The Federal Government is taking public submissions into whether burning native forest biomass for energy should be included in the Renewable Energy Target. Submissions are open till Friday 21 October. We all know burning native forests to produce energy is NOT sustainable, or renewable. Logging and burning forests will undermine the potential for ongoing carbon storage and sequestration, whilst also contributing to large, immediate emissions from logging and burning native forests.
This is our chance to prevent further destruction of native forests by stopping the burning of biomass in Australia.
Click here to download our public submission signed on behalf of our 30+ member groups
Submissions can be made to [email protected] - make sure let them know whether you'd like your submission to be public or anonymous.
Some of the key points you might like to touch on:
- Native forest logging in Australia is not ecologically sustainable, as evidenced by terrible decline of forests and the animals that depend on them to survive. The introduction of an industrial scale forest biomass trade would further intensify the devastating impacts of logging;
- Logging destroys critical forest carbon stores which help us tackle climate change - burning native forests for energy is terrible for the climate;
- Native forests are NOT a renewable resource. A report released last year by Victorian environment groups show many areas of forest fail to regenerate after logging;
- Biomass burning emits more carbon than coal, increasing rather than decreasing greenhouse gas emissions;
- Incentivising the burning native forest timber for energy risks undermining the integrity of the national RET, a policy that will play a key role in rolling out wind and solar power to act on the climate crisis.
Call on the federal government to:
- Remove the eligibility for native forest wood under the Renewable Energy Target (RET)
- Break the devastating Regional Forest Agreements (RFAs) which give native forest logging special exemption from national threatened species laws (EPBC Act)
Don't have time to put in your own submission? It only takes a minute to sign onto the Friends of the Earth one here!