Ms O’CONNOR (Hobart) – Mr President, I move –
That the Legislative Council:
- Notes the release of the report ‘Tasmania’s Forest Carbon – 2025 Update’, a co-sponsored project by the Tasmanian Climate Collective, the Tree Projects and the Wilderness Society, and authored by internationally respected scientist, Dr Jen Sanger.
- Accepts the scientific fact that unlogged forests are the reason Tasmania can claim to be one of the first jurisdictions in the world to become net zero, evidenced by the state’s greenhouse accounts from 2012 onwards.
- Notes the report finds Tasmania’s forests currently draw down an estimated 22 million tonnes of carbon each year, which would more than triple by 2050 if native forest logging ceases and forests are managed for climate, biodiversity, recreation and tourism.
- Recognises the report finds that ongoing native forest logging and burning is also the state’s single biggest emitter, with industrial scale forestry burns accounting for the emission of an estimated 1.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2e) each year.
- Notes with concern federal and state government moves to facilitate the further burning of native forest for biomass, including at Goliath Cement in Railton.
- Agrees that the single most effective step Tasmania can take to reduce emissions is to end native forest logging and burning – the necessary and ethical response to accelerating global heating which will impact on our communities, environment and economy with increasing intensity in the decades ahead.
Well, it’s been one hell of a summer in the northern hemisphere, as many members will know. We’ve had rolling severe heat waves and heat dome effects across Europe and North America. Widespread fires in places that they’ve never been seen before at the intensity that they’re happening, threatening cities like Bordeaux and Edinburgh, the boreal forests of Canada also aflame. Millions and millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide being emitted into the atmosphere. Two weeks ago we had the devastating consequences of accelerating climate disruption in the country of Nepal. Again I say it because it’s true, climate change will hit the poorest people in the world the hardest, and it is a crime that’s been committed by the world’s richer countries, who are failing to rein in their emissions.
I read recently a really interesting scientific observation that there is more carbon trapped in our atmosphere than all the weight of all of the buildings on Earth. When I read that, the effect of climate change, and how it works became more real in my mind. It’s not a matter of opinion; it’s a matter of physics. That carbon that’s sitting up there in our atmosphere is operating like a lid on the planet, and trapping heat. Some of the carbon in the atmosphere now was emitted during the Industrial Revolution. The carbon forming that heat trapping lid on our atmosphere now will take centuries to breakdown. In the year that I was born in 1967, the concentration of atmospheric carbon was 322 parts per-million. In 1991, when my first child was born, it was 355 parts per-million. Today it sits at 428 parts per-million and rising. This gunk in our atmosphere will take hundreds of years to break down. Despite everything we know about global heating, its causes, the evidence of its current and future devastating effects, despite the increasingly desperate warnings and pleas from climate scientists and young people, communities all over the world, marginalised at risk communities like Nepal and Kiribati. Despite all of this, emissions keep rising, glaciers keep melting, forests keep burning, people, animals, life on earth keeps suffering.
What we have to do here, it’s a matter of fact and urgency. As a society, a global human society, we have to stop spewing carbon into our atmosphere. We have to stop logging and burning our carbon stores, and here in Tasmania that means ending native forest logging. We have to bank securely and restore terrestrial carbon stores. We have to protect our forests. We’ve heard much, in these decades of climate denial, about carbon capture and storage being the fossil fuel industry’s answer to its endless pollution agenda. We know that’s a con. We already have the perfect biological carbon capture and storage and oxygen production machine: a biological machine – that is a tree – a miracle of creation.
I wanted to just draw members’ attention to the Tasmanian Forest Carbon 2025 Update by respected forest scientist Dr Jen Sanger, most recently of The Tree Projects. She worked on this report with the Tasmanian Climate Collective and the Wilderness Society of Tasmania and her report finds ‑ and it’s all referenced, she’s not making any of this up ‑ that native forest logging is the highest emitting sector in Tasmania, producing two and a half times the emissions than the state’s entire transport sector. This is primarily because the majority of the forest is turned into wood chips and waste with very little of it stored in carbon as long-term products like furniture.
Research conducted for Dr Sanger’s 2022 report found that greenhouse gas emissions from native forest logging were on average 4.65 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent a year from 2016 to 2020, which easily makes native forest logging the highest emitting sector in Tasmania. That is two and a half times higher than the transport sector, including all of Tasmania’s trucks, cars, domestic aviation and shipping. It’s also equivalent to the annual emissions from 1.1 million cars or equivalent to 422,000 return flights from London to Tasmania.
When native forests are logged in Tasmania, the vast majority of the forests end up as wood chips and waste. After logging, around 60 per cent of the forests’ biomass remains on the site, which is often burned in high‑intensity fires.
