Robert LePage
A recent claim that the so-called sustainable forestry practiced by Forestry Tasmania maintains or even increases carbon, stored in the forest.
This is despite a recent report by the ANU showing that a forest that is subject to logging will be about 40% to 60% lower in stored carbon.
The claim totally ignores the emissions from the activities of the logging, transport, burnoffs and processing of the timber. All of these have a huge impact on emissions.
The mills themselves are powered by electricity, which is mostly now imported from The Victorian brown coal power stations, which are the biggest emitters of CO2 out of all the power stations in Australia.
Forestry Tasmania say that they are cutting nearly five million tons a year and there is probably another million or two added to this figure going by the amount they burn off of as “unsuitable” timber.
The claim is that there will be more trees in ninety years time than there are now.
The “more trees “ will only be part grown and there will be a smaller selection of tree species. It takes twenty years for new tree growth to reach a size where they will hold a reasonable, amount of carbon and in that time another one hundred million tons will have been cut. So in effect there will always be a net loss of carbon stored in trees.
The “wet’ forest will have been dried out so the soil will less moisture than if it was left undisturbed.
It will result in fiercer fires because of this. The native habitat will be destroyed. There will be contamination of the watercourses by pesticides etc. A forest produces rain through the transpiration of trees, because of the smaller size of tree and lower moisture content, rainfall will be reduced even further resulting in lower growth rates.
Then we are asked to believe that when the pulp mill is in operation that this will actually decrease emissions because the mill will have a very light carbon footprint.
This is despite an increase in logging, an increase in the transport of logs with a large increase in power demands for the mill.
The mill will be supplied by renewable electricity they claim. This is to be supplied by burning even more forest adding even more CO2 to the emissions.
Apart from the carbon emissions the mill will be using an enormous amount of water something that Tasmania is becoming increasing short of. On top of this list of problems is the pollution of the air and sea. Forest burn offs are 40% of the carbon emissions in Tasmania
The appetite of the country’s biggest pulp mill for Tasmanian native forest has been exposed – and it appears to be gigantic. The proposed pulp mill would take millions of tones of native forest timber, perhaps never to be totally replaced by plantations, a leaked draft impact statement says. The pulp mill would not end low-value woodchip exports. Instead, these exports would continue at almost their current .
Robert LePage
Cygnet
