Legal challenge to native forest logging in Tasmania might succeed

"BIG NEWS ! This court case could be a watershed moment in

ending the taxpayer-subsidised destruction of Tasmania’s precious native forests and the best chance in a generation to properly protect our old growth wilderness, their critters and critical carbon sinks.

Australian political parties support logging native forests

For more than two decades, too many Tasmanian politicians have hidden behind these dodgy Regional Forest Agreements and promoted the interests of a few profiteers at the expense of our environment and taxpayers.

We have long known these Regional Forest Agreements were used 

Native forests are already at risk from fires.

as cover to abandon the endangered wildlife they were set up to protect, simply to grease the wheels for a marginal industry that has wielded significant political clout. 

Recently the Tasmanian Government failed again to get FSC certification for its destructive native forest logging operations. 

This is no surprise when, for decades, it has not had a robust legal framework holding the industry to account especially around the protection of endangered species such as the Tasmanian devil, wedge-tailed eagle and swift parrot, and also for the logging of old growth forests." Senator Whish-Wilson on Facebook

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"Bob Brown launches legal challenge to native forest logging in Tasmania

State-sanctioned felling is ‘based on a monumental lie’, former Greens leader says

'The former Greens leader Bob Brown has launched a legal challenge to native forest logging in Tasmania, claiming it is inconsistent with federal environment law.

The case by the Bob Brown Foundation, lodged in the federal court on Thursday, challenges what has been seen as an effective exemption from environment laws granted to state-sanctioned logging under regional forest agreements between Canberra and the states.

Australia ranks second worse on climate protection

It argues the Tasmanian regional forest agreement is not valid as it lacks a legally enforceable requirement that the state must protect threatened species.

The foundation says if the case were successful it would consider similar action against federal-state forest agreements in Victoria, New South Wales and Western Australia. It said the current rules “essentially allows the state government to make up the rules as it suits, and gives no guaranteed protection for our wildlife and environment”.

Brown said the foundation had been buoyed by a landmark federal court judgment in May that found logging in Victoria’s central highlands by the state-owned agency VicForests was in breach of a regional forest agreement.

Logging in NSW leaves Koala stranded.

“This is a huge undertaking for us but everyone knows that the flattening and burning of native forests and wildlife is not ecologically sustainable,” Brown said. “The industry is based on a monumental lie and this challenge puts that lie to the test.”

Read complete The Guardian story, August 21, 2020

  Related: Both the major parties in Australia support new gas projects

Time to rethink Australia's fire fighting resources.

📷: Bindi Cox

Our wildfires are taking lives, destroying homes and infrastructure and stressing our rural communities. 

Our firefighters in Australia, both paid and volunteer, are out there risking injury and putting their lives on the line, or at the very least sacrificing their work. Employers, often small business employers, are supporting them. Are our firefighters sufficient in number?

"There are still 50 fires burning across New South Wales, with 21 fires uncontained. A total of 630 firefighters have been deployed across the state. A fire in Bees Nest, north-west of Dorrigo in the Armidale area, is currently over 66,500 hectares and out of control." September 10

https://www.theguardian.com › australia-news › live › sep › queensland-nsw...

What are we losing in these fires?

📷 Photo Credit: Darren, Jimboomba Police

 • Of course we are losing homes and infrastructure. Communities are being traumatised. We are now wondering whether drought stricken communities will have the required water to fight the inevitable fires that climate change is increasing. 

• We now have a new fire category, 'extreme'.

• We are also losing precious forests and biodiversity. This week the Gondwana World Heritage Area has been severely damaged.

"The Gondwana Rainforests of Australia, World Heritage Area, contains the most extensive areas of subtropical rainforest in the world, large areas of warm temperate rainforest, and the majority of the world's Antarctic beech cool temperature rainforest. These extraordinary areas still contain ancient and primitive plants and animals from which life on Earth evolved." NSW National Parks

The same fire began in the Guy Fawkes River National Park and by September10,  had burned 66,500 hectares and was 'out of control'.
 
"The park is a significant conservation site with amazing biodiversity. There are 24 threatened animal species you might encounter here, including the brush-tailed rock-wallabies that can often be seen in the park’s rocky areas." National Parks

There has been a world wide reaction to careless burning of the Amazon forests. Other countries are busily planting trees to protect soils and store carbon, yet Australia is busy clearing trees and fighting forest fires with limited resources. 




It is time to review our fire fighting resources.

We know some extra resources have been ordered or already purchased.

"New South Wales has signed a contract with United States-based Coulson Aviation to purchase three aircraft for firebombing duties, including a modified Boeing 737 large air tanker.

  

NSW buys Boeing 737 large air tanker for firefighting ...

https://australianaviation.com.au › 2019/05 › nsw-buys-boeing-737-large-..."

As we face an increasing number of fierce fires in an extended fire season, it is time to ask:

Are we allowing our rural communities to suffer unnecessarily?

Why are we allowing our world heritage forests with unique biodiversity to burn?

Do we have sufficient resources to fight fires and to extinguish them quickly?

Why are we still reliant on volunteers? Why are we putting volunteers at risk?

Do we have enough air support?

Is a budget surplus a priority over expanding our firefighting resources and better protecting our communities? 

Related:

What if we stopped pretending Climate Change could be prevented.

New climate change report underscores the need to manage land for the short and long term: SciFiGeneration

In its latest report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change describes how agriculture, deforestation, and other human activities have altered 70% of the land on Earth’s surface. 

