Native forests around the world should be locked up if the international community is serious about addressing global warming, according to a specialist on global environment issues.
Professor Brendan Mackey from the Australian National University, says the world's forests ecosystems store massive amounts of carbon, that when logged are released into the atmosphere. Excessive carbon in the Earth's atmosphere is generally understood as the cause of global warming.
"About 20 per cent of the green house gas emissions annually – that humans are causing to be released in the atmosphere – are from deforestation," Professor Mackey told The Epoch Times.
"It is going to be very hard to solve the global warming problem unless we factor in native forests into that equation."
The World Resources Institute says 80 per cent of the planet's natural forests have already been destroyed. The two largest surviving regions of rain forest are in Brazil and Indonesia, and these areas are being rapidly devastated by land clearing and logging.
Australia's Federal Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull recently announced a $200 million plan to help stop deforestation in Asia.
Mr Turnbull said the international community needs to focus more on deforestation if it is serious about tackling climate change.
"We have to tackle deforestation," he said. "It's the second largest source of emissions globally and it's something that we can deal with now."
Professor Mackey said the difficulty in arguing for the preservation of native forests is that domestic policies and programmes were still being driven by economic and environmental agendas from the seventies and eighties. Carbon stored in native forests also has no current economic value.
"This is creating a big problem because if the carbon that is in native forests has an economic value, then policies will change very quickly in recognition of that."
Professor Mackey said he believed that a carbon trading scheme similar to that already in place for plantations, under the Kyoto protocol, would change how people view these natural assets.
"What we need to do is move to an international regime where the carbon that is currently locked up in native forests, has an economic value.
"People can earn an income stream from protecting that carbon that is locked up in those native forests."
Labor Party Leader Kevin Rudd recently announced that Labor would not be extending forest protection beyond the established Tasmanian Community Forest Agreement and the Regional Forest Agreement, a move widely understood to garner support from forestry unions in the lead-up to the Federal elections.
Professor Mackey said forestry industries needed to restructure, so that they were not reliant on old growth forests. One way of doing that was to use plantation timber, he said.
"The thing we have to realise here about logging is that we are talking about how we can grow raw material – that is fibre – that can be input into industrial process to make product like paper and cardboard. So where that fibre comes from doesn't matter. It can come from a plantation just as easily as it can come from a native forest."
Professor Judith Ajani, who has been working with Professor Mackey in detailing the economics of a carbon trading plan for native forests, said Labor's forestry policy was "remarkable" in that it came at a time when global warming and deforestation was concerning the community at large.
"It is a remarkable statement that Labor has said, under Rudd, that it will not allocate any more for native forest conservation in Tasmania," Professor Ajani said.
Author of a book on Australia's forestry industry, titled Forestry Wars, Professor Ajani said Labor's timing was ironic as Australia's plantation industry was on the cusp of a boom.
Between 80 to 90 per cent of Australia's native forest logging went as woodchip mostly to overseas pulp mills, she said. However, a local hardwood plantation industry "will come on stream big time over the next three years".
Neither the Labor Party nor the Coalition had, to date, registered the benefits of a plantation industry she said, despite the fact that 80 per cent of Australian wood products were already produced by local softwood plantation timbers.
By using plantation resources, Professor Ajani said forestry industries would be able to free up native forests for "carbon sequestration, water catchment protection and biodiversity conservation".
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