As just one product of the highly regulated sustainable active management of designated parts of Australia’s Native Forests, wood chips represent part of the solution to climate change and carbon management in Australia according to Timber Communities of Australia CEO, Jim Adams.

It should be remembered that any areas of native forest within Australia that are still available for active productive management are areas not considered to have high conservation value and set aside for timber production through the extensive and exhaustive Regional Forests Agreement processes of the 1980s. “This includes the areas scheduled for management in the Bermagui State Forest, that is why it’s called a State Forest not a National Park,” Adams said.
At the time of the RFA all aspects of management including water and biodiversity conservation were considered and significant areas were set aside in reserves to protect these values such that one way or another more that 88% of the native forests on the South Coast of NSW are within these reserves. With respect to carbon and the management of climate change in 2007, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported; “In the long term, a sustainable forest management strategy aimed at maintaining or increasing forest carbon stocks, while producing an annual sustained yield of timber, fibre or energy from the forest, will generate the largest sustained mitigation benefit.” Clearly this finding of more than 1000 of the world’s top scientist and experts in the field of climate change does not suit the purposes of the South Coast greens and they prefer to ignore it and seek to invent their own work to support their misguided objectives, Adams speculated. “TCA supports calls for a more sophisticated discussion on these issues as it will bring out the truth of the Intergovernmental Panels findings and debunk the findings of the partially green funded and self-serving work currently being cited by the Greens,” Adams concluded.