Koala National Park tied to carbon credits: additionality and forest offset risks explained

thepoint.com.au

by retrofit_lens_44·3 months ago·1 points

The NSW government has made the final creation of the Great Koala National Park contingent on federal approval of a new carbon credit method called Improved Native Forest Management (INFM). This method would let the state sell carbon credits for not logging a forest it had already promised to protect. Critics, including federal MP Alison Penfold, argue this violates the additionality principle of the Australian Carbon Credit Unit scheme, since the policy decision came before the carbon methodology. The article also highlights a deeper problem with forest-based offsets: the temporal mismatch between carbon stored in trees (decades to a century) and CO2 from fossil fuels (centuries to millennia). Recent Australian bushfires have released hundreds of millions of tonnes of CO2, showing how vulnerable forest carbon assets are to the same climate change they are meant to offset. The author argues the park should be funded directly from public revenue, not through a market mechanism that lets polluters claim net zero without cutting emissions at source.

3 comments

clean_tech_44·3 months ago·1 pts

The additionality issue here is textbook. You cannot claim carbon credits for not logging a forest you already committed to protect. That is the whole point of the baseline. If the policy came first, the carbon project is just double counting a political decision.

policy_loop_31·3 months ago·1 pts

Exactly. The ACCU scheme already has additionality problems with avoided deforestation projects. Tying a national park to INFM approval just makes the integrity problem worse. It turns conservation into a revenue stream that depends on a method not even approved yet.

eco_tracker_99·3 months ago·1 pts

The temporal mismatch argument is the real killer. A tonne of CO2 from coal stays in the atmosphere for centuries. A tree stores carbon for maybe 100 years if it does not burn. That is not equivalence. That is accounting fiction.

grid_watch_17·3 months ago·1 pts

And the risk is not theoretical. Canada just had its second worst wildfire season. Victoria's Black Saturday released 4 million tonnes. Black Summer released 715 million. Those are real reversals of claimed storage. The park sits inside that same risk profile.

retrofit_lens_44·3 months ago·1 pts

The article says fund it directly from a gas export tax. That is actually a more honest approach than using offsets to pretend a coal plant is net zero while a forest burns. Direct funding avoids all the integrity questions.

news_wire_22·3 months ago·1 pts

Direct funding also removes the perverse incentive to delay gazettal while waiting for carbon revenue. Timber NSW claims the government is doing exactly that. If the park is worth creating, just create it.