Page 3942 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 15 Sept 2009
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The reality is that the action that we take to achieve that 40 per cent target will be made up of many policy measures. Some will deliver cheaper, faster abatement than others; some will come with added benefits, such as job creation or improved energy security. As we choose these policy measures, we will need to be mindful of the cost and benefit of each of them. It is on this point that the Greens flag caution about overstating the role of our urban and non-urban forests in reducing our greenhouse footprint.
The report that the minister tabled stated that the total average carbon sequestration capacity of the urban and non-urban estates was 29,400 tonnes per year. The recent greenhouse gas inventory for 2006 that was released by the minister puts the ACT’s annual carbon emissions at a shade over four million tonnes. So the entire ACT estate will offset annually around 0.73 per cent of our total emissions. While we acknowledge that every bit counts in our response to climate change, that is not a significant amount, and it is certainly not significant in the backdrop of a 2020 target of 40 per cent emission reductions. Certainly, it is not significant when it costs 60 per cent of our climate budget.
The arboretum alone has been funded to the tune of $16 million from the $100 million climate budget, and there are, of course, other amounts being appropriated for the arboretum. This report finds that the arboretum will only become carbon positive—that is, it will start to store carbon—by 2015, and it will only sequester on average 350 tonnes of CO2 each year. Just to be clear, that 350 tonnes is around 0.008 per cent of our annual emissions. That is not exactly a speedy response to climate change either, I might note—63,000 tonnes over 200 years. At the switch to green conference the other day, I had the good fortune to listen to Dr Will Steffen, and if you suggested to him that we were putting in place a climate response that would deliver in 200 years, I cannot imagine what he might say in response, but I do not think it would be complimentary.
But back to the report: it also usefully clarifies the potential for offsets into the future in the ACT. I think it is a very valuable contribution in that sense. The climate change inquiry which reported this morning did hear some interesting evidence from Actew about their offsets policy for carbon emissions, developed in response to their concern to make the Cotter Dam expansion carbon neutral.
The take-home message from this report is that our native forest areas do not have a large capacity to sequester further carbon, but that our urban forests do, primarily because of the age of the trees concerned. The development of an offsets policy which ensures that offsets should be additional may limit the scope for our urban forest to qualify. Actew have certainly outlined their concern to ensure that projects that were funded through offsets were not programs that would have gone ahead anyway, and I think that that is a very good policy position that they have taken and it sets a standard for the ACT.
The other policy requirement is that offsets are permanent. For this reason, Actew has identified that international projects do not currently meet their criteria and that they will only support national projects. For the ACT, permanence is possibly less an issue of governance and more an issue of bushfire risk. In 2003, we lost nearly 14 times
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