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
