Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

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Kyoto’s relevance to ‘Back o’ Bourke’

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I leave today for Brewarrina, 100kms east of Bourke. I will be speaking at a NSW Farmer’s Forum on the issues I raised in my column in The Land of 3rd February.

I wrote:

The latest round of restrictions on tree clearing in NSW and Queensland were driven in part by the Federal Government’s global warming concerns and our Kyoto target.

At Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 the Australian government agreed to a target of limiting greenhouse gas emissions to 108 per cent of 1990 emissions over the period 2008-2012.

But Canberra has never formalized this deal. It says the Kyoto Protocol does not provide a comprehensive, environmentally effective long-term response to climate change. Nor are there clear pathways for action by developing countries, and the United States has indicated it won’t sign.

Without commitments by all the major emitters, the Federal Government says the protocol will deliver only about one per cent reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions.

However, the federal Environment Minister, Senator Ian Campbell, late last year restated Australia’s commitment to meeting its target and praised the “tremendous effort by governments, industry and the Australian community” in cutting emissions.

Indeed, the Federal government report, Tracking the Kyoto Target 2004, indicates Australia is on target. But what the Minister did not acknowledge was this was mostly a consequence of restricting and redefining ‘tree clearing’.

The report says vegetation management legislation recently introduced into Queensland and NSW will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 24.4 million tonnes. By comparison, the energy sector increased emissions by 85 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent during the period 1990 to 2002.

The total reduction attributed to ‘land use change’, which includes reduced tree clearing, is 78 million tonnes for the same period. So the increase in emissions from the energy sector has been offset by clearing fewer trees – at tremendous cost to individual landholders in Queensland and New South Wales, yet the Minister made no mention of this.

He may be down playing land clearing for the following reason.

What is known as the “Australia Clause” (Article 3.7) in the Kyoto Protocol allows countries for which land use change and forestry was a net source of emissions in 1990 to include the emissions from land use change in their 1990 baseline.

It has been claimed that the Australian national greenhouse office consequently exaggerated the extent of the clearing in 1990 to give an inflated baseline value and at the same time not recorded carbon sinks resulting from forest growth and woodland thickening.

This made it easier to achieve the Kyoto target for 2008-2012.

Ecologist, Bill Burrows, writing in the international journal Global Change Biology in 2002 explained how Australia’s often quoted total net greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced by 25 per cent if we included the sinks resulting from woodland thickening in our National Greenhouse Gas Inventory.

But this would also affect our 1990 baseline and make it harder for the ‘accountants’ to suggest we are on target, and even more difficult to justify the draconian vegetation management laws.

Dr Burrows calculates the annual carbon sink in about 60 million hectares of grazed woodland in Queensland alone is about 35 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year.

So we have a Federal Government pretending to meet its obligations to an agreement it hasn’t signed up to using accounting practices that deny the phenomenon of vegetation thickening.

Fun Ride in Adelaide

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Adelaide City Council is making 40 bikes available for city workers, tourists and presumably others – free for the first two hours.

As an avid bike rider, I say what a great idea.

I have my own bike for getting about Brisbane, and have often wondered about ‘packing it’ for my visits to Melbourne.

A Conservation Economy

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Neil Hewitt posted the following comment after my post of 19th May titled Just Released on Parks and Weeds:

“My suggestion … is that public administration of protected area estate be removed of its exclusionary influences to fair trade, by requiring that conservation management is completely self-funded from the natural and cultural resources of the reserve without subsidy or budgetary allocation.

Afterall, many were viable working properties before acquisition under the pretence of conservation and if Australia is serious about conserving its natural and cultural wealth across all tenures, a conservation economy will need to be cultivated.”

There is also an argument that sustainable harvesting programs focused on native species can enhance conservation.

Bob Beale and Mike Archer argued in the Australian Financial Review (23-28th December 2004) that mallee fowl and giant bustard would not be “facing oblivion if we served them up for Christmas dinner instead of Asian chicken and North American turkey”. Crocodile populations in northern Australia have increased from less than 5,000 in the early 1970s to over 70,000 today. This increase coincided with the development of croc farms for meat and skin export as well as a ban on shooting.

