Forests and climate change – examining the spin

By Susan Austin
Tasmania, Australia -- It’s easy to get confused about the issue of forests and climate change. Climate scientists say that preserving our forests is a quick, easy and cheap way to prevent further global warming, and Australia’s previous federal government allocated A$200 million towards preserving forests in South-East Asia. Yet both the federal government and the Tasmanian state government are overseeing the continuing destruction of Tasmania’s old-growth forests to feed a profitable wood-chip export industry and a soon-to-be-built pulp mill. And what’s more, they say that the industry is carbon-positive and sustainable. What’s really going on?
``Action
to preserve the remaining areas of natural forest is needed urgently”, wrote Sir Nicholas Stern, in his October 2006 Stern Review: The Economics of Climate
Change, produced for the British government. And the Australian
government’s consultant, Professor Ross Garnaut, in his interim report to the
government on climate change, advocates re-forestation and forest conservation
to provide breathing space for new technologies to “de-carbonise” our economy
in the next decade before we trigger dangerous climate change.
Deforestation and forest degradation contribute to around 20 per cent of
global greenhouse gas emissions, second only to the burning of fossil fuels to
produce energy. The federal government’s Department of Climate Change website
states: ``There is the potential to reduce these emissions by encouraging more
sustainable forest management practices.”
Government double standards?
In March 2008,
the Australian federal government, led by the Labor Party’s Prime Minister
Kevin Rudd, announced the Papua New Guinea-Australia Forest Carbon Partnership,
which is designed to reimburse PNG if it protects its forests from the axe by
taking advantage of international carbon markets under the Kyoto Protocol.
This follows
similar initiatives by the previous Liberal/National Coalition federal government,
such as the “Global Initiative on Forests and Climate”, which was launched in
March 2007 by the then-federal environment minister Malcolm Turnbull. That $200
million dollar scheme aimed to stop deforestation, particularly illegal logging
in the
It is no
exaggeration to say that tropical rainforests are the lungs of the planet.
Tropical forests cover 17% of the Earth's land mass, but account for more than
a third of the world's plant growth and store roughly 40% of all the carbon in
terrestrial life, plus a third or more of all the carbon stored in soils.
"Tropical forests move more carbon in and out of the atmosphere than any
other ecosystem", says Alan Townsend, an ecologist at the
Of course environmentalists
support government initiatives to curb logging overseas, but they question
governments’ unwillingness to practice what it preaches in their own backyards. Does it matter that a large percentage of
logging in countries like
Australian Greens
Senator Bob Brown responded to the 2007 announcement by saying: “Our Prime
Minister is a forest fool. He believes the Australian people will be satisfied
with him putting $200 million into
The
Programme for Endorsement of Forest Certification has certified forestry operations in
However almost all current harvesting
in
Forestry Tasmania claims to be reducing its reliance on
clear-felling by phasing in a practice called “variable or aggregated
retention” which many
regard as clear-felling by another name – the practice simply leaves 20 to 30
per cent of the trees left to stand in small clumps or islands in the sea of
destruction. According to Timber Workers for Forests, these clumps are
frequently scorched, burnt, wind thrown and fail to achieve their purpose of
ecological preservation.
Forests on fire
Massive
regeneration burns conducted throughout the state by Forestry Tasmania in
autumn this year have once again ignited the debate about
Greens member
of the Tasmanian parliament Tim Morris said on April 24: “Year after year
people with asthma and other respiratory problems are forced indoors to get
away from this state-endorsed smoke pollution …This is completely unacceptable
for both public health considerations as well as meeting our climate change
commitments.”
The
complaints haven’t just been about harmful effects to health and quality of
life, but about the release of carbon into the atmosphere. With growing
awareness of the seriousness of global warming, people aren’t prepared to sit
back and watch their forests being turned into giant columns of smoke and
ashes.
A Sunday Tasmanian report on April 27,
2008, noted that the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere from
forestry burns could reach an estimated 1.54 million tonnes during this
burn-off season, according to the forest industry’s own figures, which estimated in 2001 that the amount of
carbon in the smoke of a wet eucalypt regeneration burn averaged 196 tonnes per
hectare (which is likely to be a very conservative estimate).
