Protecting Primary Forests with Brendan Mackey

Good evening, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here at the Woods Hole Research Centre. Many thanks to Melissa for organising this and it's great to see such a good turnout. I'm going to talk for about 20 minutes and then my three colleagues will come and give brief presentations for about five minutes each. And then we'll all sit here and we're very happy to take any questions you have of us. What I'm going to do is explain to you what we mean by this term primary forests. Say something about their values, why are they valuable to us and the benefits they provide, and say something about the threats to their ecosystem integrity. And then I'll stop because my three colleagues are going to give you some of the solutions that are needed to protect them, including examples of what's working in the world today and something about what we need to be doing.

Well.

This might be obvious, but it's not as obvious as what you might think. There are many kinds of forests. We use the word forest to actually cover a huge range of natural phenomena. Obviously what they have in common is that they have trees. But as everyone here, I'm sure, is fully aware, there are forests and there are forests. So when we say primary forests, we're really talking about natural forests, forests that have come about as a result of natural processes to do with ecology, ecological processes and processes of biological evolution and the interaction between living organisms and the physical environment. And that's a scene of a primary forest in the Brazilian Amazon, where Barb is working. And the image on the right, you can see there's a person. There is a mountain ash forest in the central highlands of the state of Victoria, Australia, which has a lot of ecological similarities with the tall, wet forests of the Pacific coast of USA and Canada. So these forests, humans in all of these forests, actually humans have been living in them since there have been humans. But the forests, they all have an ancient origin and of course predate humans. So they are not in any respect reliant upon or dependent upon humans for their. For their generation or regeneration. And we can compare that to what I can just put simply as degraded forests. These are forests that have been heavily utilized and exploited by humans to extract stuff from them, mainly the wood, but often they're cleared to get into what's underneath them in the way of mineral exploration, etc. So about a third of the world's forests that currently exist are degraded by these kind of intensive industrial scale commercial activities. And then we also have what some people call them secondary forests to distinguish them from Primary forests, but the forests that are regrowing from having been either completely, or put it this way, severely degraded, if not completely deforested a long time ago. And of course we're looking at that category of forest here out through this window. And this whole section of northeast United States, as I'm sure you all know this history far better than I did, was cleared for agriculture and cattle and sheep a long time ago for various, various reasons that farmland was abandoned and the forest has regrown largely from the remaining seed stock that was present. And this was a very interesting paper that was done by some American colleges back in 2013 where they were able to study at a large number of sites across these states what the, they were able to reconstruct what the, what the taxonomic composition of the forest was, what, what species of forest trees were there before they were cleared and what's grown back. And you can see there's a, it's color coded and you can see there's a difference in the colors. On the right hand side it's kind of dark, dark reds and on the, on the right hand side it's kind of light pinks and light reds. Well, what's changed? You've still got a forest and still technically the same kind of forest. Except what's different? Well, the forest as it was was dominated by late successional taxa such as beech and hemlock, and now it's all dominated by kind of early, more pioneer species such as red maple. So if you like, it's kind of a teenage forest. It's yet to grow to maturity, it's not yet a middle aged forest, let alone a kind of wise and mature one like the speakers before you today, so to speak. So again, a lot of the world's forests that we see are kind of baby forests. And actually a lot of the human land use, intensive land use and commercial land use actually keeps them young, actually prevent them from growing into some kind of ecological maturity. And then of course there are what are referred to as plantations or planted forests. These are forests which are entirely the design and at the instigation of, and are only maintained by humans. They require huge amounts of inputs from humans of all kinds, from the seeds or the seedlings through to fertilizers and pesticides and insecticides. And they're grown generally in monocultures. There's one species, and it's grown specifically to produce acorn commodity or a raw material that feeds into some kind of industrial process. So on the left we've got palm, palm oil and on the right, we've got Pinus radiata, which was the poor thing. It was a lovely little native species of west coast usa maybe up, I'm not quite sure what elevation up a bit, wasn't a coastal species, had a very narrow range, but forest has got to and bred it up and it's now, you know, one of the two or three commercial species that's grown around the world, you know, in for industrial production of woody fiber. Now what's happened? Should keep an eye on the time, shouldn't I? When did I start? Like how many more minutes do I have to go? 10 minutes. Okay, so why is this difference important? I mean we can see the difference. You can understand in general terms the difference. Why is the difference important? Well, it matters. The difference between these types of forests matters because these forests vary. They are all forests if you like, but they vary in their characteristics, the values and the benefits they provide people and the planet. So I'm just going to give some examples of each of those differentiating values and benefits. Well, the first one, and this is, this is the really interesting one, the one that's actually, you know, grabs a lot of attention, is that they store primary forests store a lot more carbon than what do degraded recovering or plantation forests. And there's a very simple explanation for it. And that is if you look out the window at a tree, take out the, imagine removing all the water, 50% of what you're looking at is carbon. So most of the carbon that's in a forest is stored in the woody biomass of large old trees. I mean that's just the simple in the stems and in the roots. And depending