Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Continuing on with that theme, I want to draw the minister's attention to a paper, last year, by Heather Keith and others. It estimated that continued logging in the central highlands region of Australia, under current plans, would represent a loss in carbon stocks of 5.56 megatons over five years or over one megaton of carbon a year. This takes into account the stored carbon from the wood products produced, which is not much. Only four per cent of the forest was converted to sawn-timber products, yet under this legislation that would be a primary purpose, a higher-value product. Over two-thirds of the forest was made into paper products, which only had a short lifetime of less than three years. Under this scenario, instead of those residual waste woodchips going off to biomass the emissions from burning those trees would be immediate, so the ledger would be even more negative.

I repeat Senator Milne's question: what evidence do you have that by considering the burning of wood from native forests for energy would, by any means, be considered renewable? What will be used as a benchmark to verify that no extra logging will take place as a result of using native forest biomass eligible for renewable energy certificates? Will the benchmark be current 2014-15 logging volumes or is there some other measure that will be used?