Under
pressure from the public’s opposition to forestry burns, the timber industry has
again raised a plan to establish biomass power plants to burn some of the
larger pieces of forest residue to generate electricity, saying that this would
reduce smoke from burn-offs and generate renewable electricity. In a media
release on
While many
environmentalists, such as Mark Diesendorf, author of Greenhouse Solutions with Sustainable Energy advocate burning
forestry and agricultural residue for fuel, they also insist that broader
sustainability criteria would need to be met. Vica Bayley from the Wilderness
Society told Green Left Weekly on
There are
well-founded concerns that such power plants would lead to an expansion of
logging practices solely to create power instead of serving as a useful way to
deal with genuine logging waste, just as the woodchip industry was originally set
up to make use of "waste" left over from the production of saw logs and
now about 90% of all old-growth forests logged in Tasmania are done so solely
to produce woodchips.
But what about bushfires?
Global
warming causes drier, hotter conditions which increases the risk of bushfires.
Dr David Bowman, a scientist from the
Forestry
groups pretend not to understand why people complain about the smoke from post-logging
regeneration burns but don’t speak up about pollution from natural bushfires or
forest preservation practices like back-burning. It is obvious that climate
change is already leading to more frequent and bigger bushfires which result in
large amounts of carbon being released into the atmosphere (although nowhere
near the amount released through regeneration burns), and back-burning helps to
decrease their spread. On the other hand, regeneration burns are purposely lit
carbon-emitting bonfires that add to global warming for the noble purpose of
increasing company profits.
A study by Dean and others[1] in
2003 found that while 85% of carbon is lost when forests are logged and burnt,
whereas an astonishingly small amount, only 2.4%, of forest carbon is lost when
a natural fire passes through. It is also worth noting that mature forests are
wetter, and are therefore less prone to bushfires.
Forestry practices – good or bad for
the climate?
The debate
about the climate change impacts of current forestry practices has been raging in
If you sat
at home and perused the climate change section of Forestry Tasmania’s
website you would be forgiven for
believing that “Tasmania’s state forests
are sucking carbon from the atmosphere at the rate of around 700 thousand
tonnes per year, thanks to Forestry Tasmania’s management strategies…Each year,
Tasmania’s forests are absorbing 24% of the entire state’s carbon emissions.”
However, if you took a trip to the Weld or Florentine valleys in southern
Forestry Tasmania’s website emphasises that “Tasmanian
forests [are] a massive contributor to the fight against climate change”. Do we
need to add “if you leave them standing”?
Carbon accounting
Forestry
In 2005
Where do these forest industry
claims of being “greenhouse positive” come from? If you look closer at the 2005
inventory you will see that the sector is broken down into two areas – “forestry”
- which includes afforestation and reforestation - and “deforestation”. Afforestation
is the artificial establishment of forests by planting or seeding in an area of
bare or non-forested land. Reforestation is artificial or natural re-establishment
of forest in an area that was previously under forest cover, or the
restocking of existing forests and woodlands which have been depleted or
chopped down. Under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the Australian Greenhouse
Office inventories, both areas are grouped together to measure carbon dioxide uptake from
plantations established from 1990 onwards on agricultural or cleared land. In
Peter Boyer, a Climate Project Presenter, wrote in the Mercury on April 29, 2008: “Under the
Kyoto Protocol, clear-felling mature native forests to grow new trees doesn’t
count as land-clearing, so carbon emitted from that activity is left out of the
ledger. The result is that forestry gets a dream run in official emissions
statistics.”
MBAC
consulting, in its 2007 report for Forestry Tasmania, found that over 23 years
to 2030, logging will release at least 28% of the carbon stored in the
commercial forests
But talking
in terms of 2050 figures obscures the picture of what is happening in the next
20 years, which many climate scientists say is the crucial window of
opportunity when it comes to reducing our emissions. In fact forest operations
in
Vica Bayley
from the Wilderness Society said in an article in the Tasmanian Times on
Dr Hans Drielsma
from Forestry Tasmania says that carbon in production forests is balanced
between that removed by harvesting and restored through regeneration. In
Forestry Tasmania’s June 2007 Branchlines
magazine he said this balance is maintained in
However
this seems to imply that forests of all types and all ages store similar
amounts of carbon. In fact strong evidence is emerging that nothing can beat
undisturbed mature native forests when it comes to storing carbon.