on the species it can also be in the, there's a lot of the branches as well. So of course when we commercially log a forest, that's the first, the first cut takes out the big trees and successive cuts keep the forest at a young age and never allow the big trees to grow. So there's a range. It depends upon the forest ecosystem type and the logging regime and the logging cycle, etc. But basically primary forests just store a hell of a lot more carbon than any other forest types that we're talking about. So why is that important? Well, gosh, I'd really like to give a talk about where carbon came from and how Earth is a closed system and all the carbon that's here was here when Earth was formed and it's not going anywhere. Earth doesn't leak any carbon. So the carbon, the carbon's here to stay. But it can take Various forms. So this is a graph, it's my only graph. And the vertical column is the stock of carbon in these major reservoirs in the Earth system. That's pettigrams of carbon, which is equivalent to a billion. One petagram of carbon is 1 billion metric tonnes of carbon, if you're interested. So we're looking at how much carbon is in known conventional gas deposits, known oil deposits, known coal deposits in the atmosphere and in terrestrial ecosystems. And 80% of that's in forests. How does carbon get around? Well, you know, carbon is an element and it can form different kinds of molecules, so it can take a different form when it's in the atmosphere. It's a gas right here. Obviously it's a solid. There's actually a huge amount in the ocean, but I don't have time to talk about the ocean story. But obviously it's dissolved inorganic form in the ocean, but in plants it's taken up through photosynthesis and it's actually stored. Well, what's woody biomass made of? It's carbohydrates, sugars, essentially. It's the carbon found in sugars. Well, if the carbon's not here, it's got to go somewhere. And the atmosphere doesn't leak carbon dioxide. So if the carbon's not here, it's here. There's also a link to the oceans, but we'll leave that out for the moment. So the reason why we've got a climate change, a climate crisis is because we're digging up this and oxidizing it. And the oxidized coal goes into the oxidized carbon that was in the coal when it's burnt, goes in the atmosphere. And when we log and destroy trees, forest ecosystems, that biomass carbon also gets oxidized and become carbon dioxide. And primary forests store 30 to 70% more coal, more carbon than other forest types. Well, if it's not in the primary forest, where is it? Well, it's in the atmosphere. And so what we have to do is to address the climate change crisis is to avoid emissions. So how do we avoid emissions? We stop using coal and oil and gas and we avoid logging and degrading primary forests. Primary forests, of course, are also really important for, for biodiversity. And they provide unique wildlife habitat that's not found in any other forest type. And this is an example from Australia, from these mountain ash forests. I showed you a photo of before, and this is Leadbeaters possum, which is a threatened, listed threatened, one of Australia's most endangered marsupial mammals. So leadbeaters possum can only survive because of large old trees. And these large old trees, after about 150 years, they start to hollow out in the middle through fungi and other kind of activities. And so the possum nests and shelters in the hollows of these large old trees and they actually spend about 16 hours a day in there. They're very lazy animals. It's actually a thermo regulation thing. In winter they have to stay in there or they'll freeze to death. And they also reproduce in there. And the kind of hollow they shelter in and nest in protects them from predators. So basically, if there's no large old trees, there's no leadbeater's possum. And actually the reason why it's one of Australia's most threatened, actually it's one of the world's most threatened mammals species, is because these are almost all gone. There's only 1% of the original primary forest in mountain ash remains. The rest has been intensively felled and logged to produce wood chips. So this turns into a pile of wood chip which is sold to Japan, which is turned into a cardboard box, which is then shipped back to Australia when we buy a fridge or refrigerator or a washing machine, and then that gets thrown in the dump. So there are many, many, many of our wildlife species that are dependent upon habitat features and characteristics that are only found in primary forest. Primary forests are also incredibly important for water supply because they yield a watershed covered in a primary forest yields the cleanest water. It's easy to understand that as soon as you start logging it, you cause soil abrasion and you increase the sediment flow and so the water gets all mucky. So from a water supply point of view, you want the clean water and that's what it does. And also, and this is, has certainly been definitively proved in the tropics, a large extent of primary forest affects the regional climate. And that's because the primary forest, the plants are using so much water, they're evaporating water. There's more water vapor going up into the atmosphere. What goes up must come down. So they evaporate more water, less runs out through the stream, so there's more water vapor in the atmosphere, so there's more rainfall. And this has been shown in Africa. About 30% of the rain that falls on the, on the Amazon rainforest comes from the water that's been evaporated from the rainforest. The rainforest is actually helping create the climate that the rainforest needs. It's an incredible, what we call positive feedback, but they're under massive threat. And you know, we all know the reasons why they contain valuable timber and they are being rapidly. I'm trying to think of a nice word, but annihilated is probably the. They're being targeted, you know, by industrial scale commodity related industries. They're being turned into wood chip and other things. This is not, this is deforestation for growing cows. Not in Brazil, but in Australia. Australia loses about 400,000 hectares of forest every year for growing cows, exactly like in Brazil. And so we're taking trees like that. And this is a legal logging in Brazil, which Barb will say something about shortly. So what can be done about this? What can we do to get the values of primary forests and the benefits they provide people recognized and properly valued? And what kind of responses can we put in place internationally and nationally and locally to make sure that these forests are protected so they can continue to provide the benefits that, that they do? Well, at that point, I'm going to stop and hand over to my colleagues who's going to give you some good news about what good things are happening in some parts of our world.

