Native forest woodchipping is a massive contributor to climate change, generating almost 10% of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. This is because native forests hold and absorb an enormous amount of carbon. Woodchipping forests is a lost oppotunity to help combat climate change.
Native forests in the south east of NSW are among the most carbon dense in the world. In the context of dangerous climate change, the Environment Minister Carmel Tebbutt should step in to stop the woodchipping of these carbon dense forests.
Logging for the Eden woodchip mill contributes over 2% of total Australian annual carbon dioxide emissions. This is more than the emissions from every car in Sydney for a year!
If logging for Eden woodchips paid its way under the proposed carbon trading scheme, it would cost over $1 million a day, based on the proposed $25 a tonne of CO2.
The figure of emissions from Eden woodchip mill is probably an underestimation. Only a broad indicator of the scale of emissions from logging for the mill is possible because the National Carbon Accounting System has not commissioned detailed research on emissions and uptakes from Australian forests. However we now know from the Mackey research team at the Australian National University that the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) default values significantly underestimate the capacity of the south east forests to sequester CO2 by a factor of three, and for some areas by up to a factor of ten.
