Tasmanian Times

23.10.08 7:43 am

Mercury: Managing director Bob Gordon said the principal reason for the difference between the operational and the total loss related to a decrease in the value of the “biological or forest value” of $74 million. Read more: Forestry posts $55m loss

Mathew Denholm The Australian

TASMANIAN Premier David Bartlett has sided with the forest industry in a fierce debate with conservationists about whether old-growth forests should be protected as reservoirs of carbon. Mr Bartlett told The Australian that calls by the conservation movement to suspend old-growth logging, because of evidence they might be more valuable as carbon sinks, were nonsense. “This is bullshit—this is just not true,” the Premier said. “They can make that claim at the moment because Kyoto Protocol accounting for timber got it totally wrong. “When you chop down a tree under Kyoto and you burn it, or you alternatively turn it into a high-value coffee table, it’s accounted for in exactly the same way. And that is clearly false. “If you burn a tree, obviously the carbon is realised. If you turn it into a coffee table, that carbon is sequestered for life or for a very bloody long time.” Australian National University researchers recently found that old-growth forests in Victoria, NSW and Tasmania stored up to three times the amount of carbon that was previously estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The research—criticised by industry because it was funded by the Wilderness Society, but strongly defended by the ANU—concludes that old-growth forests are more reliable as carbon sinks than as plantations because the latter are more vulnerable to fire, disease and disturbance. Read more here

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