Hi. Well, so we have five minutes each to give you the solutions to all this. I'm going to really try to do this quickly. But one of the solutions that does work, where it can be applied and where I think the conservation movement is increasingly sort of putting their hope into, is working with local forest communities, whether they be indigenous or other local communities that are living beside or possibly in these forests and it's their home and they're gaining a large part, all of, or at least some of their livelihoods from these forests. But they're often, well, almost always the, you know, the weaker financially anyway, members of their national societies. So they don't usually have much of a voice. And when the industry and the corporations move in there, they're usually pretty much, you know, pushed out. So the conservation movement has realized, and we have good examples to show that it works, that empowering these local people to really to defend their rights also works for conservation and that it's a great method that we have to preserve some large tracts of. In this case, the example I'm going to tell you really quickly about is in the Brazilian Amazon in the southeastern Amazon, which is being one of the world's highest deforestation zones. Deforestation for ranching principally, but also mining and dam building and road building and soybean. And this is, this satellite shot shows you an indigenous territory which is the green block surrounded by ranches and soybean and Rhodes and logging and everything else you can imagine, but it's still intact. And the reason in 2019, that territory is still intact is because NGOs, non governmental organizations have allied with the indigenous owners of this territory, the traditional indigenous peoples who live and have rights to this territory, to help them understand the outside world that they're now surrounded by and how to defend themselves in that outside world. And it's proving to be very effective in this case. This is just one case, but it's a striking case because of the size of the area. These people who are called the Kaiapo, have an area, this green area that belongs to them is the size of South Korea.

