Nationals senator Matt Canavan has taken the Federal Agriculture Department to task over a lack of detail on how much land will be taken out of production to meet Australia’s net-zero by 2050 target.
In a tense Senate Estimates hearing this week, Canavan expressed his frustration at the agriculture department’s lack of curiosity about how the target will impact its industry, with no answers on how much land will be taken out of agricultural production for both reforestation and renewable energy projects.
The department released its Ag and Land Sector Plan last month, which outlines what the country’s net zero target will mean for the agricultural industry.
Beef Central staffer Eric Barker reported carbon sequestration on agricultural land was set to be the main contributor to the ‘net’ part of the target, with ‘reforestation’ taking up an overwhelming majority of that sequestration.
Reforestation is defined as converting land that was once forest, back to being a forest – with that mostly expected to happen on the more intensively farmed parts of southern Australia.
With department bosses fronting a Senate Estimates hearing this week, Senator Canavan expressed his frustration that the agricultural department could not detail how much land would be “reforested”.
“It seems to me that you are just trying to hide the detail from Australian farmers,” Canavan told acting secretary Justine Saunders who said that was not the case.
“You are happy to market the benefits, or the perceived benefits of reforestation, in terms of a carbon sink. But you are not willing to tell the Australian agricultural sector what the cost of getting that is, which is a reduced amount of agricultural land.
“This is why people are cynical about these targets because you are not being up front with them about it.”
Referring to modelling from the Federal Treasury department about how much sequestration was needed from reforestation and how much carbon can be sequestered per hectare, Canavan said it was likely to take up about 5 million ha of land.
Responding, Matt Lowe, department deputy secretary said: “I am not going to object to the senator’s arithmetic but there is considerable uncertainty about the amount of carbon sequestration that can be delivered.”
Lowe said the Treasury modelling) was a literature review and there was more work to be done on carbon sequestration’s potential.”
Canavan labelled the Treasury modelling some of the worst economic modelling he had ever seen. He cited two other reports that put figures on the amount of land needed for reforestation. One of them was the Net Zero Australia report put together by the University of Melbourne, University of Queensland and Princeton University.
“They have a map of Australia, and on the top it says, ‘our modelling cites 5.1m ha of new trees on crop land and pastureland’. Then they understate it by saying ‘this will be very difficult’,” Canavan observed.
Canavan then went on to cite some CSIRO modelling, which said the reforestation needed to happen in areas of land that has already been cleared.
“We are talking about 5 million ha that covers the Murray Darling Basin, the food bowl of the Lockyer Valley, the Riverland and the wheat producing areas of Western Australia.”
Canavan added: “It just beggars belief to me that we would be seeking to destroy our food security in such a way and there is almost no curiosity from the agriculture department about this.”
Both Lowe and ABARES executive director Jared Greenville said the ag department was looking at sequestration options that were complimentary to agriculture.
“We certainly acknowledge that reforestation or revegetation is an efficient form of carbon removal,” Lowe said. “But we also acknowledge that there are other forms of carbon removal that are available, soil carbon an example.”
Lowe said there were also opportunities that exist for reforestation to occur in sympathy with farming.”
The Queensland timber industry has raised alarm at the federal government’s new carbon method, the Improved Native Forest Management in Multiple-use Public Forests.
“This method raised far more questions than it answers,” according to Timber Queensland’s CEO Mick Stephens, who told Wood Central earlier this year the method was “at odds” with principles identified in the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 4th Assessment Report, which states that: “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.”
Stephens said the proposed method suggested that by simply ceasing sustainable timber harvesting in public multiple-use forests, you can generate additional long-term abatement compared to the counterfactual of continued harvesting and storage of carbon in regrowing forests and harvested wood products.
“However, this is in direct contrast to many life cycle analyses of managed forests with sustainable timber harvesting, which show long-term sustained carbon benefits when the substitution of steel and concrete in the built environment is included along with carbon stored in forests and harvested wood products.”
Stephens added: “The method fails on multiple accounts to meet the very principles Minister Bowen set out following the recent Chubb review into the land-based carbon sequestration market.”
Timber Queensland has called on the federal government to withdraw this method immediately and to undertake a review into how the approval process seemingly ignored the counterfactual science. Stephens added: “The irony is there is a definitive need for a carbon method that deliberately encourages forest thinning and sustainable timber harvesting to improve tree growth and productivity, forest health and long-term carbon outcomes in many public and private native forests.”
