Land use policy may end up being much more important than renewables

Growing trees absorb more carbon than we can poke a stick at!

Given all the remedies for stalling climate change, my home state of Tasmania has illustrated, almost by accident, the huge role that changes in land use can play.

Tasmania has the luck of having hydro-electric resources — lofty mountains and rainfall. But being a remote economy it has also relied heavily on exploiting and exporting its natural commodities, especially via its dominant native forest logging industry.

A massive turnaround in the state’s carbon emissions occurred around 2012- 2015, whereupon the state Minister for Climate Change, Matt Groom, announced that the state had quite suddenly and unexpectedly achieved its 2050 emissions abatement target several decades ahead of time. This remarkable success came about despite the state government having a very weak mitigation strategy, having almost no deliberate policies in place to reduce emissions.

How did this magical, phenomenal result come about then? It was all to do with a downturn in log exports. Thanks partly to a downturn in newspaper production, the global market for woodchips had shrunk and other nations, that had developed an efficient plantation based logging industry, were able to out compete Tasmania on price for export wood chips. The result was that thousands of hectares (or acres) of Tasmanian native forest that would have been logged were left growing.

At first many of us suspected the governments carbon abatement figures. But a back-of-the-envelope calculation easily demonstrates the relative impact of allowing carbon to grow across thousands of hectares of land. A simple way to envisage this is to think of those thousands of hectares as a solar surface area, each square metre soaking up the suns rays. No infrastructure needed to tap into that sunlight. Just trees growing.

Now consider an alternative way of tapping into that sunlight… cover that same immense acreage with solar panels. What would be the cost — in terms of money and physical resources — to cover an equivalent area of land with millions of solar panels, keeping in mind also that trees are more efficient than solar panels in trapping energy? The investment alone, to undertake such an immense program, would have been beyond the financial capabilities of the state.

This small, real life episode smacked home to me in stark relief the vital need to focus on factors other than the popular romance with new technology if we have any hope of comprehensively dealing with the global climate challenge.

To put this in even balder perspective, manufacturing and transporting all those solar panels would have required a significant expenditure in fossil fuels, mining the various resources, manufacturing the photovoltaic cells and components, transporting all of those resources across nations to where they are needed and then to install the end product and maintain them, and ultimately replace them. A net postive energy return can be theoretically calculated, but the short term input of energy and resources are an added carbon burden when thrown against the looming carbon wall.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that the whole world can simplistically give up on forest products and stop logging altogether. But there is vast scope to re-forest degraded land and enact policies that minimise the use of wood and paper products and to restore carbon in soils, and in so doing minimising the need to log the worlds forests at the rapacious scale that is currently happening.

In more general terms, there are alwasy two ways of looking at the carbon equation. Demand-side solutions (what do we need resources for?) wins hands down every time compared with a fixation on supply-side solutions (how do we feed insatiable demand?). Yet despite this glaring evidence, nearly all of the conversation and maculine excitement in the climate debate arena is about supply-side remedies. Making new things. Making new factories to churn out all those new things. Futilely trying to save the world without altering our imbedded fixation on growth and progress, rather than applying the brakes and thinking seriously through both sides of that equation.

We need to transmogrify our cultural attitudes in these respects before we have any hope of climbing out of the human predicament.