It's.

Over 11 million hectares. Actually, that entire area is more like 14 million hectares. But the Kaiapo occupied the top part. So extremely significant for rainforest conservation in a really difficult part of the world where deforestation is increasing at a more rapid pace, again for the same industrial reasons that we all know, and where there's also little law enforcement. So although these people do have rights to this land, the government doesn't enforce it. And the ranchers, the loggers, the gold miners, everybody else just will go in there if they can get in there. So, so what we have been doing is working with them to help them defend their rights and investing in all sorts of programs, and it's effective. So even in this scenario of high deforestation and lawlessness, that block of green primary forests survives. So that's one way that we can, that we can save some of these primary forests, which are the greatest stocks of terrestrial carbon and biodiversity and species of plants and animals, and also indigenous cultures. Now, of course, their fight is to save their home and their livelihoods and the basis of their cultures. We are more, you know, want to save the forest for the reasons that everybody in this room knows, but the two objectives are 100% the same. And that's how we're able to form this alliance, in this case with these people.

That's good science to decision makers, which is an extremely challenging task, particularly in the international sphere, with some of these big conventions that are very difficult for even scientists to access, let alone the community. It's been an interesting and challenging learning experience for me, but it's very clear that if we had more engagement from the community and more understanding about how some of these international rules impact what happens to forests even here, we could build a groundswell of support for change. One of the things some of you might be aware is because of the way the international rules relate to forests, we now have a whole new industry of burning forests for power. And the forests of Southeast America are at the forefront of that, where something like, I think you'll correct me, Peter, if I'm wrong, but I think it's about 8 million tons year of wood pellets produced from swamp forests and old growth forests and some planted forests out of southeastern US chopped up. I mean, the landscape's annihilated, chopped up, turned into pellets and shipped to Europe and the uk. And this industry is only possible because of international rules that allow Europe to claim that this energy is carbon neutral and renewable. In fact, it's more emissive per unit of energy than coal and it's anything but renewable when you're talking about old forests, natural forests that are on wetlands, and in many cases quite ancient forests that are in fact irreplaceable. So that's an example of why the international rules are important. And there are a few other folks, including Peter Riggs at the back, who's at the forefront of trying to get this system of rules changed. There is increasing awareness globally and a strong pushback from the science community about the insanity of the climate and biodiversity insanity of chopping down safely stored carbon in landscapes and putting it immediately into the atmosphere and no one counting the emissions. And the Europeans are actually being sued by a number of plaintiffs, and the chief scientist is an American woman called Mary Booth with the Partnership for Policy Integrity. She has pulled this case together and they're being sued because of their refusal to actually treat this resource honestly in terms of its impact on nature and its impact on the climate. And change is slowly happening in that arena and the science community is really up in arms about the absurdity of the whole venture. The other increasing area of interest and relevance in the international sphere is the realisation that we don't just have a climate crisis, we have a biodiversity crisis and that the two things are linked. So we have a circular relationship, if you like, between climate and biodiversity and ecosystem integrity. As you damage ecosystems by removing elements of biodiversity and degrade it, it's more vulnerable to losing its carbon stocks. The ecosystem's less stable, you release carbon into the atmosphere, the less stable ecosystem, the more easily damaged it is by things like climate change, climate change. So the circular relationship works two ways. The good news is that if you protect biodiversity and restore ecosystem integrity, you actually improve the stability of your ecosystem carbon stocks. And the first morning we turned up here and we had a lovely presentation, wonderful, from Bill Muma, who talked about something we've been talking about in the project for quite some time, and he's got a new term for it called proforestation, and that is encouraging degraded natural forests to reach their full potential, to let them grow old, to let them store as much carbon as they're able to store. And you do that in a way that buffers and reconnects areas of primary forest that helps build the resilience of those forests and their resistance to threats, whether that's pest, disease, fire, drought or climate change itself. So that was a very encouraging introduction to our seminar. So the move internationally now is to try and integrate the workings of the Biodiversity Convention and the Climate Convention, at least in relation to land and forests. And an ideal outcome would be that all climate action in land and forests helps protect biodiversity and ensures ecosystem integrity. So that is, in fact, one of the goals of the project we're working in. Thank you.

