FORESTRY TASMANIA’S BIOMASS PUSH FOR NATIVE FORESTS COURTS CONTROVERSY & ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE

Markets For Change today expressed disappointment that Forestry Tasmania has chosen to push native forest based bioenergy despite its awful environmental impacts, the controversy it creates, and its potential to undermine genuine clean energy alternatives.

A report, ‘BIOMASSACRE – How logging Australia’s native forests for bioenergy harms the climate, wildlife and people’ outlining the issues surrounding native forest based bioenergy, and urging that bioenergy proponents differentiate between environmentally acceptable and unacceptable feedstocks was released by Markets For Change two months ago.

“Native forest biomass projects are the new woodchipping,” Markets For Change CEO Peg Putt warned.

“Far from assisting the fight against climate change, biomass burnt for bioenergy contributes large emissions and is an enabler of continued and controversial industrial logging of native forests, whilst potentially undermining genuinely clean and renewable energy sources such as wind and solar.”

“Claims of carbon neutrality are so far wrong they are laughable. They arise from flawed European carbon accounting rules that failed to include emissions for logging and then burning forest products – now recognized as an important loophole.”

“Where are the environmental signatory groups to the Tasmanian Forest Agreement who have been assuring constituents that biomass projects won’t happen and giving the erroneous impression that industrial logging of public native forests will cease, when in fact Forestry Tasmania is ramping up its push for biomass burning using native forests allocated to permanent wood production?” Ms Putt concluded.

The BIOMASSACRE report:

• exposes serious adverse climate impacts of using native forests for bioenergy. Although touted by the forest industry as ‘carbon neutral’ the greenhouse gas emissions generated would take decades or even centuries to recover;

• outlines that a dramatic decline in woodchip export markets has prompted plans fill the void with biomass extraction for bioenergy on the spurious rationale that it is merely ‘waste’. In fact it will be the same as woodchipping, an enabler and driver of continued native forest logging, and just as contentious; and

• explains how native forest derived bioenergy may compete with and threaten genuine clean energy alternatives such as wind and solar

The BIOMASSACRE report is available on

www.marketsforchange.org

and can also be downloaded here: (no it can’t … it’s too big. check it out on the website)

CEO of Markets For Change, Peg Putt