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Forest & Wood Communities Australia (FWCA) has called on the Australian Greens to support the proposed Senate disallowance of Labor’s Improved Native Forest Management carbon method ahead of the expected Senate vote on 18 August 2026, saying the vote will expose whether the party genuinely opposes carbon offsets or only opposes them when they deliver its preferred anti-forestry outcome. Source: Timberbiz The Improved Native Forest Management method allows state governments to generate Australian Carbon Credit Units by ceasing planned timber harvesting in defined areas of multiple-use public native forests. It also requires reduced wood extraction across the broader project area and imposes a 100-year permanence obligation. FWCA Chair and Director Steve Dobbyns said the method is not simply a conservation measure. It is a carbon-crediting mechanism that monetises the closure and restriction of sustainable native forestry. “This disallowance motion is a test of principle,” Mr Dobbyns said. “The Greens can vote to disallow this method, or they can admit they are prepared to support forest offsets when those offsets are used to shut down sustainable native forestry. “They cannot condemn carbon credits as a licence for big polluters one day, then defend the same offset mechanism when it is used to bankroll their preferred political outcome.” Mr Dobbyns said the INFM method raised serious concerns that FWCA and others had warned about from the beginning. “The first issue is additionality. “If governments have already made political commitments to close or reserve these forests, then the public is entitled to ask whether the carbon credits represent genuine new abatement or whether taxpayers and emitters are being asked to pay for a decision that was already politically intended. “The second issue is leakage. Timber demand does not disappear when harvesting is stopped in one region. It shifts to private forests, interstate supply, imported timber, steel, concrete and other substitute materials. If that leakage is not fully and honestly accounted for, the claimed carbon benefit is little more than accounting theatre. “The third issue is permanence. A 100-year carbon obligation is not a short-term policy adjustment, particularly when that century-long commitment is effectively being paid for through just 15 years of carbon credit payments. It is a century-long restriction on future forest management, timber supply, regional employment, housing materials and the capacity of future governments to respond to changing circumstances.” FWCA said the method also has implications beyond the specific areas where harvesting formally ceases. “This method is not limited to drawing a line around a park and walking away,” Mr Dobbyns said. “It operates across whole forestry regions and requires reduced wood extraction across the broader project area. That means the economic and supply impacts can extend well beyond the immediate carbon protection areas, and risks creating a financial incentive for governments to constrain or discourage private native forestry activity in surrounding landscapes, particularly where increased private harvesting could undermine claimed abatement through leakage. “That matters for sawmills, haulage contractors, harvest crews, timber workers, builders, manufacturers and regional towns that depend on a predictable supply of Australian hardwood.” Mr Dobbyns said the Greens’ own public comments had already exposed the contradiction at the centre of the debate. “The NSW Greens have criticised the idea of turning forests into carbon banks and offsets for climate polluters. On that point, we agree,” he said. “So, the question for the federal Greens is simple: will they vote according to that principle, or will they protect a method that does exactly what they claim to oppose?” FWCA said the INFM debate should not be misrepresented as a choice between conservation and forestry. “This is a choice between credible climate policy and political carbon accounting,” Mr Dobbyns said. “Australia needs carbon methods that are transparent, scientifically robust, fully account for leakage, and support active, adaptive forest management for carbon storage, fire resilience, biodiversity, cultural values and long-term forest health. “What we do not need is a carbon-crediting mechanism that shuts down one of the most heavily regulated timber industries in the world, increases pressure on imports and substitute materials, and then pretends the emissions consequences disappear.” Mr Dobbyns said the method also undermines Australia’s broader sovereign capability in timber and housing supply. “Australia is already under pressure to meet future timber demand,” he said. “Reducing domestic hardwood supply for the next 100 years will not help build homes, support local manufacturing or reduce reliance on imported timber from countries that may not meet Australian environmental, labour or governance standards. “You do not protect the global environment by closing well-regulated Australian production and outsourcing demand elsewhere.” FWCA said the proposed disallowance is now an integrity test for every party in the Senate. “If the Greens vote to disallow the method, they are standing by their stated opposition to forest offsets for polluters,” Mr Dobbyns said. “If they vote to protect it, they are not opposing dirty offsets. They are simply choosing which regional communities; workers and industries should be sacrificed to create them. “The Greens now have to choose – principle or politics.”

