Forests critical for Climate and Biodiversity Protection

The critical importance of high integrity forests for climate abatement and biodiversity protection

Introduction

While the past may well inform the future, our forests and a vast number of Australians who depend on their services, face an unprecedented and entwined set of escalating risks as global heating and biodiversity loss escalate. This existential threat to communities can only be prevented if we tackle the climate and biodiversity challenges together. As the first ever joint workshop of the scientific advisory bodies to the Climate Convention and Biodiversity Convention noted in 2021, the climate and biodiversity crises amplify each other and urgent synergistic action to protect and restore carbon dense and species rich ecosystems is needed. Bringing climate and biodiversity policy and practice together is now an accepted imperative as this decision taken at UNFCCC COP 28 illustrates:

“Further emphasises the importance of conserving, protecting and restoring nature and ecosystems towards achieving the Paris Agreement temperature goal, including through enhanced efforts towards halting and reversing deforestation and forest degradation by 2030, and other terrestrial and marine ecosystems acting as sinks and reservoirs of greenhouse gases and by conserving biodiversity, while ensuring social and environmental safeguards, in line with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework; “ (Para 33 from COP 28 CMA 5).

In the context of rapid global change Australia’s forest policies, regulatory frameworks and on ground practices are not just out of date, they are eroding the very foundations of recovery and forest ecosystem resilience. Media coverage of the recent ‘Nature Positive Summit’ has been scathing because Australians understand that you can’t be serious about reversing the extinction crisis while continuing to destroy core habitat, fire and drought refugia, ecological connectivity and ecosystem integrity. Nor can we achieve our climate targets if we increase the risk of losing the billions of tonnes of carbon stored in our forests to the atmosphere.

The Scale of the Problem

The 1992 National Forest Policy Statement (NFPS) promoted a vision of achieving ecologically sustainable forest management of public and private native forests and plantations. It required maintaining ecological processes and biodiversity within all forests and optimising the benefits to the community from forest uses within ecological constraints. This policy and the instruments designed to deliver it, RFAs, have demonstrably failed on all fronts. It did not place the native forest logging sector on an ecologically sustainable footing – failing even to deliver long-term sustainable wood supply, let alone prevent ongoing damage to biodiversity and the integrity of forest ecosystems.

A ‘set and forget’ attitude to the conservation elements of the RFAs has meant logging agencies have had a largely unfettered hand in maintaining and in some cases increasing, ecologically damaging logging practices. This inflexibility extends to government and agency inability to respond appropriately to catastrophic events like the 2019/20 fires (see report to the EPA by environmental consultants austeco). The Forestry Corporation of NSW, the EPA and other government agencies have proven incapable of adjusting logging plans to help protect and recover even critically endangered species. The NFPS aspiration of reforming forest management to achieve ecological sustainability turned out to be a pipe dream.

Every day essential habitat resources (food, nesting sites and hollows, safe havens from predators) for State and Federally listed threatened species are lost. The fate of these species is now completely dependent on securing urgent policy and legal change. If Australia is serious about halting and reversing the trajectory towards extinction of forest-dependent wildlife, change cannot wait.

Change, particularly in the face of global heating, which interacts with logging to increase the impacts of drought and fire, is imperative. The fate of our forests and the wildlife that contributes to their ecological integrity are not all that is at stake. If we are to reduce the risks to communities from severe and catastrophic fire we must act to restore the ecological integrity of our native forests and make much deeper cuts to Greenhouse gas emissions. 

Exemption from Federal Environment Law, combined with weak or non-existent State Government oversight of the effectiveness of legislative and regulatory arrangements for conservation, has resulted in a frankly terrifying set of circumstances for our native forests and the species dependent on them.

Thirty two years after the introduction of the NFPS, the challenges facing our native forests have increased beyond our imagining at that time. The impacts of, and interactions between, the climate and biodiversity crises are rapidly playing out – impacts that are exacerbated by the limitations and failings of State and Federal regulatory frameworks.

The native forest logging sector of the timber industry is in inexorable and terminal decline. As its struggle for survival escalates, the industry is wreaking havoc on our unique plants and animals. Umbrella species, like the Greater Glider and Australia’s iconic Koala, have moved onto State and Federal endangered species lists in the blink of ‘evolutionary time’, and are being pushed ever closer to extinction. The native forest logging sector continues to seek new subsidies in the form of carbon credits to keep a flailing industry afloat; and has launched a major national re-branding effort of largely unchanged industrial logging practices under the guise of keeping ‘forests healthy’ or worse, falsely claiming to mimic past management by Aboriginal people.

What is ecological integrity, and why does it matter?

