Australia Fudging to Meet Kyoto Targets

SimonC has just posted a comment at The Cost of Kyoto stating:

I think the anti-Kyoto people are the ones who are scare mongering with their cries of ‘we’ll all be ruined’. …According to Howard we’ll meet our Kyoto targets (despite not ratifying it). So why hasn’t Australia fallen into economic free fall?

I understood that the reason Australia is going to meet its Kyoto targets (even though it hasn’t signed up to Kyoto) is because the Australian government has done a fiddle with the tree clearing figures particularly in Queensland.

Indeed, the Federal government report, Tracking the Kyoto Target 2004, published late last year indicated Australia was on target. But what the Minister did not acknowledge was this was mostly a consequence of restricting and redefining ‘tree clearing’.

The report says vegetation management legislation recently introduced into Queensland and NSW will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 24.4 million tonnes. By comparison, the energy sector increased emissions by 85 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent during the period 1990 to 2002.

The total reduction attributed to ‘land use change’, which includes reduced tree clearing, is 78 million tonnes for the same period. So the increase in emissions from the energy sector has been offset by clearing fewer trees – at tremendous cost to individual landholders in Queensland and New South Wales, yet the Minister made no mention of this.

This is how it works:

What is known as the “Australia Clause” (Article 3.7) in the Kyoto Protocol allows countries for which land use change and forestry was a net source of emissions in 1990 to include the emissions from land use change in their 1990 baseline.

It has been claimed that the Australian national greenhouse office consequently exaggerated the extent of the clearing in 1990 to give an inflated baseline value and at the same time not recorded carbon sinks resulting from forest growth and woodland thickening.

This made it easier to achieve the Kyoto target for 2008-2012.

Ecologist, Bill Burrows, writing in the journal Global Change Biology in 2002 explained how Australia’s often quoted total net greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced by 25 per cent if we included the sinks resulting from woodland thickening in our National Greenhouse Gas Inventory.

But this would also affect our 1990 baseline and make it harder for the ‘accountants’ to suggest we are on target, and even more difficult to justify the vegetation management laws.

Burrows calculates the annual carbon sink in about 60 million hectares of grazed woodland in Queensland alone is about 35 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year.

So we have a Federal Government pretending to meet its obligations to an agreement it hasn’t signed up to using accounting practices that deny the phenomenon of vegetation thickening.

………….
Some months ago Bill Burrows sent me a copy of a speech he gave earlier this year, Download file. It is a detailed critic of the recent politics of vegetation thickening in Queensland from the persepective of a retired government scientist.