New Australian climate change report due out
Updated
The next step in Australia's response to handling climate change will be released later today. Economist Ross Garnaut will reveal targets Australia should set to lower its carbon emissions and help ease the problem of climate change. His report will be anticipated as much around the region as in Australia. It comes as Indonesia's policy of planting palm oil plantations for bio-fuel comes in for renewed scientific criticism and a claim that the environmental damage would take 800 years to redress.
Presenter: Michael Cavanagh
Speakers: Australian economist, Professor Ross Garnaut; Frances Seymour Director General of the Centre for International Forestry Research.
- Listen:
- Windows Media
CAVANAGH: Australia is the largest emitter of carbon gases in the region. As a participant in last year's Bali conference on climate change Australia was part of the setting of a target range of between 25 and forty per cent reduction in carbon emissions. Environment group Greenpeace wants it to be at the top end of forty per cent by 2020 based upon emission levels in 2000. Professor Garnaut in his initial July report outlined a carbon emissions trading scheme which had been devised by his team and the Australian Department of Treasury. He emphasised the need for an international agreement on the significant reduction in carbon emission levels if there was to be any long-term impact upon climate change.
Critics of the Australian government's push to set its own targets argue that it would put the country at a disadvantage as developing nations such as China and India operate outside the parameters making it difficult for Australian industry to compete. While different groups are calling for targets of varying levels to be set amidst various scenario's of what could occur if climate change is not addressed Professor Garnaut says in his endeavours to put together a coherent response there is one part of the community who have not been rushing forward to assist...
GARNAUT: A lot of reluctance of people in the scientific community to chance their hand at estimates of parameters which were really rather fundamental to building up an overall view of climate change impacts in Australia. Its not part of the culture of our scientific community to answer questions of a precise kind.
CAVANAGH: While Professor Garnaut may have problems with the scientific community willing to put forward definite figures, a fellow speaker at the International Conference on Climate Change and Food Security Issues staged in Canberra was clear about some of the ramifications of land clearing for greater production of bio fuels.
Frances Seymour is the Director General of the Centre for International Forestry Research based in Indonesia...
SEYMOUR: If you clear a peat swamp in Indonesia and plant oil palm as a way to replace fossil fuel with bio diesel it would take 840 years of continuous cultivation to repay the carbon debt created by that initial land clearance. So clearly planting oil palm on peat swamp is not a carbon mitigation strategy.
CAVANAGH: Ms Seymour observed that one of the great contributors to forest degradation in emerging economies is infrastructure development -- with the building of such things as roads greatly contributing to deforestation the roads were needed for primary producers to get to markets as they moved from subsistence farming to commercial agriculture.
However she says often they have led to a loss of forests without real financial benefits..
SEYMOUR: There are a lot of indirect subsidies that are afforded to say the timber industry the pulp and paper industry the oil palm industry that end up distorting essentially land values and markets such that when forests are cleared when they need not be and one of the hopes that we have with this new attention to the role of forests as a climate mitigation strategy and the potential for carbon markets or other forms of market finance to be realised that they will help rectify the balance and precipitate the removal of some of these perverse subsidies which have caused more loss of forests than what otherwise may have been the case.
