Payout to keep forests Bid to halt land-clearing

Sunday Mail Brisbane
Sunday 2/11/2008 Page: 25

MONEY really could grow on trees under a proposal to pay farmers not to clear forests on their land. Climate-change groups say Australia could double its targets for greenhouse gas cuts by rewarding landowners for protecting "regrowth" areas. Financial incentives for graziers and growers to compensate for lost production could promote the regeneration of up to 15 million hectares of trees an area twice the size of Tasmania environmentalists claim.

"Queensland could be one of the world's biggest carbon sinks," World Wildlife Fund Queensland program leader Nick Heath said. "We can be a real world leader here." The move would enable Australia to double the targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions set in the Garnaut Report, Mr Heath said.

And it would transform Queensland from the country's worst global-warming polluter to a climate-change champion. Latest State Government figures show land-clearing laws have done little to halt felling. In 2005-06, 375,000ha of forest equivalent to five million average-sized suburban blocks was cleared. "That's seven years after the Government said they would solve land-clearing," Mr Heath said.

The 2006 figure was 7 per cent higher than the previous year. The Department of Natural Resources says that's because it was a transition year, with farmers rushing to use old permits before they expired on December 31, 2006. Queensland Conservation Council executive director Toby Hutcheon says they don't expect the level of land-clearing to fall, because most is being done in areas exempt from the laws such as regrowth in previously cleared areas.

The tree-clearing accounts for a quarter of Queensland's greenhouse gas emissions. At a possible $20 per tonne of carbon under the Federal Government's proposed emissions trading scheme, the land-clearing will cost Queensland $800 million a year. Environment and farming groups want to see some funds from the sale of carbon emissions permits used to pay landowners for allowing trees to recover in regrowth areas. Sustainability and Climate Change Minister Andrew McNamnara said the Government was very interested in such ideas to quickly boost carbon emission cuts.