These changes are significantly adding to climate-warming emissions. They are also making forests and other natural systems, which can store key greenhouse gases, less able to do so.
Many calls to limit emissions focus on those from energy and transportation. But as the IPCC report points out, agriculture and land use are also major greenhouse gas sources. In the past decade, land use was responsible for 22% of global greenhouse gas emissions, compared to 35% for energy and 14% for transportation.

For the past 20 years, I have been working to understand how severe climate change will be in the coming century. Scientists know that Earth’s climate responds to both changes in greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere and changes in land use. This report makes clear that solving the climate crisis will require serious choices about how humans interact with the land systems that provide our societies with food, water and shelter.

The story is not all doom and gloom. There are strategies that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions from land use, food production and agriculture, and also generate economic and social benefits. Acting on these recommendations would be a big step toward addressing climate change in a meaningful way. 

Read the complete SciFiGeneration article

Forests, logging and climate change: IA

Logging has a serious effect on climate change, writes Frances Pike.

THE INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL for Climate Change (IPCC) recommends that "natural solutions" are employed to deal with climate change emergency. The immediate protection and restoration of natural systems for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) are preferred to geo-engineering and B.E.C.C.S — burning biomass as a fossil fuel substitute while using some sort of carbon capture and storage.

It is clear that the resilience of natural systems must be enhanced to withstand climate change impact, lest they falter and collapse, inhibiting their capacity for CDR.

The fairytale that burning wood instead of coal is carbon neutral continues to wreak havoc on the world’s extant forests. But that fairytale could soon end, taking with it the myth that the industrial logging of the world’s native forests has been and is now "sustainable".

For a long time, the falsity of carbon emission accounting for forest bioenergy has been apparently invisible to many policymakers. A Weekend Australian commentator said, in relation to UK power station Drax which has converted to wood: “The CO2 it emitted as a coal station was causing climate change; the increased CO2 now emitted from burning wood is defined by the EC bureaucrats as not existing”.

Read the complete article 

Related: Want to beat climate change? Protect our natural forests: The Conversation

Want to beat climate change? Protect our natural forests: The Conversation

Tomorrow a special report on how land use affects climate change will be released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 

Land degradation, deforestation, and the expansion of our deserts, along with agriculture and the other ways people shape land, are all major contributors to global climate change.

Conversely, trees remove carbon dioxide and store it safely in their trunks, roots and branches. 

Research published in July estimated that planting a trillion trees could be a powerful tool against climate change.

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Read more: Our cities need more trees, but some commonly planted ones won't survive climate change

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However, planting new trees as a climate action pales in comparison to protecting existing forests. Restoring degraded forests and expanding them by 350 million hectares will store a comparable amount of carbon as 900 million hectares of new trees.

Natural climate solutions

Using ecological mechanisms for reducing and storing carbon is a growing field of study. Broadly known as “natural climate solutions”, carbon can be stored in wetlands, grasslands, natural forests and agriculture. 

This is called “sequestration”, and the more diverse and longer-lived the ecosystem, the more it helps mitigate the effect of climate change.

Allowing trees to regenerate naturally is a more effective, immediate and low-cost method of removing and storing atmospheric carbon than planting new trees. Shutterstock

Research has estimated these natural carbon sinks can provide 37% of the CO₂ reduction needed to keep the rise in global temperatures below 2℃.
But this research can be wrongly interpreted to imply that the priority is to plant young trees. In fact, the major climate solution is the protection and recovery of carbon-rich and long-lived ecosystems, especially natural forests.

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Read more: Extreme weather caused by climate change has damaged 45% of Australia's coastal habitat

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With the imminent release of the new IPCC report, now is a good time to prioritise the protection and recovery of existing ecosystems over planting trees.
Forest ecosystems (including the soil) store more carbon than the atmosphere. Their loss would trigger emissions that would exceed the remaining carbon budget for limiting global warming to less than the 2℃ above pre-industrial levels, let alone 1.5℃, threshold.

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Read more: 40 years ago, scientists predicted climate change. And hey, they were right

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Natural forest systems, with their rich and complex biodiversity, the product of ecological and evolutionary processes, are stable, resilient, far better at adapting to changing conditions and store more carbon than young, degraded or plantation forests.

Protect existing trees

Forest degradation is caused by selective logging, temporary clearing, and other human land use. In some areas, emissions from degradation can exceed those of deforestation. Once damaged, natural ecosystems are more vulnerable to drought, fires and climate change.
Recently published research found helping natural forest regrow can have a globally significant effect on carbon dioxide levels. This approach – called proforestation – is a more effective, immediate and low-cost method for removing and storing atmospheric carbon in the long-term than tree planting. And it can be used across many different kinds of forests around the world.

 

Avoiding further loss and degradation of primary forests and intact forest landscapes, and allowing degraded forests to naturally regrow, would reduce global carbon emissions. Shutterstock

Avoiding further loss and degradation of primary forests and intact forest landscapes, and allowing degraded forests to naturally regrow, would reduce global carbon emissions annually by about 1 gigatonnes (Gt), and reduce another 2-4 Gt of carbon emissions just through natural regrowth.

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Read more: Not everyone cares about climate change, but reproach won't change their minds

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Research has predicted that protecting primary forests while allowing degraded forests to recover, along with limited expansion of natural forests, would remove 153 billion tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere between now and 2150.
Every country with forests can contribute to this effort. In fact, research shows that community land management is the best way to improve natural forests and help trees recover from degradation.

Read The Conversation article