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By Linh Do, Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera
Thursday, Jun 12, 2014
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Tasmania's forests are home to a unique ecosystem, writes Do [EPA] |
Imagine the uproar if the Grand Canyon was dug up for mining. The
protests if the bells of Notre Dame were melted down for car parts.
There
are not many places in the world precious enough for World Heritage
listing, so many countries covet this lucrative international
recognition. These natural and cultural places are so significant, so
exceptional that to deprive the world and future generations of them
would be a tragedy.
Tasmania's old-growth forests have been
included on the World Heritage list as a natural wonder since 1982 and
it's not hard to see why. With some of the oldest trees in the world,
some up to 3,000 years old, the forests span more than one million
hectares of land, making up one of the last, vast expanses of temperate
rainforest in the world. The Tasmanian forests aren't just about the
trees, but also the biodiversity they protect and carbon sequestration
value they represent.
Yet the Australian government couldn't seem to care less.
At
the upcoming World Heritage Committee meeting in Doha, Qatar, the
Australian government will put forward an unprecedented proposal to
delist the Tasmanian forests.
It is Australian Prime Minister
Tony Abbott who has been leading the crusade against Australia's ancient
forests. Abbott has been instructing his diplomats to lobby committee
members, a rarity within the UNESCO world, to delist the forests so that
the trees can be logged and shipped to willing buyers.
A million
hectares is hard to picture, and the Abbott government may only be
pushing for five per cent of the area to be delisted but, that still
amounts to 74,000 hectares, an area the size of Bahrain. And what's to
say that five percent won't become 15, or 50 in the future?
Going against public opinion
Abbott's
delisting campaign is beyond confounding. His actions completely ignore
the overwhelming opposition to the move within Australian society; a
recent poll showed that 91 percent of Australians believe that Tasmanian
forests should not be delisted. His government has also completely
excluded Tasmania's indigenous population from the decision-making
process.
Abbott's economic
motivation to launch the delisting campaign is also under question.
Nature attractions, such as the Tasmanian forests, attract hundreds of
thousands of tourists and the World Heritage status makes them that much
more attractive. Tourism is an important sector for Australia's economy
which accounts for 2.8 percent of Australia's GDP.
Tourism is
even more important for Tasmania's economy. More than one million
tourists visited Tasmania in 2013 (a 14 percent increase since 2012),
bringing the local economy some $1.4bn).
Encouraging the growth
of the tourism industry is one way to address the island's 7.6 percent
unemployment rate. Removing the forests from the World Heritage List and
boosting logging would certainly not make Tasmania more attractive to
tourists.
At the same time, the forestry industry has not been
supportive of Abbott's delisting attempt either; their concern is that
there may not be any buyers for the product of controversial logging.
Industry groups have been urging him to honour the Tasmanian Forests
Agreement, otherwise known as the peace deal between loggers and
environmentalists.
Hidden value
Almost one-third of
Tasmania is protected in forest and marine reserves, leading Abbott to
argue that "too much forest is locked up". Abbott is mistaken in
thinking that Australia has "quite enough national parks", given that we
lag behind the rest of the world with our conservation efforts.
The
value of Tasmania's forests resides not in timber, but in their
ecosystem. They provide habitat for the already endangered Tasmanian
devil and the rare eucalyptus regnans, the tallest flowering plant in
the world.
In addition, if managed properly, forest conservation
can be the most cost-effective way of abating carbon and dealing with
climate change. According to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change's findings, forests and land use account for 24 percent
of global emissions and addressing this is crucial if we want to limit
the planet's warming to within 1.5C. The moment we allow for the
protected Tasmanian forests to be logged, its potential for emissions
reductions will be lost.
Only two other UNESCO sites have been
delisted before. Germany's Dresden Elbe Valley was delisted after a
four-lane bridge was built through the city. In Oman, a sanctuary for
the Arabian oryx antelope was removed from the list, after the
government found oil in its grounds. After decreasing the size of the
reserve by 90 percent, most of the animals died. Will Tasmania's forests
have the same fate?
The Australian government has already showed
that preserving the environment is not on its priority list. It
recently allowed three million cubic metres of dredging spoil to be
dumped near the Great Barrier Reef in order to make way for large ships.
If the governments get their way, miners will be able to additionally
export millions of tonnes of coal through the Great Barrier Reef each
year, threatening ecosystems in the short term with spills, and in the
long term with ocean acidification.
UNESCO condemned the dumping
and the World Heritage Committee has considered putting the Great
Barrier Reef on the endangered list, meaning it would join the degraded
forests of Congo and Colombia, cities in Syria and Iraq devastated by
war, and the ancient sites at Timbuktu in Mali, destroyed by extremist
groups.
It is clear that Abbott's government does not take
seriously Australia's environmental issues, even worse, it does not have
any qualms about pursuing policies that can further the destruction of
already endangered areas. It is imperative to resist its
anti-environment policies and to fight for keeping Tasmania's forests on
the World Heritage List.
Linh Do is the community
coordinator at the Australian Conservation Foundation, editor at The
Verb and an experienced climate change campaigner. She is based in
Melbourne, Australia.
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