Parliamentary nod to burning native forests for electricity

Media release
The Wilderness Sydney Inc
24 June 2010

Laws designed to encourage renewable energy ventures are having the perverse effect of incentivising the logging of native forests, The Wilderness Society said.

Today’s Senate debate on the detail of the Renewable Energy Target legislation will lead to new laws that incentivise logging, woodchipping, and burning native forests for power; a practice called ‘biomass burners’ or ‘forest furnaces’.

“The climate takes a big hit when forests are burnt for power, generating carbon emissions that cannot be removed from the atmosphere for hundreds of years,” said Wilderness Society Strategic Campaigns Director Virginia Young.

“Yet today the government has disgracefully allowed for forest furnaces to get incentives that are meant for genuinely environmentally friendly technologies to create power.”

“The government needs to do something good to reduce emissions after shelving its CPRS so instead of burning forests and releasing the carbon those forests contain into the atmosphere - the government should see forests as a clear and easy opportunity to help meet its Kyoto Protocol targets by using them as important stores of carbon and biodiversity”.

The Australian government says it reports all logging carbon emissions but was lobbying heavily against accounting for logging emissions of developed countries, including Australia’s, at UN climate talks in Bonn earlier this month.

“It’s now obvious that domestic policy is also being designed to encourage industrial logging and incineration of our native forests under the ridiculous fiction that the climate would benefit,” said Ms Young.

Australia currently manages to evade accounting for 50 mega tones of carbon emissions created by logging every year.

“This dreadful decision encouraging forest furnaces has happened just when export woodchip markets are in disarray because of concern for impacts on wildlife and climate.

“This new way of destroying our native forests is being promoted as a new use for “forest waste” in much the same way that the woodchip industry was promoted 30 years ago.

“More than 80% of native forests logged ends up at woodchip mills, proving woodchipping is the economic driver of all native forest logging.

“There is a clear opportunity to end the broadscale logging of native forests and save them as stores of carbon and biodiversity, instead of this outdated idea of burning wood for power.”