Garnaut must add southern forests protection to his call to protect the north

The Wilderness Society (Victoria) Inc
Media Release
4 September 2008                              

 The Wilderness Society welcomed today calls by the Prime Minister’s climate change adviser, Professor Ross Garnaut to protect the woodlands of northern Australia to boost biosequestration, but also urged for the protection of the forests of Victoria and Tasmania which have recently been identified as some of the most carbon dense on earth.

“It wouldn’t make much sense to only protect woodlands in northern Australia while allowing the destruction of some of the world’s largest carbon banks in Victoria and Tasmania’s forests,” said Victorian Campaigns Manager, Gavan McFadzean.

In the Australian National University’s (ANU) “Green Carbon Report” released last month, the forests of south eastern Australia were measured to store on average between three and ten times more carbon than the estimate set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“But logging reduces the size of the carbon bank in these forests by 40% to 60%. On top of that, logging releases dangerous CO2 into the atmosphere, shrinking the size of the carbon bank and making climate change worse.”

“The products we make from logging are not safe carbon stores either. 80% of the wood from logging native forests ends up as paper, which releases its carbon into the atmosphere in an average of only three years.”

“The protection of forest across the continent is the easiest and fastest way to achieve deep cuts in emissions, and their protection should form a key plank of Australia’s plan to tackle climate change.”

“This is especially the case when Australia is in the enviable position of having a plantation resource large enough to meet our wood needs. Plantations however are a much smaller and less resilient bank than native forests, that’s why plantations should supply our wood needs while native forests and woodlands should be protected as carbon banks.”