The carbon credit methodology that will determine whether the Great Koala National Park is created is exposed to the same additionality and leakage failures that Australian National University professor Andrew Macintosh has used to attack the integrity of other carbon schemes. That is according to Forest & Wood Communities Australia chair Steve Dobbyns, who said it was deeply ironic to watch Macintosh question other Australian Carbon Credit Unit (ACCU) schemes whilst the Improved Native Forest Management (INFM) method tied to the park faced serious integrity questions of its own.
Dobbyns, who leads the national body representing forestry businesses and timber communities, said the scrutiny now surrounding the INFM proposal pointed to growing concern that the methodology could fail some of the most fundamental tests Australia’s carbon framework demands. The two biggest problems were additionality and leakage, he said, and both went to the heart of the scheme’s credibility.
The additionality concern was particularly acute because the NSW Government had already made a political decision to establish the Great Koala National Park, Dobbyns said, leaving open the question of what the ACCU scheme would genuinely be paying for. The whole premise of additionality is that credits should only be issued for activities that would not otherwise occur, he said, and a park the Government had already committed to creating risked rewarding a pre-existing policy decision rather than new abatement.
Dobbyns said even Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee chair Karen Hussey had acknowledged during Senate Estimates that additionality and leakage were key integrity risks requiring careful scrutiny. The leakage problem was even more glaring, he said, because removing native forestry from NSW did nothing to remove Australia’s need for timber.
“Stopping native forestry in NSW does not stop Australians needing timber,” Dobbyns said.
Australia would still need hardwood for construction, pallets, flooring, poles, fencing and packaging, Dobbyns said, and that demand would not disappear simply because a forest changed tenure. Timber production would instead shift onto neighbouring private forests, into other states or increasingly into imported timber from countries with weaker environmental standards.
That displacement was the definition of carbon leakage, Dobbyns said, because emissions and environmental impacts moved with the harvesting rather than being avoided. The atmosphere did not care whether emissions occurred in NSW, Queensland, Papua New Guinea, South America or Southeast Asia, he said, and a project that exported timber production elsewhere was not delivering genuine global abatement.
The Government’s own science also undermined claims the park was necessary to save koalas, Dobbyns said, pointing to research by NSW DPI Forest Science that found no statistically significant decline in koala density following regulated selective harvesting in north-east NSW state forests. That work, reviewed through the NSW Natural Resources Commission, sat alongside the NSW Baseline Koala Survey, which confirmed koalas remained widespread across production forests on the Mid North Coast.
More than half of the 176,000 hectares of state forest proposed for the park was already managed primarily for conservation through existing reserve systems and environmental protections, Dobbyns said, describing the proposal as a publicly funded carbon-credit land transfer rather than evidence-based conservation. His criticism follows concerns already raised across industry, the Senate and the scientific community over the INFM method and the multi-million-dollar funding gap hanging over the park.
Dobbyns said the same scrutiny Macintosh had demanded of other ACCU projects must now apply to the INFM method, with the future of more than 176,000 hectares of NSW state forest resting on whether it survives that test.
