Labor environmental campaigners have urged the Albanese government to use the Jobs and Skills Summit to create a new forest protection employment plan, a proposal they say could build a globally significant carbon sink and create 18,600 skilled jobs in Australia. Source: Australian Financial Review
The Labor Environment Action Network is pushing for extended protection for Australia’s remaining native forests and the start of a long-term effort to regenerate forests around the country, including moves to harness carbon credit markets.
LEAN has told the government a nationally co-ordinated approach to protecting and restoring forests would create at least 18,600 new jobs in regional Australia.
Machinery operators, ecologists, botanists and field scientists would be included in the employment expansion, along with Indigenous rangers, fire and land managers, tree planters, and surveyors.
The gains would include new jobs in the timber industry. Plantations make up more than 85% of Australia’s wood production, and the federal government plans to expand growth areas.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ issues paper, released ahead of the September 1-2 summit, has asked participants for proposals on maximising opportunities in the industries of the future.
Opportunities include growing carbon and biodiversity credit markets. Private capital would be used to support forest protection and restoration, potentially helping create more secure jobs for Indigenous communities.
LEAN is a grassroots ginger group within Labor. Its members lobby the party’s leadership to adopt ambitious climate and environmental policies.
“Creating expert, local workforces with strong regional identities that deliver on national biodiversity and emission reduction goals requires an industry plan, including carefully designed policy settings and workforce planning and training,” LEAN said in its pre-summit submission.
LEAN national co-convener Felicity Wade said the plan would help the government reach its newly adopted emission reduction targets. Experts believe forests and land-use actions could deliver as much as 30% of the emissions reductions needed to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees.
“Australia has unique advantages in building a globally significant carbon and biodiversity sink, and with it a sophisticated new industry. With a mix of private,public and community players delivering on the ground,” she said.
“Protecting and restoring the bush can be a significant industry for us and offers thousands of new jobs, every one of them in the regions. It should be treated like any new industry, with government support to ensure we get the public policy, the incentives and the workforce planning right.
“We are imagining expert regional workforces with a strong sense of regional identity, that know exactly how to manage their landscapes.”
The latest State of the Environment Report, released last month by Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek, found declines in the amount and condition of native vegetation, soil and biodiversity. It said growing profits from agriculture, forestry and mining were driving up clearing rates.
Analysis by the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists shows 99.8% of Australia’s degraded terrestrial ecosystems could be restored to 30% of pre-European levels, while maintaining food production.
Paid for by carbon farming revenue, the plan would cost $41.5 billion over 30 years, including $2.1 billion in year one.
LEAN argues native forest industry jobs could be re-purposed for the ongoing management task of protecting carbon stocks and biodiversity.
“This is about rational choices in a carbon-constrained world. We now have a valuable commodity sitting in the landscape that makes upright trees much more valuable than mowing them down for woodchips or clearing them for agriculture,” Ms Wade said.
