Let’s stick with forest benefits

CLIMATE AND ENERGY

THE claim that to deliver a climate benefit Tasmania’s wet eucalypt forests need to be saved from ongoing evolutionary processes is bizarre ( Letters, November 12). Peter D. McIntosh says we should keep logging then burning them in high intensity fires, because “letting nature take its course is too risky”. This ignores the urgency of acting on the climate crisis and the objective evidence in Tasmania’s official greenhouse gas inventory of massive emissions reductions from 2011 “mainly resulting from reductions in native forest harvesting”. It’s taken us to the world leading achievement of a 111.2 per cent reduction in net emissions levels.

We’ve got below net zero and into negative emissions territory, storing more carbon than we emit overall. The next few decades are vital. Leaving our forests intact and letting those degraded by logging recover delivers climate benefits in that time frame.

Worrying that this is unhelpful because over hundreds of years our wet eucalypt forests may evolve into rainforests that may then store less carbon than intact forests is misplaced. This strange alternative vision also includes burning forest biomass to produce electricity as a climate solution.

Burning forest biomass is as emissive as burning coal. The dubious breakeven scenario in which trees growing somewhere else make up for the carbon emitted ignores that leaving trees to grow instead of logging and burning them adds to carbon stores, taking us much further in the struggle to restrain

climate change, just as we are now experiencing. I’ll take my chances that we make it through to where an evolution to rainforest is even possible, and hope future generations can rejoice in such an outcome.

Peg Putt

Cygnet