Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Climate Change and Water) Share this | Hansard source

Perhaps the best way of clarifying this is in Australia’s submission in March this year to the international negotiations on land use, land use change and forestry, which specifically talks about harvest of wood products. We made reference to the New Zealand proposal—and this is what we were saying as at March, so I am not sure whether there has been any shift in the New Zealand position—which they described as emissions to atmosphere which provides a practical approach to account for emissions when they occur. We said the proposal had potential as a viable accounting treatment for harvest of wood products post 2012. In the submission we supported New Zealand’s proposal that the approach be applied to wood products harvested from 1 January 2013. I read from the international submission that Australia made:

Using an approach such as ‘Emissions to Atmosphere’ is likely to create an incentive to produce longer lived wood products. It will be necessary to ensure that this does not at the same time create leakage for production of short lived wood products to countries not subject to emissions limitations.