Forest carbon

The Australian government is proposing to allow foresters and farmers to create carbon offset credits for international sale into foreign emissions trading markets. Prime Minister Julia Gillard launched the policy on the weekend, part of campaigning ahead of a federal election on August 21.

I want to thank Avoided Deforestation Partners for holding this event and inviting me to join all of the distinguished speakers here today in urging the adoption of REDD plus as part of a gl

With the climate bill officially dead, there's already a trickle of "who's to blame and what they should have done differently" pieces. I expect it will soon become a flood.

Tucked away on the bottom of the world, New Zealand is showing bigger developed nations how its done when it comes to tackling greenhouse-gas emissions and climate change. The first jurisdiction outside Europe to take the plunge on a nation-wide mandatory carbon pricing scheme, New Zealand has gone a long way to tackling the political and economic challenges of fundamental low-carbon reform that have bedevilled the US, Canada, Japan and Australia.

Foreign-owned "carbon foresters" have ambitions to turn a fifth of New Zealand sheep and beef farmland into forests and that will devastate many rural towns, the national farmers' lobby says.

Federated Farmers president Don Nicolson said the organisation strongly believed that farm forestry was integral to farms where suited. This made the government's axing of the Afforestation Grants Scheme (AGS) in preference to the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) "incredibly perplexing".