A few years back, when I was living in the other place, a person who’s known very well to both you and I, the former Greens member for Lyons, Tim Morris, and I went up the Plenty River to have a look at a coupe that had recently been logged and was waiting to be burned. Within that coupe in the Plenty Valley, quite close to the Plenty River, there were piles of rainforest species; there were piles of celery-top logs. They were sitting there, left by the contractors, waiting to burn. Tim Morris is a resourceful human being, and he certainly got his permissions from Forestry Tasmania, and he was able to salvage some of that celery-top timber that was to be burned. But this is happening on a regular basis in our forests, and when you have specialty timber workers, craftspeople, not able to secure supplies of these rainforest species, we want to challenge Forestry Tasmania and its operations because the fact of the matter is that often non-eucalypt species are left there on the forest floor to burn. If Tim hadn’t been paying attention, those piles of very large, old celerytop trees would also have been burned in the following autumn to our visit.
Only a small proportion of the forest that’s logged ends up as usable timber, and as little as 1 per cent, on the evidence, ends up as sawn timber, which is used for building houses and furniture. A further 5 per cent goes into what’s referred to as engineered wood products, such as laminated veneer and plywood. The rest of it, that is 90 per cent of what is actually harvested, goes into short‑lived products such as paper, cardboard, comic books and toilet paper. That’s what our beautiful, carbon‑rich habitat‑forming forests are being turned into.
Dr Sanger goes on to say that annual emissions between 2022 and 2024, according to our greenhouse accounts, averaged around 4.43 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. As we know, Tasmania can claim a net‑zero status in our greenhouse accounts because of the sequestering power of our forests that are not being logged. The graph is very clear that from about the year 2013, our greenhouse accounts started to turn around because, as a result of the Tasmanian Forest Agreement, the loggers were taken out of 576,000 hectares of Tasmania’s carbon‑rich forests and they haven’t returned since. But as the independent review of the Climate Change Act has warned us, it is dangerous to rely on our forests for net‑zero status; our forests themselves are at risk as a result of climatic heating. We know that logging is not carbon neutral, but we also know that that old trope that you hear that carbon dioxide is plant food when it’s applied to the science of global warming becomes very disingenuous and somewhat dishonest.
There’s a story here from the Guardian newspaper from three weeks ago that makes it clear that adding huge quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is set to cause the Earth’s forest to wither and die rather than flourish, countering erroneous claims that fossil fuel pollution will green the planet. An analysis of fossilised leaf cells from a period known as the Paleocene‑Eocene Thermal Maximum, which occurred about many tens of thousands of years ago, helped reconstruct how the world’s forests responded when planet heating gases were previously being released at a rapid rate. The authors of the new paper found this prehistoric change caused a retreat in the forests and the earth browned rather than greened, a finding they state has chilling implications for the future. It’s very, very clear we have to rein in our emissions.
There’s an instrument – a statutory instrument – that has come into effect. It’s called the Improved Native Forest Management methodology. It’s an instrument that was developed in New South Wales, and it provides for offsets from forests that have been set aside. Those offsets, or Australian Carbon Credit Units, can be purchased from relevant state authorities by big polluters. If they have these offsets from the forests, it enables them to keep polluting. The problem with offsets is that they provide no incentive for big polluters to rein in their emissions. There is an ongoing debate at the moment about that methodology and whether or not it should be disallowed, because the concern here is that we’re trading forest protection on the one hand, for the destruction of nature through accelerating runaway climate change, on the other.
We are being told by governments, including the Albanese government, that the only mechanism for protecting forests is through their monetisation. Well, down here, the Tassie Greens regard carbon offsets as a con. We don’t support them. We don’t support trading away forest protection for climate destruction. The maths and the morality just don’t add up.
A statement’s been put out today by the Wilderness Society nationally. It has expressed its strong opposition to the native forest management method and says Australia must reject a model where nature protection in one place is used to justify fossil fuel expansion somewhere else. The Wilderness Society’s spokesperson, Dr Kirsty Howey, has said: [tbc 11.49]
There is a line we will not cross. Protected areas in Australia’s forests must not become a licence to keep logging or expand fossil fuel extraction. The Wilderness Society does not support protected areas across Australia becoming conditional on the generation of offsets. The Wilderness Society opposes the INMF method because it risks turning the protection of forests into a mechanism that can facilitate their continued destruction, while carbon markets are used to legitimise both.
The statement also goes on to say:
It also risks creating a perverse system where governments use carbon markets to fund or justify forest protection, while those same markets create incentives for continued logging and facilitate further coal and gas expansion. [tbc 11.49.55]
Dr Howey says:
Nature protection and emissions reduction are both essential. Neither can be used as a substitute for the other. We should make nature more valuable to governments, not more tradable to polluters.
The Wilderness Society and I might say here, like the Tasmanian Greens, supports greater investment in restoration, protected areas and First Nations led conservation, but we can’t let conservation funding become dependent on creating permission for further environmental destruction. I’m not sure if any honourable members read former Australian Greens leader Christine Milne’s opinion piece in the Mercury newspaper, it was delivered in typically devastating and succinct Milne style, but it contains a number of searing truths.
