Climate Commission needs to re-think forest carbon

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.