Giant kelp forest plight hidden beneath waves

THE

vanishing of 95 per cent of Tasmania’s giant kelp forests is a tragedy.

Most of us realise that, but the extent of this tragedy is hidden deep below the waves, out of sight and out of mind.

When clearfell logging was ripping millions of tonnes of native Tasmanian forests out of the ground every year to be exported as woodchips in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was the widespread broadcast of images of the scorched desolation, the aftermath of hitech, slash-and-burn forestry, that kept it in the public eye.

These images ignited empathy and triggered howls of protest. The giant kelp has disappeared with barely a whimper in comparison.

Scientists and divers who have witnessed kelp’s tragic demise have spoken out, but sadly the undersea forests are not in our face like Donald Trump’s tweets, North Korea’s threats or the flood, famine and war that win our attention.

While we look the other way, the biodiverse kelp ecosystem disappears at a frantic rate. A kelp-covered reef system extends from north of Sydney down around Tasmania to Western Australia. It is the biological framework that supports most of the nation’s fisheries, worth about $10 billion each year. The loss of these reef ecosystems undermine the long-term viability of the Tasmanian rock lobster and abalone fisheries.

As global warming has taken hold, the East Australian Current that slips down Aus- tralia’s east coast has pushed south past Victoria into Tasmanian waters. It has extended 350km south in 60 years.

Tropicalisation of our temperate waters encourages the march of sea urchins into the kelp forests, transforming them into barren wastelands.

The full ramifications of this dramatic change are unknown. We speculate. We estimate and prognosticate. The intricate, symbiotic relationships between plants and animals are so intertwined that predicting what will happen is dizzily complicated.

All we know for sure is that something that had functioned for eons is now disappearing in a matter of decades.

The only way to stop this destruction is to tackle global warming. One major problem is coal, a chief contributor to climate change. COAL

is central to Australia’s economy. It makes up about 15 per cent of national exports, worth between $10 billion and $20 billion every year since 2003-2004, about the same as our farm exports. Coal mining directly employs about 55,000 Australians in full-time jobs, and more than 145,000 in related employment.

This has political ramifications. Any federal government that pulls the rug from under these jobs faces hostility at the polls, especially when it will have to wear the balance of trade ramifications of losing up to $20 billion in exports each year. The governments of the coal-mining states of Victoria, NSW and Queensland are manacled to the industry.

Do we turn a blind eye and accept the catastrophe happening under the waves off our coast and just blame the weather for the potential col- lapse of a $10 billion fishery and all the jobs that go with it?

This dilemma reminds me of the early 2000s when Tasmania was in the grip of the insatiable woodchip industry.

Hundreds of millions of dollars from federal and state coffers were poured into all sorts of research, industry subsidies and public relations campaigns to make chipping more palatable. It all came to nowt.

The inevitable happened. Cheap chips from huge plantations in places like Brazil and Vietnam flooded the global market at a time the exchange rate was working against Tasmanian exports. Environmentalists campaigned against Tasmanian woodchips in overseas markets. The bottom fell out of forestry managed investment schemes that were atrociously designed, woefully regulated and poorly operated. The industry imploded.

For more than 10 years wise heads had warned this would happen, but state and federal governments, terrified of political fallout, kept throwing money down the hole, year after year, buying time before the inevitable collapse. WHAT

would have happened if the hundreds of millions had helped transition Tasmanian jobs; reskill the labour force; seed-fund new businesses; educate and assist? Could we have avoided the horror of the crash and found new enterprises, new jobs, and still had forests left for specialty timbers?

I think so. I also think lessons from the woodchip disaster apply to the dilemma with coal and giant kelp.

However, rather than assist the transition out of a dying industry for which the writing is on the wall, I fear the Federal Government will bombard us with a clean-coal campaign and will pour millions into cutting-edge carbon-capture research, only to eventually find it is too late and the world moved on without us.

If you thought the crash from the collapse of our woodchip industry was loud, wait for the almighty bang if we ride coal all the way to the bottom.