The WA Greens MPs strongly oppose the recently approved Improved Native Forest Management (INFM) method, which creates carbon offsets from protected forests.
Over the past few days and weeks, we have been urging our federal colleagues to support the disallowance motion.
We are disappointed that the majority of the federal party room has decided not to support the motion, allowing the INFM method to remain in place.
We acknowledge and thank our Greens WA Senator, Jordon Steele-John, for voting according to his conscience alongside Senators Nick McKim and Vanessa Bleyer in support of the disallowance.
The INFM method allows State Governments to generate carbon credits by voluntarily ceasing planned logging of public native forests. Those credits can then be purchased by industrial polluters to offset their own pollution.
The Greens (WA) position is grounded in the party’s climate change policy, which commits to prohibit the use of carbon offsets that extend greenhouse gas emissions.
The Greens (WA) Forests and Woodlands Spokesperson Jess Beckerling MLC says that offsets do not reduce carbon pollution, and that forests must be protected for their intrinsic values rather than managed as carbon stores.
“The Greens (WA) urged our Federal colleagues to support the disallowance motion, to stop native forests being turned into carbon credits for polluters.
“This is a complex matter and we appreciate that good people can come to different conclusions. Our position is based on the reality that offsets exacerbate climate change, and that managing forests as carbon stores would have multiple perverse outcomes.
“The Greens (WA) have a very clear policy to prohibit the use of offsets that extend GHG emissions. The INFM method could generate up to 1.5 million new carbon credits: enough to fully offset all of Woodside’s emissions reported against the safeguard mechanism.”
“Offsets do not work to bring down carbon pollution. In fact, they have been shown over and again to prolong the use of fossil fuels. We cannot support a system that enables carbon polluters to keep polluting.
“Forest protection should not become a licence for someone else to keep burning fossil fuels.
Even if carbon credits are quarantined from coal and gas companies, they can still be sold to major polluters like Alcoa in WA or Tamago Aluminium in NSW which gets its feedstock from landclearing and strip mining in Queensland and the NT.
“This method would end logging in one state while enabling land clearing in another – and in Western Australia, where we are still fighting the destruction of the Northern Jarrah Forests for bauxite, we know precisely what that trade looks like.
“Forests must be protected for their holistic, biodiversity, cultural and intrinsic values. It sets a dangerous trajectory for forests to be managed for carbon as a priority. It is frightening to imagine how prescribed burning for example could be increased in a misguided effort to prevent wildfire regardless of impacts on wildlife and biodiversity.
“Our federal colleagues had a difficult decision to make. We retain our deep respect for all our colleagues who have engaged in a robust discussion and understand that sometimes good people come to different points of view.
“I want to thank the environment groups, the scientists and the community members who have engaged in this issue. Every one of them came to it wanting the same thing, which is forests protected.
“That shared purpose has not gone anywhere. We will keep making the case against offsets, and we will keep working alongside our colleagues and the movement to protect forests for what they are, not for what they can be traded for.”