I'll have a question for our colleague from Brisbane. What kinds of understanding and cooperation are you finding from other surrounding countries? From Southeast Asia?

Yeah, that's a very good question. So it's highly variable, if you like. Interestingly, Indonesia, which gets a lot of bad press because of the extensive conversion of natural forest to palm oil plantations and the like, they've actually just extended a moratorium on any logging or intrusion into the remaining primary forest. So it's quite a turnaround, I think. Indonesia is a big country, it's got a huge population, and these issues are as contested within Indonesian society as they are anywhere else. But, you know, at the moment, they've made this very strong policy commitment, you know, to allow no further degradation of primary forests. You go across the border in Papua New guinea and it's not so clear. But again, the government does recognise primary forests, but again, it's a different context. So in Indonesia, all the forest is owned by the central government. Papua New guinea, the central government owns none of the forests. All the land and the resources are customarily owned by the traditional tribal groups, and that's in their constitution. So the government just can't tell the customary owners what to do. These things have to be. The customary owners have a lot of say in what happens to their forest. And it's patchy. Some communities are like the Kaiapo. Others have been convinced otherwise. But as we go north through Southeast Asia, it's not a very happy story. The remaining primary forests in Southeast Asia are really being hammered, you know, hard and fast, and there is not the awareness of the values of those forests as there is actually in Indonesia. And, you know, the understanding and debates within societies in Indonesia and Papua New guinea is much at a much higher level than what it is elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Well, my name is George Masters Wood. Well, and I have a hard time knocking pontificating on that topic, but I think it would be unfortunate if we left here without a good firm understanding of the role that forests have in the global carbon cycle, the role they have in curing the climatic disruption that we are facing at the moment. So I'd ask you to elaborate on that topic. Yeah, well, let me begin. So there are two roles that forests can play. One is forests store carbon. So primary forests kind of by definition are at their natural carbon carrying capacity. So one thing we can do is avoid emissions by not having human induced emissions. How big is that? Okay, well, as I said, there's about eight. Well, there's about. Well, just let me answer the question two ways. So first of all, there are about a third of the world's forests that are left are primary forests. And there's a third which are used for commercial logging. So their carbon stocks are very low. And there's a third which are just highly degraded. You know, they're not really functionally forests at all. So there's two mitigation actions you can take. One is to protect primary forests so we don't emit all the carbon that's in them. The other is to allow the logged and degraded forest to regrow naturally. So the question is, if we were to do that in an ideal world, we were to say if we were just to allow all the world's remaining natural forests to continue to be logged and cleared this century. So if we were to have complete deforestation of the world's natural forests by the end of this century, that would increase the atmospheric concentration of CO2 by at least 100 parts per million. It's currently at 400. Okay. To limit global warming to 2 degrees above pre industrial levels, it can get up maybe to 450 parts per million. So if we were to completely stop using fossil fuel tomorrow, but allow the complete deforestation of the world's natural forest this century, we would still be way, way over 2 degrees and heading into 3 degree, 10 degree. So that in, you know, that's some indication of the potential contribution that forests can play. But you might want to say some more about that.