Carbon storage
No one is denying that young trees
are faster growing and absorb carbon at a faster rate than mature trees. But
mature forests are much better at storing it in wood, branches,
leaves, undergrowth, litter, roots,
peat and soil. A United States Wilderness Society report, authored by Ann
Ingerson and Dr. Wendy Loya[2] and released in April this year, shows that in
general, the amount of carbon stored above ground in trees is less than half
the forest carbon total.
When Barry
Chipman from Timber Communities Australia spoke at the April 23 forum, he
didn’t deny that clear-felling and carrying out regeneration burns releases
carbon into the atmosphere, but he argued that the equivalent amount of CO2 is
absorbed back when the forests grow again.
Dr Jerry F.
Franklin, a professor with the University of Washington's College of Forest
Resources, explained the problems with this approach well when he said: "Mature
and old-growth forests can store or sequester extraordinary amounts of carbon
…An analogy would be that older forests can be viewed as having very large
capital reserves, whereas younger forests have high cash flow, or carbon
uptake, but contain very little capital, such as sequestered carbon. There's
also a high 'transaction cost' when you 'liquidate' this stored carbon by
harvesting the forest. The harvested sites are significant carbon sources
leaking carbon dioxide to the atmosphere for many years to decades following
the harvest."[3]
Research
clearly shows that native forests which have not been logged store up to three
times more carbon than forests that have been logged. And up to 60% of the
carbon in a Tasmanian wet eucalypt forest is stored in the soil.
Christopher Dean, Stephen Roxburgh and Brendan Mackay researched
carbon levels in Eucalptus Regnans (a commonly logged species also
known as mountain ash, swamp gum or stringy gum) in Victoria
and Tasmania in 2003. They found that carbon storage increases in Eucalyptus Regnans up to 400 years old
can approach 1500 tonnes of carbon per hectare. In contrast, after five cycles
of logging every 80 years, forests tended to store an average of only 387
tonnes of carbon per hectare.[4]
A study by Roxburgh and others
published in 2006 in the Journal of Applied Ecology predicted that it would take 53 years
for a previously logged forest in temperate regions of Australia to reach 75% carbon
carrying capacity, and 152 years to reach 90% of its original carbon
storage capacity.[5]
The
Wilderness Society says that detailed studies have shown that the whole of
Australia’s intact eucalypt forests store on average around 650 tonnes of
carbon per hectare – far more that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) default values for temperate forests of 60 tonnes of carbon.
According to the National Carbon
Accounting System Technical Report 17 from the Australian Greenhouse Office in 2000,
plantations store much less carbon at around 122 tonnes per hectare.
So it is not enough to know that under the Australian government
forest industry initiative, Vision 2020, the area of plantation forests in
Australia is projected to increase by about 2 million hectares by 2020 over
that present in 1996. The problem isn’t that most new plantations will be on
agricultural land, although this raises questions about food security and
priority of land use, but that plantations are not as effective at combating
global warming as old-growth forests, which we urgently need to protect.
Not only do older forests store more carbon, but when
forests or plantations are harvested regularly, other factors contribute to
greenhouse gas emissions, such as increased drying and decomposition of the
carbon stored in the soil, burning or acceleration of decay of biomass left on
the site, the burning of fossil fuels to run the logging machinery and the log
trucks which transport them long distances, and the short life of most of the
end products.
Storage in timber products
At the
April 23 public forum, Chipman displayed a nice slide with this quote from the
Stern report: “If the timber is used in long-lived wood products it actually
conserves carbon during the product’s lifetime.” Hans Drielsman from Forestry
Tasmania (in the June 2007 Branchlines
and at the public forum) stated that wood is a greenhouse-friendly product as
it stores carbon, whereas every other type of building material including steel, aluminium, plastic and concrete takes a lot of energy
to produce and are therefore responsible for high carbon emissions.
This is probably
true but how much of the timber that is logged really goes into long-lived wood
products? With 90% of our forests going into woodchips, pulp and eventually
paper, there’s a cause for concern.
In a Green
Institute paper written in September 2007 by Margaret Blakers, we discover that
when you log native forests, 60% of the carbon is lost due to burning or decay,
23 per cent of the carbon is in exported woodchips (with a maximum life of
three years), 11 per cent adds to landfill, and only 4 per cent adds to the
store in longer lived wood products. In other words, the argument that wood
products store significant amounts of CO2 relative to native forests has no
validity. Almost all CO2 from wood processing is released within a few years,
and the absolute maximum residence time of carbon in wood products is estimated
at 90 years. Old-growth forests contain trees aged 200-300 years plus.[6]
In a speech to parliament on
Even if we generously assume that his figures are correct,
in this era of increased understanding about the alarming rate of global
warming and the role of old-growth forests in storing carbon, the questions we
need to be asking are: Why are only half of our rainforests being protected?
