Until he returned recently to Australia, expatriate Jim Douglas had spent the last eight years as the World Bank’s Forests Adviser in Washington. Writing a guest editorial in “Australian Forestry”, he had this to say about Australia’s forests: “I will go out on a limb here and suggest that the conservation, recreation and carbon values …
This short video explains how forests and our climate are so closely connected. Forests are our greatest land based carbon stores, shade the earth, moderate our climate and provide clouds and rainfall. More information about the link between forests and climate at www.forestsandclimate.net
Dr Judith Ajani analyses the arguments of both sides of the forestry debate about whether native forests should be used for bioenergy or biodiversity. Australia’s forestry industry and foresters argue that, from a climate change perspective, we should substitute fossil fuels and emission-intensive products with native forest wood, highlighting the fact that trees re-grow. Ecological …
If you get confused by all the talk of carbon trading, prices, international negotiations and Kyoto rules, you’re not alone. But here’s an attempt to simplify a part of it. Sadly, forests are still being done over by the latest wheeling and dealing. Late last year there was the Durban Climate Conference. Countries worked on …
Today, Greenpeace Australia Pacific, The Wilderness Society and My Environment have released an international report detailing repeated failures of the Program for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC) forest certification standard. The report is being released globally today. The report, On the Ground 2011, is a joint project between NGOs in North America, Europe, Asia …
If you or I were to thieve $1Million of native forest logs while being paid to protect a community from one of the biggest fires of the decade, shouldn’t we end up behind bars? This was the case as detailed in the article “Tree lopper turns up as biomass spruiker” in the Age on 27th …
This just shows how easy it is to not see the obvious. Dolphin colonies in Port Phillip Bay and the Gippsland Lakes have recently been formally recognised as a new species. The Burrunan dolphin or Tursiops australis, is thought to number about 150, but more research is needed. They differ from the other bottle-nosed dolphins …
Before our forebears arrived with axes and chainsaws, the old growth forest full of 90mt tall giants covered 80% of the Central Highlands (north-east of Healesville). Now only 1% survives. The old-growth is almost gone and on the verge of being unrecoverable. One more bush fire could send it the way of the Thylacine, and …
A report commissioned by VicForests has shown that there is enough plantation wood in Victoria to end native forest woodchipping for paper production in Victoria. For years, VicForests has been misleading the public by saying that there is not enough plantation wood to make paper here in Australia. This rhetoric has lead them to continue …
The threat of turning forests into furnace fodder for electricity isn’t going away. The emerging new market for selling biomass pellets as fuel for power generation is Korea. So says a well-known global logging consultancy group Pöyry Management Consulting Inc. It also believes Europe is an upcoming market and also Japan is now looking for …