So on an annual basis, the emissions, carbon emissions from deforestation and degradation of forests is about 8% of annual emissions. What is hidden in that statistic is that is in fact a net figure in Other words, they're measuring what goes up in the atmosphere and a portion of which is also reabsorbed by forest. The gross figure of how much is actually emitted by clearing forests and degraded forests is much higher. We don't know exactly what that percentage could be. I've seen the figure 8 to 20% as a very broad range. But the point is, a lot of the carbon that we emit every year is coming from forests and from primary forests, and a lot of that is, in fact, unnecessary. And as Brendan said, the scale of the problem and the scale of the carbon stock is so big that if we emit even a fraction of the carbon in primary forests, it doesn't really matter if we get off of fossil fuels and transition to renewables. There is enough, many times over, just in forests, which without all the other terrestrial ecosystems, without looking at wetlands and sea grasses and other ecosystems around the world, there's plenty in forests to drive us to a very unsafe climate very quickly. If you start restoring those forests and you start drawing the atmosphere, the atmospheric carbon dioxide down, and if you allow those forests to age, as Brendan said, then in fact, forests are not only part of the solution, they're an essential part of the solution. We do not solve the climate crisis without forests. So we need to reduce emissions from every sector, but it's not an either or thing. We need to reduce the. The carbon emissions from fossil fuel use, and we need to protect the vast carbon stock, keep that out of the atmosphere, and we need to restore so that the aging forests can pull the carbon out of the atmosphere. And unfortunately, there's this perception that an old forest just kind of keels over and stops being productive and releases all the carbon and that all the trees die and it's all dead wood. And it's a huge problem. And we, at all costs, must have young forests. And that's a big, big fallacy. What we're finding out is that a lot of trees, as they age, continue to sequester just as much carbon and in some cases even more. And it's a function of the trunk size, it's a function of the branches, it's a function of the leaf size. But there's been kind of a myth that the tree gets old, falls over, and that you're better off cutting it before it falls over, because once it falls over, it's useless. And so we're desperately trying to get this message out that, you know, the stock that's there in the old, resilient, strong biodiverse forest needs to be protected and the stock that the forests that are young and growing fast need to help us pull the carbon out of the atmosphere. And that, that's not a bonus, that's not a co benefit, that's essential. We have to do it. If we don't do both that and fossil fuels, we don't have a safe climate.

Thank you very much.

I work for Education for Sustainable Development over the last 15 years and I was just wondering. I fully concur on the importance of having governments and civil society in the policy dialogue to protect the World Heritage sites and National Heritage sites and primary forests. My question is to what extent are you reaching out to learners and youth? Because my bet is the change is going to come from the new generation because they are the ones who are most vested. It's their future, the sustainable future. And the scientific as you are, as we have new emerging scientific data while you deliver it to the policy maker, I think it would be equally important to translate that in a user friendly way for schools and educators and youth so that they can become active global citizens and local citizens and make a difference on the ground. So I'd like to hear if there are any examples of that. Thank you.

Exactly what we've been talking about today in our meeting because. But you're absolutely right, the reason we're focused on the international policy space in particular is because the decisions that are made in the next two years will frame what happens to life on Earth. So there's a new framework of new targets for the biodiversity convention. Nationally determined contributions have to be revised for climate to meet the climate targets. But by 2020, the Sustainable Development goal on land is being revised in 2020 so that with our limited resources we're focusing a lot on those high level issues. But you're absolutely correct and we've been discussing today how we develop communication materials, education materials for the young and particularly given the really truly inspiring young rebellion, if you like, of school children around the planet actually trying to claim their future. Which is fantastically inspiring for those of us who lived through the 60s to see that we now have a generation doing the same thing. So yeah, hopefully we'll be able to answer that better for you next time we come to Woods Hole and meet.

But you know, if you please come and talk to us, we're really, I mean this is a. We need educators and you know, and communication people to be helping us craft these messages. Of course, you know, I've spent a long time studying the science. I can give you a very good lecture about the about how we can model the lifetime of the airborne fraction of a pulse of CO2 in the atmosphere. But you know, translating that to something that will inspire and can be used by a youth activist I'm clueless about. Good.

Yeah.