Why are 32 per cent of our remaining old-growth forests still at risk of being
turned into woodchips or burnt? Why are 87 per cent of our native forests not being protected for their
climate-saving values? Why are corporate logging interests allowed to threaten
our very future?
With the election of Kevin Rudd’s Labor Party government and the signing of the Kyoto Protocol in November 2007, many Australians were hopeful about finally seeing leadership on climate change. However as
Former Tasmanian Labor Premier Paul Lennon asked Professor
Ross Garnaut, who is investigating economic aspects of climate change, to review
the impact of logging. However there’s enough evidence around already without
us having to wait for Garnaut’s final report – it’s plain to see that we need
to protect our forests from those whose primary concerns relate to company
profits and shareholder dividends. Instead we need to recognise our communal
carbon bank and invest in the future.
The Gunns pulp mill – climate
destroyer
Gunns Ltd, Australia’s largest woodchipping company, is forging ahead with its plans to build a $2 billion pulp mill in the Tamar Valley in the north of Tasmania, despite massive community opposition, which has taken the form of 10-15,000 people marching in repeated demonstrations at both ends of the state and over 6000 people signing pledges saying they will peacefully blockade the mill should its construction go ahead, even if it means going to jail.
Tasmanians Against the Pulp Mill is a thriving community-based protest movement that has been attracting over 100 people to its fortnightly campaign meetings for years now, and big environment groups like the Wilderness Society have been consistently voicing opposition to the mill in the media. Students Against the Pulp Mill has mobilised large numbers of high school students to walk out of school in protest, and a variety of other tourism, agriculture and fishing industry bodies have spoken out against the damage that the mill will cause to their industries.
The proposed pulp mill, one of the largest in the world, will use harmful chemicals, suck large amounts of water from local supplies, pump wastes directly into the ocean, cause major air pollution and further escalate old-growth logging. The government has been accused of corrupt practices by allowing the company to pull out of the independent environmental assessment process and introducing a special law to fast-track the mill’s approval. The issue has clearly radicalised people all over the state and awareness is growing across Australia.
The strength of the campaign has led to a number of victories, such as the May 26, 2008, resignation of the Premier Paul Lennon, who was a fanatical pulp mill supporter, and the recent news that ANZ bank was no longer prepared to finance the project.
On May 5, 2008, the Tasmanian Labor government admitted that it had signed a secret deal with Gunns and Forestry Tasmania that committed it to supplying wood to the proposed pulp mill for 20 years. The agreement even promised $15 million in taxpayer-funded compensation if any future government’s legislation interfered with the wood supply deal.
Accountant Naomi Edwards, in her submission to the Resource Planning and Development Commission in September 2006, said that “the pulp mill contract locks in over two million tonnes of state forest resource annually to the pulp mill, for a twenty year period, which locks in Gunns as a 70% plus monopsonist. Even if Forestry Tasmania is able to find a second customer producing a higher value product, it will not be possible to divert the wood resource away from the pulp mill. Further, Forestry Tasmania has existing contracts of supply in regard to woodchips, and Gunns has stated that it will need to continue with these woodchip exports in order to finance the pulp mill.”
Online campaigning group Climate Ark argues that Tasmania's logging industry already exports 5 million tones of pulp annually, and if built, the pulp mill will need another 4 million tonnes yearly, nearly doubling Gunns' current rate of clearfelling. Climate Ark claims the pulp mill will increase Australia's annual greenhouse gas contributions by more than 2 per cent.
Gunns says it will use between 3.2-4 million metric tonnes of pulpwood per year, compared to the current average of 4.7 million tonnes of pulpwood being exported. It says that it won’t lead to an intensification of logging but will divert resource that would otherwise have been exported in chip form to the pulp mill for value-added processing. However Gunns’ impact statement shows that the rate of woodchip production to feed all of its mills, including its woodchip export mills at Triabunna and Hampshire, will increase to 6.8 million tonnes per annum. It’s hard to find exact figures as information on native forest logging, wood-supply deals and woodchip contracts is often made exempt from freedom of information provisions and public Australian Bureau of Statistics reporting.
