes to building carbon storage in the community in harvested wood products over a long period ensures that plantations are a superior carbon abatement vehicle.

“Natural ecosystems tend to maximise carbon storage, that is, they store more carbon than the ecosystems that replace them after they are converted or actively managed for production.”

Extolling the supposedly superior carbon outcomes of ‘natural ecosystems’ over-and-above forests being ‘actively managed for production’ is again reliant on ignoring the contribution to carbon storage made by wood products.

It also downplays the role of fire as the overwhelming arbiter of carbon storage in Australian forests. ENGOs have taken this to an illogical extent by assuming that every forest left unlogged will automatically attain ‘old growth’ status in the future, and that these old forests will be ‘fire-proof’ and can therefore store carbon in perpetuity.

This effectively denies the reality of periodic landscape-scale fire. In Victoria since 2003, around 170,000 hectares (or 20 per cent) of the state’s ‘old growth’ forest has been killed by bushfire, including areas of wet ‘old growth’ eucalypt killed by the 2009 ‘Black Saturday’ fires. In total, over three million hectares of Victorian forest has been burnt by bushfire since 2003, much of it severely.

Clearly, ‘old growth’ forests are not ‘fire-proof’, and periodic fire events will always prevent huge areas of forest from attaining ‘old growth’ status. Fire will ensure that forest carbon stores naturally fluctuate regardless of whether or not a minor portion of forests are used for timber production. Forests are not static carbon stores as ENGO campaigns would suggest, but are dynamic and constantly changing in response to natural disturbance. Artificially disturbing and then regenerating a minor portion through sustainable timber production is not out of place within this reality.     

“Recognition of the need to protect primary forests has helped to catalyse formulation of the REDD (Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) agenda item under the UNFCCC negotiations.”

True, but REDD programs target the unsustainable treatment of forests in developing countries primarily in the Asia-Pacific, West Africa, and Latin and South American regions. Sustainable timber production in Australia is not targeted, despite the efforts of ENGOs to shamelessly misrepresent it as ‘deforestation’ when it clearly is not. The Critical Decade’s mention of REDD in relation to a discussion of Australian forestry suggests that the Climate Commission has been overly influenced by this ENGO deceit.

Arguably, what has not been said in The Critical Decade report is of far greater significance than the few references to forestry which it contains. In particular, the lack of acknowledgement of sustainable forest management reflects a questionable understanding amongst the Climate Commission and its advisors that is rather astounding given the numerous studies commissioned by the government and others which have found forestry to be one of the few carbon-positive activities in Australia, with wood products being an important vehicle for carbon abatement.

The Climate Commission’s treatment of forest carbon therefore raises concerns about how it may have treated other natural resource use issues. Rightly or wrongly, it creates a perception of the Commission as a vehicle for ticking-off items from a populist ‘green’ wish list even when they are counter-productive to combating climate change.

If Australia is to effectively respond to climate change by reducing carbon emissions, its citizens deserve to have the requisite actions determined by the best available scientific advice. Taking a lead from an activist agenda is far from this, and will be counter-productive to efforts to reduce carbon emissions given that wood is our only renewable resource, embodies very low emissions in its harvest and manufacture, and with its local production off-setting demand for high emissions alternatives or imports from developing countries associated with deforestation. The Climate Commission must do better than this if it is to indeed help reduce Australia’s carbon emissions.