The Australian Institute has launched a withering attack on the New South Wales government’s failure to deliver on its promised Great Koala National Park in the state’s mid-north and is banking on carbon credits instead.
In a major research report and video by its new senior fellow and Walkley Award winning former ABC journalist Stephen Long, the institute says the government has delayed action on the park “until the forests can be used to generate carbon credits.”
An open letter on the issue has gathered nearly 700 signatories since Tuesday including 100 politicians and environmental activists.
They include former Liberal leader Dr John Hewson; former Greens leader Bob Brown; Climate Council member and lead author for the International Panel on Climate Change Professor Lesley Hughes; former Reserve Bank of Australia Governor Bernie Fraser; businessman Geoff Cousins; and environmentalist Virginia Young.
NSW government’s Forestry Corporation has already come under fire for its poor logging practices. Late last year The Fifth Estate reported that the corporation was forced to stop timber harvesting in two separate forests after failing to protect endangered Greater Gliders.
One of the forests was within the proposed Great Koala National Park. The institute said that despite the threat of koala extinction, NSW Premier Chris Minns was to create the new national park or end logging and land clearing of the area until the government “secures another way to make money from trees”.
“Officially, the government cites consultation with stakeholders as the reason for the delay,” the institute said.
“In essence, it wants to exploit the forests for carbon credits.”
The Institute noted that Premier Chris Minns had candidly explained the situation in a budget estimates hearing:
“There are many industries and many companies and governments around the world that are desperate for carbon offsets and would be looking at jurisdictions like New South Wales in relation to that.”
Long’s article questions the authenticity of using forest-based carbon credits to offset fossil fuels: “Trees may die or burn, but carbon emissions can persist in the atmosphere for thousands of years.”
The article says, in part:
The NSW government is now looking at a new carbon credit method based on avoided harvest” or “avoided deforestation” from curtailed logging.
But recent bushfires have reduced the land available for logging, and the social licence for native forest logging is rapidly eroding.
For these reasons, it’s difficult to establish, and easy to exaggerate, the baseline threat to the forests. This creates a significant risk of “over-crediting.”
Australia Institute analysis found that there were not enough bulldozers in NSW to carry out the clearing that landholders were supposedly threatening, and then forgoing, in return for receiving an earlier brand of carbon credits.”
It quotes the premier saying in a budget estimates hearing:
There are many industries and many companies and governments around the world that are desperate for carbon offsets and would be looking at jurisdictions like New South Wales in relation to that.”
You have to have the system up and running before you can quarantine a park or an area to allow for that area or that zone to be eligible for the carbon transfer. If you do it in reverse, then you can’t retroactively go to that national park or that forest and say, ‘This will now apply to carbon offsets in the future.’”
It was a remarkable admission.
The articles says that the “money-making method” the government is turning to risks undermining koalas and their habitat.
Why? Because the carbon credits it hopes to generate from the forests may well be a sham: likely to worsen, not lessen, carbon emissions and the global warming which threatens koalas and the forests they rely on.
“The methods claim to be clean and green but they’re not,” it says.
“Without stringent laws requiring polluters to cut emissions before turning to offsets, the credits can be used to maintain or increase emissions, exacerbating global warming.”
A video by the institute shows distressed koalas looking for their homes after logging.
Stephen Long was interviewed by Philip Adams on ABC radio