I have a question about the indigenous rainforest people in Brazil. The group with the South Korea sized region. Can you tell me what their population is and is that population growing?

Yeah, their population today is around possibly 9,000. So in a country in a forest area the size of South Korea it is growing pretty rapidly, but you know, it's still tiny compared to the size of their area. And in fact we, you know, we've even done some studies and stuff. Obviously they're hunting and fishing and so on for their subsistence. But this area of theirs is a real refuge for, for threatened and endangered Amazonian species because they just have, you know, there's so much land that they're, the areas they hunt are tiny compared to the areas that, you know, they're not hunted. But I was going to say their population is growing, but it also went through the classic, you know, decimation from introduced diseases when they were contacted, which was only in the 1950s, 50s and 1960s. So like my age group in my parents age group went through that epidemics. I think it was measles and chickenpox mostly and you know, they were literally decimated. So probably, you know, almost 90% of the population died. So but their population is growing, but it's still, you know, it's still pretty small.

A quick question to the Australians. We were just in New Zealand. In every port we stopped in there were tons and tons and tons of logs being loaded onto ships. And when I asked a couple of times I asked, everybody said oh, it's all sustainable and all of that. And I'm skeptical. So what's the truth? This is in Australia basically. So our natural forests are dominated by species of the Eucalyptus genus like the one I showed you, that's Eucalyptus regnans. So they're all slow growing, long lived hardwoods that live up to those trees live up to four or five hundred years. And you know, basically the forestry that's going on is mining. I would describe it as forest mining because they're not even sustaining the wood yield. Even if you were to find sustainability just in pure wood yield terms, it's not sustainable. There isn't a single forestry operation in the country which has been proven to be sustainable. What they keep doing is changing the product that they're harvesting from it. So they went from harvesting the Trees for lumber to harvesting for pulp to turn into manufactured wood products to. Now they want to go down generating pellets to export for power plants or.

Whole logs actually sent whole loggers.

Well, New Zealand basically deforested. The whole 90% of the country just got deforested. They had remnant patches of native forest ap primary forest. So they put a moratorium, unlogging that and made massive investments into plantations, a lot of monoculture plantations. So they're logging it. They don't log native forests. They've hardly got any left whatsoever. It's protected and all their timbers coming from plantations. Australia actually has 85% of its wood products come from plantations, which is about 6% of the forest forest cover. Plantation is an incredibly effective way, efficient way of supplying timber. 85% of our wood supply comes from plantations. There's no reason to ever log another native forest again. From a wood supply point of view, the problem they have in Australia is there's no money being invested in manufacturing. So they've got this oversupply of logs. Actually they're exporting whole logs, plantation timber, because people aren't. They can't attract the investment, you know, to manufacture them into products that people want to buy. So the, the logging of the native forest that's going on, which I'm suggesting is more accurately described as mining, is just kind of a legacy issue. You know, it's just the, it's the legacy, it's the vested interest, it's heavily subsidized. You know, it's all the, all the reasons that an industry gets embedded in a, in an economy. And it's kind of these policy dependencies that get it locked in. It's like the coal industry where you've got all this money invested in a certain kind of form of economic activity that no longer makes any environmental or economic or social sense.

It's worse than that though, because we've got production forests now, natural forest in collapse. The ecosystem that impact the Central highlands forest that Brendan showed you is an ecosystem in collapse. Just complete overuse and the interaction of logging, logging, making the forest more fire prone. And in the climate, the climate changes that are already occurring, that's catastrophic.

