Nathan Paine
Bipartisan support in Federal Parliament to the ambitious plan to plant an additional one billion trees to secure Australia’s future fibre ought to be commended but it’s time to rethink how we move this plan from policy to plantation.
Despite the Federal Government’s $87 million investment in a tree establishment fund, the reality is that it is the State Government’s responsibility to provide the framework to unlock land for new plantation estate.
This is why the critical pathway forward is for Federal Forestry Minister, Murray Watt, to secure a commitment from the states and territories on a national plan to unlock plantation growth.
The simple, unescapable truth is that global fibre demand is escalating and forecast to quadruple by 2050, meaning, and if we want to meet our future fibre needs at the same time as working to stop global deforestation, we need to get more trees in the ground and we need to do it now.
By planting more plantation estate, we secure our future sovereign capability to meet our fibre requirements without relying on imports, such as the framing timber used to build houses or pallets that transport our food from farmers to supermarket shelves, or even the paper that we write on.
It’s important to highlight that not only does our forest industries provide us much needed essentials in everyday life, but every tree that we plant is a step closer to a greener climate by sequestering carbon from the atmosphere.
As the Chubb Review eloquently explained, “After experimentation and speculation for decades, the only pathway known to science that has the immediate capacity to remove GHG (CO2) from the atmosphere at scale is photosynthesis: the mechanism by which plants and some other organisms use light, CO2 and water to create energy (stored as sugars) to fuel cellular activity and growth.”
That statement is a clear and unambiguous boost for the benefit of planting production trees.
More trees means more carbon sequestered, more jobs created in domestic processing and more houses that can be built and it is time to get those one billion trees into the ground.
Nathan Paine is CEO of South Australian Forest Products Association
