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

In New York last week representatives from over 125 countries came together to reinvigorate international effort to tackle climate change. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon invited these world leaders to Climate Summit 2014 to galvanise climate action and to build political will to tackle this immense challenge. Ban Ki-moon asked leaders to bring bold announcements and actions to the summit to reduce emissions, strengthen climate resilience and secure political commitments.

Sadly, Australia did not live up to the challenge of the New York talks. We were an international embarrassment, with our Prime Minister failing to attend the talks. Our representative, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, went along instead and presented Australia's commitments, and they were roundly criticised as weak. The foreign minister played down Australia's contribution to global warming and the imperative for us to be a leader on climate action. The foreign minister failed to admit that Australia is amongst the highest polluters per person in the world.

Australia also was not there when the New York Declaration on Forests was endorsed, which came out of talks about forest protection. Forests are essential to our future; yet our government is AWOL when it is time to endorse real action to protect biodiversity and carbon sinks. Australia failed to join world leaders in endorsing a global time line to cut natural forest loss in half by 2020 and to strive to end it by 2030. The World Resources Institute says that meeting the declaration's zero deforestation goal in 2030 would cut more carbon than removing all cars, buses and planes from the US, China and India combined. The Declaration on Forests lays out a set of concrete actions and partnerships to address one of the biggest challenges of this generation. The declaration highlights that here in Australia we have a lot to work to do to play our part in global efforts to improve forest protection and management. We are already feeling the devastating effects of climate change and we must strive to limit the damage before it is too late. Our forests are a key piece of the puzzle. We must act now to protect native forests, to protect water supplies and to minimise the risk of hotter and more severe bushfires.

Protecting forests is essential to maintaining the diversity of species on this planet. We are standing by as extinction events happen at a staggering rate across the globe. Forests support up to 80 per cent of land based biodiversity. Research just released by the World Wildlife Fund shows that the number of wild land animals worldwide has declined by a devastating 39 per cent in the past 40 years. We are destroying these ecosystems at our peril. As a species, we rely on keeping the diversity of animal and plant species for our own survival. How many lifesaving medicines are we missing out on discovering? How much clean water will be ruined by dirty run-off of eroded soils? More than 1.6 billion people across the globe depend on forests for food, water, fuel, traditional medicines, traditional cultures and livelihoods. What will we tell our children and our grandchildren? So many creatures and wondrous plants will be left only as things of the past, remaining only in the stories we tell. I do not want orangutans to be a mystical creature from the past.

Closer to home, biodiversity loss is cutting right to the heart of who we are. In my home state of Victoria we are destroying the habitat of our own animal emblem. Our own symbol of the wildlife of Victoria is heading for extinction. Leadbeater's possum—a gorgeous little creature that lives in the mountain ash forests just to the east of Melbourne—is on track to become critically endangered as a result of intensive industrial-scale logging. Not only are we contributing to the possum's demise but we are using taxpayer dollars to subsidise it.

VicForests is making massive losses, but we continue to bail them out instead of helping our forest industries to complete the transition to plantations. In East Gippsland, VicForests is losing between $5 million and $6 million every year by logging forest habitats of threatened and endangered species, including the powerful, sooty and masked owls. Well done to community organisation Environment East Gippsland, who are currently taking legal action against VicForests because of this logging. These owls require intact forests with old trees with hollows. I have had the privilege of seeing powerful owls in these forests. They are magnificent creatures, up to a metre high. There may be as few as 400 pairs of them left in Victoria. They need our protection, not annihilation.

We now have the opportunity to protect these forests. South East Fibre Exports, who run the woodchip mill at Eden in New South Wales, has announced that it will not renew its contract with VicForests when it expires at the end of the year. This is because the global market for our woodchips continues to drop, replaced by higher-quality woodchips produced more cheaply from plantations in South America and South-East Asia. This is a watershed moment. This is the opportunity to protect our forests, to manage them for all their values. The alternative is to continue to destroy them with skyrocketing subsidies, as unsustainable economically as they are ecologically. But because there is no viability in logging native forests for woodchips for paper, this dying industry is scrounging for a replacement. The alternative they are promoting is to burn our forests for energy in forest furnaces.

Under the current Renewable Energy Target scheme, energy produced from burning native forest products is prohibited from being used for Renewable Energy Certificates, thanks very significantly to the huge amount of work Senator Milne did to exclude native forest wood from the RET in the Clean Energy package. In the government's Warburton Review of the RET, however, the panel supported the government's desire to reinstate the eligibility of so-called wood waste from native forest as a renewable energy source. But characterising the native forest wood that would be burnt as 'waste' for energy is simply deceitful. The native forest logging industry's push for burning wood from native forests for energy is driven by its desperate desire to find a replacement market for its woodchipping operations.

The claimed reduction in total greenhouse gas emissions would not occur, because of the massive release of carbon from destruction of intact forests. We need our forests as forests, as carbon stores, working for us, soaking up carbon from the atmosphere. Even if the logged forest is allowed to regrow, it would be decades, if ever, before the amount of carbon stored in that regrowth returns to the levels stored before logging—and we do not have decades to play with. Australians do not want to power their fridges with electricity produced by burning precious native forests. They want Renewable Energy Certificates from energy sources that are truly clean. Using our native forests as an energy source would massively undermine the renewable energy market and the solar and wind industries, which currently employ around 21,000 people. This booming sector of our economy is just getting started. Consumers have the right to know, when they are purchasing genuine renewable energy, that it has not been produced by destructive forest furnaces.

The other big threat to our forests is bushfires. We are all aware of the dangers Australia faces every year from bushfires. We all want to reduce the risk of severe bushfires, whether by complying with warnings and regulations, by reporting firebugs or by reducing the effects of dangerous global warming. So we should pay attention to very important recent research that has shown that the logging of native forests increases the risk of bushfires. Analysis of the Black Saturday bushfires looked at the areas that were most severely impacted by 'crown fires'. The flames from crown fires often extend above the forest canopy and pose the greatest threat to life and property. The findings from these studies, from the University of Melbourne and ANU, showed that the fire was at its most severe in forests that were aged between seven and 36 years, with the fires becoming progressively less severe with the age of the forests. The studies concluded that any future logging in these forests should be negligible. We must take note of findings like these. We must stand up and act and commit to ending the logging of our native forests, which are too precious to lose.