You know, a quick point on the logging is that if you look at, as Brendan said, only about a third of the planet, so the planet has had about 6 billion hectares of forest. We're down to 4. So we lost about a third of the planet's forest cover. Of that remaining 4 billion hectares, about 7%, we said was in plantations and only about A third of that is primary forest or old growth forest. So we're down to, you know, a small fraction of the original primary forest and only a smaller fraction of that is actually protected from the boreal forest which stretches from Alaska to Quebec and basically from Norway to Kamchatka is only about a third primary forest. And so you think about the scale of that forest and how little old growth is left temperate forest that you find, you know, in Europe and in North America we're down to about 15% old growth. At most tropics it's about 25%. So what we found is that in fact when we demonstrated this conclusively in the tropics, you, you can't log sustainably in the tropics because the trees grow back too slowly. That's probably true for old growth forest everywhere. You can't replace a 600 year old.

Tree on a 60 year rotation.

60 or 100 year rotation.

It just doesn't work.

So it's just, there's just been this myth that we're going to solve this problem by logging better and that a doesn't work. And it's terrible to approach for saving diversity of life on Earth. And from a climate standpoint I just.

Read probably too anthropomorphizing for scientists, but the hidden life of trees. And he really makes you appreciate how important old growth forests are because they just, you can't replace them maybe over hundreds of years, but they just have a whole ecosystem that they're involved in that is. My question is about economics. I've been involved in the center long enough to hear lots of discussions about REDD and trying to make it economically feasible for people to choose forests over destroying forests. And are there examples of where that's being successful or could you just comment on that approach? Because we all know that see it in our own country when there's enough pressure, a lot of these protected places tend to get unprotected.

Yes. So just for the benefit of those who aren't familiar with the acronym, REDD stands for reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation. And it's an international program, well, formally the formal UN Red program. The idea is to give finance, you know, to give, to pay countries not to log their forests or that was the original idea. You would basically pay countries to protect their forests so that the emissions wouldn't occur. But that's not how it ended up panning out. But Virginia, when she interrupted Glenn's introduction because he said that she worked for forests alive, she used to work for Forests Alive, which was a carbon offsetting business. I might let you answer that question about what's happened to reddd. REDD was intentionally designed to give payments to protect forests. So how has it panned out?

Well, it's panned out. Sorry. Yes, I'll get to the microphone. Some people argue that REDD has never been implemented. It rapidly turned into something that became a subsidy for logging primary forests in a nicer way than they might otherwise have been logged. So the argument was, you know, it costs money to log nicely and there will be fewer emissions than if they're illegally logged. That may or may not be accurate, but in fact it appears to have turned into a subsidy to actually encourage logging rather than protection. There are some examples of where REDD has actually helped protect forests, but they're very few and they really are the minority. The program now has shifted again so that results based payments, as they're called, will be given to countries that meet certain criteria against their overall what's called a forest reference level of their emissions from forestry. Already we're seeing the sort of weird and wonderful gaming, gaming of the system to artificially inflate forest reference levels that in fact will result in no net reduction in the destruction of primary forest. Perhaps the most perverse outcome of all is that in the forest arena, in the climate arena on forest, there is no differentiation between a primary forest, a secondary or degraded natural forest, and a planted forest, a monoculture, that is a catastrophe. It means that when people are working out how they're traveling on their forest emissions, they can net out the loss of primary forests from planting new monocultures of trees. And the two are in no way comparable. The plantations certainly can't replace in any way either the size or stability, let alone the biodiversity component of a primary forest. So there are all sorts of weird, and they almost sound, you know, impossible to an educated lay audience. How can these perverse things happen? And the answer, sadly, largely is the power of the, of timber interests. Logging interests essentially wrote the rules for the Kyoto signatories for the developed countries, and they are being transposed now to the developing world. These are some of the things we're attempting to deal with in the climate negotiations. All the attention goes to fossil fuels, but in fact, it's critically important we get much more attention to the fate of the world's forest to protect the best of what we've got left and do far more rational things for nature and for the climate than we're currently doing with our forests.

And I think, you know, we were talking about this today, about the transaction costs involved with the REDD scheme. So at a small scale, I can give you some money, and the risk is quite low because I'm not giving you much money. But if we're talking about billions of dollars, distributing billions of dollars at a national level specifically to get some outcomes related to cut.