Tasmania’s Forest Carbon: 2025 Update revisits the 2022 research by Dr Jennifer Sanger of The Tree Projects, which found that native forest logging was the state’s highest-emitting sector, producing around two and a half times the emissions of the entire transport sector. Since that report, emissions have fallen by only about 5% (averaging 4.43 million tonnes of CO₂e a year from 2020 to 2024), largely because of reduced logging after the 2019 bushfires and the fact that much of the easily accessible forest has already been logged.

The update also looks at two newer threats to Tasmania’s native forests:

• Biomass: Five current and proposed projects, including e-fuel plants, the Railton cement plant and the Bell Bay smelter, would burn wood biomass under the label of renewable energy. Plantation residues could supply only around 35% of the demand, so the remainder is likely to come from native forests.

• Carbon offsets: Forest-based offsets have well-documented integrity problems. The report argues that any Tasmanian scheme risks crediting forests that were never going to be logged, while propping up a loss-making logging industry.

The report also covers the carbon stored in Tasmania’s old-growth forests, including the Grove of Giants carbon study, the greenhouse gas impacts and health risks of regeneration burns, and the climate and wildlife benefits of protection. It concludes that ending native forest logging would take Tasmania beyond net zero, with protected public forests potentially absorbing up to 75 million tonnes of CO₂e by 2050.

Link

• Read the full report at The Tree Projects