Gunns’ impact statement shows that at start-up the pulp mill will be 80% based on Tasmania’s native forests, with only 20% coming from plantations. Its graph shows that it will take 10 years for the plantation component to increase to 80%. The Wilderness Society says that in 25 years of operation, the pulp mill will consume more than 32 million tonnes of native forest, which will require the logging of more than 200,000 hectares of Tasmania’s native forests.
In the Wilderness Society’s submission to the pulp mill assessment panel, it claims that logging of native forests for the pulp mill will result in about 110 million tonnes of greenhouse pollution over the ten-year lifespan of the project (equivalent to 80 years of emissions from all the cars, buses and trucks currently on the road in Tasmania). The state government continues to support and subsidise this mill even though it has dramatic climate change implications.
More than
30,000 people have signed a Get Up petition calling on Professor Garnaut to examine the full impact
of the logging that will feed the pulp mill before finalising his climate change
report: “We ask
that you provide a full carbon assessment of the impact of logging our forests,
in particular Tasmania's forests destined for the pulp mill, including the
serious carbon loss in converting native forests to plantations, the economic
value in leaving them intact as sources of sequestration, and the role they can
play in an emissions trading scheme."
Carbon trading and CDM
Will carbon
trading be the savior of our old-growth forests? Many environmentalists in
Timber Workers for Forests, in its
submission to Forestry Tasmania’s
Any carbon
trading scheme involving forests requires a good understanding of carbon
storage and carbon accounting in different types of forests and soils. The
federal government’s Department of Climate Change is busy working with other
partners on developing an internationally recognised system of monitoring
forests and their carbon content so that forests can become part of the carbon
market. It aims to extend Australia’s National Carbon Accounting System (NCAS)
to do this.
A global carbon trading scheme was
set up under the Kyoto Protocol and includes the Clean Development Mechanism,
which allows Western companies that expect to exceed their emissions cap to
carry on polluting, provided they invest in projects that result in
corresponding emissions cuts in the developing world. The total value of such
trades reached US$60 billion last year. As the world is already negotiating the
next Kyoto protocol, to take effect in 2013, many groups and governments are
pushing for the CDM to be expanded so that projects such as the protection of
tropical forests and even soil conservation will be eligible for carbon credits
(at the moment only the planting of trees on previously cleared land is
eligible for credits).
Making forestry projects eligible
for carbon credits brings up the problem of permanence, because many forestry
projects are temporary in nature, since carbon dioxide captured during forest
growth can be disturbed by fire or drought or released upon harvest.
Using carbon trading as a method of
protecting native forests may bring up some problems. For example, for projects
to gain CDM status, they may have to show that they are additional, and not
part of normal planning, i.e. to apply for carbon credits from a forest
preservation project you would need to prove that you were protecting forests
that would otherwise be condemned to destruction. Where is the incentive for
government’s to place these forests under protection now, before a carbon
trading scheme commences, if in doing so, lose the potential to gain an income
from protecting them later on? And should Gunns get paid to protect our native
forests? Whose forests are they?
Carbon trading may be too slow and
bureaucratic when compared to the possibilities offered by quick, effective
regulation of forest protection, delivered by a government prepared to fund a
transition plan for forestry workers into sustainable alternative employment.
There is also the broader problem of
companies using the CDM scheme to “offset” their own pollution, thereby not
reducing overall levels of CO2 emissions. Australian of
the Year (2007) and environmentalist Professor Tim Flannery presented a
submission to Professor Garnaut’s climate change review in January 2008
proposing an internet-based carbon market with a pilot scheme to be run in
Papua New Guinea. First raised in a presentation in Port Moresby in August
2007, Flannery’s scheme envisages that households and businesses would be able
to secure the protection of forests and the replanting of trees through an
auction scheme. Buyers would identify vulnerable forest land online, using
internet technology like Google Earth, and then make bids to secure its protection
through a site like eBay. If the bid is accepted by the village, the funds
would be held in trust by a non-government organisation until the agreed
protection of biodiversity or carbon sequestration has been delivered. Buyers
would get credits to offset industrial emissions, villagers would get paid for
preserving their forests and biodiversity would be protected.
