The role of natural forests in carbon storage

Part 1. A green carbon account of Australia’s south-eastern Eucalypt forests, and policy implications

The colour of carbon matters. Green carbon is the carbon stored in the plants and soil of natural ecosystems and is a vital part of the global carbon cycle. This report is the first in a series that examines the role of natural forests in the storage of carbon, the impacts of human land use activities, and the implications for climate change policy nationally and internationally. REDD (“reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation”) is now part of the agenda for the “Bali Action Plan” being debated in the lead-up to the Copenhagen climate change conference in 2009. Currently, international rules are blind to the colour of carbon so that the green carbon in natural forests is not recognized, resulting in perverse outcomes including ongoing deforestation and forest degradation, and the conversion of extensive areas of land to industrial plantations. This report examines REDD policy from a green carbon scientific perspective. Subsequent reports will focus on issues concerning the carbon sequestration potential of commercially logged natural forests, methods for monitoring REDD, and the long term implications of forest policy and management for the global carbon cycle and climate change.

Philip Hewett explains why our most famous shade dweller was well ahead of his time.

“Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong; under the shade of a Coolibah tree,” wrote ‘Banjo’ Patterson in 1895. A puddle of cool water and the shade of a gum tree in a parched land. A hundred years later you’d think shade would still appeal but it seems not. Australia has the world’s highest skin cancer rate with $294 million spent on skin cancers in 2001 and over 1,500 deaths in 2003 alone. We’d be better off in the shade of trees than in the sun yet all that planners, developers and politicians give us are treeless environs. Our oldest urban trees need replacing, and drought, diseases and pests are emerging threats as climate change alters nature’s dynamic balance.

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Philip Hewett tells us why it really is good for us to take a stroll in the park (preferably one filled with trees). For the tree at your doorstep is the forest in your mind.

Why do so many of us want to live in cities?” asks Dr Cecil Konijnendijk, Danish researcher and leader of the International Union of Forest Research Organisations (IUFRO) research group. “People are social animals, like ants, but why do we seemingly prefer ant-heaps of concrete, steel and tarmac over the rolling hills of the countryside?”

“Cities are places where a certain energised crowding of people takes place”, says architectural historian Spiro Kostof in his book ‘The City Shaped’. He concluded his work on city design by expressing his admiration for the city as a human phenomenon: “the city is one of the most remarkable, one of the most enduring of human artefacts and human institutions”.