More needs to be done to combat Australia's emissions, says report

A new report has suggested that the planting of millions of trees in Australia will not successfully offset the country's carbon dioxide emissions. The federal Coalition's tree planting policy will not help to balance out the amount of emissions the county currently produces according to the study, which calls for more to be done.

The Untangling the Confusion around Land Carbon Science and Climate Change Mitigation Policy report has been written by leading climate change scientists and has found that despite millions of new trees being planted through Australia, the move has made little to no impact. The idea behind the planting is that carbon can be stored in the trees and the surrounding soil, ultimately reducing the amount of carbon present in the atmosphere.

The report said: "There are strict, environmentally determined limits on the maximum amount of carbon that can be restored to land carbon stocks, and good reasons why this maximum will not be achieved. Avoiding emissions by protecting high-carbon ecosystems from land-use change that depletes their carbon stocks is an important part of a comprehensive approach to greenhouse gas mitigation. The mitigation value of forests lies not in their present net uptake of CO2, but in the longevity of their accumulated carbon stocks."

Whilst Australia currently has the seventh highest density of forested land in the world with 149.3 million hectares, the amount of possible carbon storage is much less than the 575 million tonnes of carbon dioxide the country produces each year. The report calls for carbon dioxide emissions to be cut alongside the continued tree planting in an effort to combat climate change.

The report says: "The most effective form of climate change mitigation is to avoid carbon emissions from all sources. This means there is no option but to cut fossil fuel emissions deeply, and not to continue these emissions under the erroneous assumption that they can be offset in the long term by the uptake of CO2 in land systems."