The integrity of forest ecosystems determines their stability, i.e. their resistance and resilience to threats that are increasing with climate change. Every ecosystem service provided by forests - including services critical for liveability in Australia, such as climate regulation and the provision of clean water - depend on the integrity and stability of forest ecosystems.

Every time we road or log an area of old growth or long unlogged forest (even ‘lightly’) we reduce its integrity and resilience, generate GHG emissions and increase the risk that the forest will release more of its remaining carbon in the future. The loss of big, old trees - which make up 1-5% of trees globally but store 25-50% of the above ground carbon in forests - and other critical elements of biodiversity, combined with edge effects of logging disturbance, increases the vulnerability of forests to severe drought, heatwaves and fire, and other human-induced threats such as insect predation and disease. These threats are increasing with climate change and interact with logging to increase the risk of forest ecosystems reaching tipping points. Damaged forests are at much greater risk of loss than undamaged forests.

Ecosystems are dynamic and dependent on their full complement of native species for healthy functioning. For example, soil biota, invertebrates and fungi break down coarse woody debris on the forest floor, thereby increasing water and carbon accumulation and retention in forest soils; pollinators and seed dispersers help maintain the natural vegetation composition (species mix) which helps determine resistance to insects, disease, drought and fire; and many species support the composition and structure of a forest. In old growth and long unlogged forests, the natural species composition, patterns and structure of biodiversity - including the presence of big, old trees - help the forest resist drought and fire thanks to moisture retention under a closed canopy. The bigger the trees are, the harder it is to set the forest alight. Minimising disturbance in forests is critically important for sequestering, storing and retaining carbon over the long term.

Forests and Climate Change

If there is a single misstep that led to the failure of government policy to realise the full climate mitigation benefits of native forests and enhance their resilience and adaptive capacity, it is blindness to the importance of retaining and recovering forest ecosystem integrity. Simply assessing the extent of forest cover and focussing on net annual fluxes of GHG reveals very little about the climate value of our native forests or their ability to resist and recover from severe drought and fire.

Failure to recognise that the integrity of forest ecosystems determines their stability, i.e. their resistance and resilience to threats that are increasing with climate change, means we have strayed far from protecting forest ecosystem carbon reservoirs - reservoirs that hold gigatonnes of carbon and could, if allowed to recover, sequester and more securely store billions more (See ‘Green Carbon Part 1: The role of natural forests in carbon storage’). The stability and risk of losing that carbon to the atmosphere and indeed of reaching forest ecosystem tipping points, as is happening in parts of the Central Highlands of Victoria, is dependent on both reducing gross emissions from all sources (fossil fuel and logging) and allowing forest carbon stocks to recover.

Unlogged forests, on average, store 50% more carbon than logged forests but this loss of carbon is not revealed in State or Federal GHG accounts. This is because gross emissions from logging in the relatively small areas logged each year are netted out against sequestration occurring elsewhere in the larger forest estate Yet the maths are simple, if you log any area of forest older than 30 years it cannot recover its lost carbon stock by 2050. Also hidden is the carbon recovery potential of allowing previously logged forests to keep growing. And no policy maker ever considers the risks to long term forest carbon storage posed by ever reducing the ecological integrity of our native forests.

All these problems are discussed in the Mackey et. al paper ‘Net carbon accounting and reporting are a barrier to understanding the mitigation value of forest protection in developed countries’. In this paper, Mackey et. al find that “Analysis of reports for Australia at a sub-national level revealed that the State of Tasmania delivered negative emissions due to a change in forest management - a large and rapid drop in native forest logging - resulting in a mitigation benefit of ~22 Mt CO2-e yr–1 over the reported period 2011/12–2018/19.”

It is urgent that we refocus climate policy on forests to maximise their resilience and resistance to threats that are increasing with climate change.

The Solution: We Must End Native Forest Logging

There is only one moderate risk pathway to reversing the extinction trajectory of species like Koala and Greater Glider, recovering lost forest ecosystem stocks and improving forest ecosystem integrity and resilience: cease native forest logging.

As a matter of urgency we must:

- Immediately cease logging in all core habitat, fire refugia and areas essential for ecological connectivity and add these areas to the National Parks estate;

- Remove control of all public native forests from the conflicted and heavily compromised agency, the Forestry Corporation of NSW;

- Cease all native forest logging on public land in this term of parliament;

- Develop a forest ecosystem recovery plan utilising the best available knowledge from the science, ecological, First Nations, and local communities; and

- Explore funding, community involvement and regional job opportunities to support forest recovery that do not result in a zero sum outcome for either GHG emissions or biodiversity loss, i.e. avoid biodiversity and carbon offsets.

This article was originally published for Wilderness Australia, October 2024.