What has happened to the concept of growing the trade in Kangaroo meat? A SW Queensland grazier has suggested that without the kangaroos on his property he could probably lift his stocking rate by a quarter. Is he exaggerating? He has also suggested I write something about the value of harvesting native animals.

And I received an email from NSW landholder Kathryn Varrica asking for information about “non regulatory (as in “lock ’em up)” solutions for nature conservation.

Your thoughts?

Jaded Kids & Jared Diamond

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A recent report by the Australian Institute titled “The Attitudes of Young People to the Environment” concluded that:

“Despite the increase in both scientific and political attention paid to environmental problems and a heightened emphasis on the environment in school curricula, young Australians are among the least likely to see themselves as environmentalists … They are, however, among the most likely to believe that threats to the environment are exaggerated.”

The report is based on data collected by Roy Morgan research from 56,344 respondents aged 14 and over across Australia.

Institute Director Dr Clive Hamiton has interpreted the results as a problem with our political leadership and suggested that “Howard’s children are characterised by apathy and scepticism.”

I disagree completely. I would suggest they are just a bit tired of the exaggeration and looking for something more substantive and interesting than what the mainstream media and their mostly too politically correct teachers tell them about the environment.

No doubt they will be even more jaded after the visit by Californian Professor Jared Diamond to Australia. He is speaking at the Sydney Writers festival on 29th May and in Brisbane on Thursday 2 June.

Diamond will be promoting his new book titled “Collapse”.

Save the Bustard

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Ian Beale from Mungallala, SW Queensland, emailed me this picture with the headline:
Save the poor bustard – stop tree thickening.
He also wrote,
Our area has the widespread problem of thickening of woody species, but we have an increasing number of these birds in areas where timber has been controlled. One of our older district residents on a return visit noted (in the presence of our numerous plains turkeys) that the last time he’d seen one in the area was 1935.

Bustard.JPG

The picture is from Readers Digest Complete Book of Australian Birds 1993.

Just Released on Parks & Weeds

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National Parks Reviewed:

My colleague Jim Hoggett who worked for the Commonwealth Treasury for 16 years and now runs a successful cheese producing goat farm in north-eastern NSW has just written “The Uses and Value of National Parks: Does More Mean Worse?”

The 15 pager is well worth a read. It includes the comment: “Given the sheer size of the real estate involved, we ought to look beyond the idealized views and seek to know more about the function that parks perform and how well they are managed to do this. We need to examine whether there is a mismatch between our expectations of the park system and the resources we are prepared to apply to it. And, if there is a mismatch, what the different approaches to park management are that would allow us to better match the two. These approaches could involve lowering expectations and providing more finance. They could also involve more diverse use of parks than occurs now.”

A Century of Weed Biological Control:

I have just received in the mail “Reclaiming lost provinces: A century of weed biological control in Queensland” (published by Department of Natural Resources and Mines, Queensland, and soon to be on sale for $35 from www.dpi.qld.gov.au).

Written by Craig Walton it mixes an understanding of the science of weed biocontrol with a history of the researchers and their work.

It includes a 1936 quote about the successful control of prickly pear: “The retrieving of 26,000 acres of some of Queensland’s richest territory from a wilderness of prickly pear by the aid of insect colonies when all human agencies had failed is surely one of the wonders of the age.”

I have pondered that no ecologist working today, without a knowledge of the past history, would come to the correct conclusion that the distribution of prickly pear in south west Queensland is limited/determined by the search behaviour and population dynamics of a moth.

My work towards the biocontrol of rubbervine (Cryptostegia grandiflora) is featured in the book as a ‘case study’ and includes a 1986 picture of me on a bullock cart in southwest Madagascar. And it is great to read that there are some monitoring programs in place measuring the impact of the rust on the weed(pg. 60). There has also been an economic review indicating the biocontrol program against rubbervine has returned a benefit-to-cost ratio of $80 for every dollar spent.