Even
though Flannery’s submission acknowledges that the industrialised world has “inflict[ed] a historic debt of 200
gigatonnes of carbon on humanity’s common atmosphere”, he still seems to
support the idea that carbon-emitting businesses in industrialised countries
like Australia should be able to receive credits for protecting forests in
other countries, while continuing to emit carbon themselves.
Socialist approaches to forestry
The
forestry workers’ union in
Our
native forests should be under public control and managed in the public
interest, not sold to Gunns for a pittance. As preserving mature forests has
been recognised as a cheap strategy for dealing with climate change, the
government needs to step in, nationalise Gunns and protect our forests for the
kinds of environmental benefits that won’t show up in a private company’s
accounting systems. (See the Socialist Alliance’s ``Open Letter to Timber
Workers about the Pulp Mill’’ at http://www.socialist-alliance.org/tasmania/
for more detail on jobs, the pulp mill and forestry practices.)
How climate change impacts on
forests
Will we
always be able to rely on our forests being carbon sinks?
Some of the
research coming out in the last few years has scary implications. Even if we do
stop logging and burning our forests, unless we work hard to reduce other
sources of emissions, global warming may catch up with us and change the very
nature of our forests and their ability to store carbon.
The amount
of carbon that a forest stores depends on the balance between the rate at which
it draws carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and the rate
at which it gives carbon dioxide back through respiration.
Scientists
such as David and Deborah Clark from the La Selva Biological Station in
A study by
Ken Feeley of Harvard University in Boston which was reported in the August 11,
2007, Malaysia Sun in showed that
rising average temperatures have reduced growth rates by up to 50 per cent in
the two rainforests in Panama and Malaysia, which have both experienced climate
warming above the world average over the past few decades.[9]
In a paper in the
Research released in October 2007 by the Global Carbon Project, reported in Climate Code Red, confirmed that there
is more CO2 in the atmosphere, partly because of a slow-down of natural sinks. “Fifty years ago, for every tonne of CO2
emitted, 600kg were removed by land and ocean sinks. However, in 2006, only
550kg were removed per tonne and that amount is falling”, concluded project
leader Dr Pep Canadell.[10]
A summary of some of the Hadley Centre’s
modeling work published in 2005 and referred to in Climate Code Red included two startling graphs. In one, the amount
of total carbon stored in the Amazonian vegetation and soils shows a drop from
around 70 billion tonnes of carbon in 2000 to just 20 billion tonnes of carbon
by 2100. The second, using the same technique, compares vegetation and soil
carbon levels in 2100 to 1850: while vegetation carbon had increased by about
60 billion tonnes of carbon by 2100, the amount of soil carbon had decreased by
130 billion tonnes of carbon.
So the ability of our forests to
store carbon and assist in the fight against global warming is actually
decreasing as the planet warms. And this is without taking into account the negative
effects of increasing numbers of droughts and wildfires on forests. So it is
clear that while it is vitally important to preserve the Earth’s remaining
native forests in their natural state, we must also act quickly to reduce our
overall emissions, by doing things like phasing out fossil fuel use, if we are
to protect nature’s precious equilibrium and avert climate catastrophe.
[Susan Austin is an environmental
activist in
Notes
1. Dean, C., Mackey, B.G., and
Roxburgh, S.H. (2003), ``Growth Modelling of Eucalyptus regnans for carbon
accounting at the landscape scale’’, in Amaro, A., Reed, D., Soares, P. (eds.),
2.
Ann
Ingerson and Dr. Wendy Loya, Measuring
3.
US Wilderness Society media release,
4.
See Note 2.
5. Roxburgh, S.H., Wood, S.W., Mackey,
B.G., Woldendorp, G. and Gibbons, P., ``Assessing the carbon sequestration
potential of managed forests: a case study from temperate Australia’’, Journal of Applied Ecology, Volume 43,
Number 6, December 2006, pp. 1149-1159.
6. Green Institute Working Paper 2
“Forests: vital for climate protection”, http://www.greeninstitute.com.au/images/uploads/Forests_-_vital_for_climate_protection.pdf.
7.
Media release, http://tas.greens.org.au/News/view_MR.php?ActionID=2976.
8. Hillary Rosner, ``Rainforests – Carbon sink or carbon
source?’’ by Hillary
Rosner, posted
9.
http://story.malaysiasun.com/index.php/ct/9/cid/48cba686fe041718/id/272618/cs/1/