Christine Milne says if this regulation is allowed to stand, it will establish a dangerous national precedent. She notes that the community is being blackmailed, agreeing to sell the forest carbon in the proposed Great Koala National Park to big polluters, or there will be no National Park, the logging will continue, the forests will fall, and the koalas will die. Well, the New South Whales Labor government has for 10 years promised a Great Koala National Park and now we’ve got New South Whales Premier Chris Minns, potentially with his handout to the Federal Government, for some offsets money in order to protect an area of forest that New South Wales Labor 10 years ago promised would be protected. It is a scam. Offsets are a scam.
Christine Milne says the methodology requires us to suspend disbelief about what constitutes an additional emissions reduction. It is not an an additional reduction if the Great Koala National Park was already going to be declared. Suspending disbelief is also required, Christine Milne says, for our core climate legislation, the safeguard mechanism, which came into effect nationally, which I’m very sorry to say, and I think we made a big mistake in doing it that the Australian Greens supported because the safeguard mechanism, of course, is the mechanism by which big polluters are able to keep polluting.
Christine Milne goes on to say: [tbc 11.52.55]
Under the safeguard mechanism, we don’t force polluters to reduce their emissions by decarbonising but permit them to use 100 per cent offsets. The consequence is predictable, if buying an offset is cheaper than investing in new machinery, changing industrial processes or genuinely reducing emissions, there is an economic incentive to do precisely that. Meanwhile, Australia’s fossil fuel industry continues to expand, and national, domestic and exported scope three emissions continue to rise.
Australia encourages, subsidises and permits increased fossil fuel exports. No amount of photos of ministers hugging koalas in front of trees or solar panels or wind farms change that fact. The science is clear. We have run out of time. Australia must rapidly stop burning and exporting coal and gas while at the same time protecting forest ecosystems, as habitat for endangered species and as or carbon stores.
She goes on to say:
The climate impacts are already unmistakable and catastrophic, from devastating heat waves and fires in Europe, to rising seas threatening Pacific communities and catastrophic glacier collapse in Nepal. Yet instead of treating nature protection as a public responsibility, the Albanese and Minn’s Labor governments appear determined to monetise it to promote Green Wall Street at the very time neoliberalism is discredited and dying
And I certainly hope it is dying. Neoliberalism, necro capitalism, whatever you want to call it, it’s a big part of why we are where we are. And she goes on to say:
They have decided to abandon the public funding of national parks and protected areas and instead make forest protection a commodity to be sold to satisfy the insatiable offset demands of some of the biggest polluters in the country.
And Christine Milne is rightly worried about what this might mean for Tasmania. The cash-strapped Tasmanian government could also be putting out its hand to Canberra if the improved native forest management methodology is not disallowed. It could allow government to generate carbon credits from some native forests, while reclassifying much of the remaining native forest estate as plantation and opening those forests to conversion. She notes that – and surely a primary responsibility of governments is to protect nature – that governments have a duty of care to future generations to be part of the solutions and to help rein in carbon emissions. We’re not there, yet.
I wanted to bring those matters to the Council’s attention. I hope that honourable members will have a look at Dr Sanger’s reports. I note, in closing, that the Tasmanian greenhouse accounts, which came out early last week, show an increase in emissions from forests. It appears that that increase in emissions has come about as a result of bushfires. It does reinforce the need to have robust forest protection, good Palawa-led land management practices, well-resourced parks and Tasmania Fire Service, SES and Forestry Tasmania fire services. We have a moral responsibility here. We’re a very small island, but we have a very significant natural forest estate that’s an extraordinary carbon store and that carbon is banked for the future, for our children’s future, and any member in this place who has young adult children, or young adult grandchildren, will know that young people are very worried about the future.
We have a responsibility here to show leadership, the Tasmanian government does, to protect our forests, to end native forest logging and burning, and to make sure we’re looking after those forests for their own intrinsic biodiversity, social, recreational and spiritual value, as well as for their carbon, and we shouldn’t be asked to trade those two things off. We can have the kind of leadership where we are protecting forests for their own sake, for their intrinsic values and those other values, and we are working with big emitters through carrot and stick mechanisms, to make sure that they are bringing down their emissions. It is no longer acceptable to allow big polluters to keep pouring CO2 and other toxic gases into the atmosphere. We can see the effect of that practice over decades now on our climate, on marginalised people around the world and on the health and wellbeing, particularly of young people.
We have a choice here and, at this point, the Tasmanian government is not showing much sign of exercising its ethical choice, but it’s certainly got one. I can say on the part of the Tasmanian Greens, we will do anything. We would work cooperatively with pretty much anyone, to make sure that our beautiful forests are properly and appropriately protected. For the miracles that they are and all that they bring to us as Tasmanians, and all that they can bring to Tasmanians and people who come to the island in the future. I note the 2025 Forest Carbon update report, and thank Dr Jen Sanger again for her extraordinary commitment and dedication to our beautiful forests.
