cooladelaide.org

Forests are incredible. Just imagine the design brief for a tree - create something that makes oxygen, absorbs carbon, fixes nitrogen, distils water, stores solar energy as fuel, makes complex sugars and food, creates micro climates, changes colours with the season and self replicates. Brilliant - who could have designed that? Now let’s chop them down and turn them into dunny paper. Genius!

MYTH

This is the short list: 20 years after they've logged a forest, it's all back to normal again; forests cause bushfires; wood-chips are made from the waste on the forest floor that saw-millers can't use; forests are bad for global warming because they absorb the sun’s energy; if we stopped logging native forests there'd be terrible job losses; fast-growing young forests absorb more carbon and are better for the climate that slow-growing old forests; Australia's native forests are managed on a sustainable basis; governments care more about forests than money.

FACT

Trees are the lungs of the Earth. They absorb carbon dioxide (the stuff that we are producing in excess of what the planet can absorb) and produce oxygen (the good stuff that we need to breathe). Trees provide habitat, food and shelter for millions of species. They also prevent erosion and moderate ground temperatures.

The bad news for South Australia is that since European settlement we’ve been very busy clearing forests. Before European settlement, forests and woodlands covered an estimated 55% of the state. While many areas of the state have been left relativity ‘untouched’, those regions suitable for agriculture have really copped it, with nearly 80% of this land having been cleared or altered. In Adelaide, this figure rises to 97.3%. You’d have to look pretty hard to find a bit of bush in our burbs…

When our old growth forests are logged they will take up to 1000 years to return to their original state. Hollows in gum trees take more than 100 years to form. These hollows provide nesting opportunities for native birds and mammals. The current practice of total removal of all trees in old growth forests simply moves more species closer to extinction.

Old growth forests also provide the most valuable carbon sinks in Australia. They can store up to 640 tonnes of carbon for every acre. This has meant that 168 million tonnes of greenhouse emissions have been caused from deforestation since 1989. This is the equivalent to 16-times the current annual emissions from all of Australia's passenger vehicles.

Here in South Australia we don’t log too many of our native forests, unlike other states. Why? Well, we actually don’t have many left and the few that we do have left are primarily used for biodiversity conservation. While that is good news, we need to get busy replacing the forests we have cleared and lost. We need more forests to create healthier habitats for our wildlife and a healthier environment for us.

Latest information