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The following is an open letter to Chris Bowen, Minister for Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water regarding the recent INFM announcement, it was written by John Raison a former CSIRO chief research scientist. Dear Minister The recently determined Improved Native Forest Management in Multiple-use Public Native Forests (INFM) ACCU method that aims to estimate high integrity carbon (C) offsets by ceasing harvest of native forests had been widely criticised. Opposition has come from associations representing the forestry and farming sectors, rural communities whose livelihoods depend on continued sustainable harvesting, trade unions, conservation groups, the Australia Institute, forest managers and many in the science community. The reasons for the strong push back include: clear failures to uphold the integrity standards of the ACCU scheme, especially additionality, leakage and ability to verify credits claimed; adverse socio-economic impacts which will greatly exceed any potential C benefit; a lack of transparency around how earlier concerns have been addressed and justification for the revised model; and strong concern that low-integrity credits will created and used to off-set (‘greenwash’) pollution from use of fossil fuels. Here, I focus on key weaknesses resulting from the misuse of science in developing the INFM. Much of this material was provided to the ERAC as part of the final consultation phase for the INFM method in early 2026. The determined method will generate bogus carbon credits with serious consequences for the credibility of the ACCU scheme. The INFM method is not supported by sound scientific evidence The proposed method has a weak conceptual foundation – by assuming that cessation of sustainable harvesting in native forests will result in a net reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and thus can provide reliable abatement. When a full and accurate life cycle analysis (LCA) approach is applied there is no evidence that this is the case and the reverse is more likely (Ximenes et al. 2016, Raison 2024). The LCA framework should include changes in forest C stocks; emissions from transport and processing wood products; changes in C stocks in wood products in use and in landfill; emissions avoided by using wood residues to replace fossil energy or by substituting wood products for more emissions-intensive construction materials; and any ‘indirect’ leakage of emissions that will result from increased production of wood products in other jurisdictions. Only one Australian study has adopted a complete and accurate LCA approach (Ximenes et al. 2016). That study, which included case studies in two important native forest regions in NSW, concluded that sustainable harvesting of native forests and the subsequent use of forest biomass to produce harvested wood products (HWP) or energy can make a positive contribution to mitigating national net C emissions. Some studies, such as those of Keith et al. (2014, 2015) have overestimated the benefits of ceasing harvesting because they have either been incomplete, used inappropriate parameters to estimate components of the total C balance, or overestimated the rate of C gain in older forests and the ability of unharvested forests to store C for the long-term. This has led to the incorrect conclusion that cessation of harvesting would provide better long-term C outcomes than sustainable management for wood production (Raison 2024). It is thus not possible to create reliable C credits by the cessation of native forest harvesting. Carbon stock change estimated by FullCAM will be highly uncertain. FullCAM estimates of long-term C stock change following disturbance by either harvesting or fire in highly heterogeneous (representing a wide range of species, forest ages and structures and site growing conditions) native forests remain uncertain. Detailed efforts to calibrate FullCAM for native forests (Forrester et al. 2025) found that the model has very low precision and some bias. Further, the model has not been independently tested for its reliability in estimating temporal change in C stocks following forest disturbance by harvesting or fire. Given the likely high level of uncertainty in FullCAM estimates of changes in C stocks at the time of harvesting, in regrowth and in unharvested forests, it is essential that the INFM method include a requirement for independent estimation of stock change based on solid field inventory. The credits estimated by the method are not verifiable. The method specifies the need to use ‘representative’ forest plots to describe combinations of forest type, forest age and silviculture. No guidance is provided on how representativeness can be determined, only a recipe on how plots that are used for modelling should be constructed in FullCAM. The spatial surfaces used to run FullCAM do not provide precise estimates of model inputs at specific forest locations. The INFM method also requires that representative plots should be ‘validated’ using an ‘iterative’ process to get a good match (+ or – 5%) between model outputs and prior records of harvest area and wood harvest – there is no guidance on how to do this. However, ‘tweaking’ model parameters to achieve this may well compromise the ability of the model to make reliable forward predictions. To run FullCAM requires a range of detailed parameters which are usually poorly known e.g. the % of harvested stems going to various wood products, the average age of trees, the age of the oldest trees – how can reliable estimates of these be obtained at specific locations? These issues mean model predictions will be very uncertain and there is no process in place to verify them. Estimating baseline C emissions is complex and unreliable/unverifiable. The INFM method critically depends on estimating a reliable baseline (what would have happened without any cessation of harvesting in the project). The method proposes that the baseline harvest level be estimated as the latest modified sustained yield to be calculated based on correlations between prior estimates of sustained yield and the annual amount of harvested wood. Arbitrary adjustments (reductions) are made depending on the strength of the correlation (R2) – if is > or equal to 0.7 then the annual harvest is calculated as the average log production to sustainable yield ratio over the baseline period. This is […]

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