Australia shouldn't have to choose between protecting forests and the climate

Australia holds some of the most carbon-dense and biologically rich forests on Earth. These are not two separate values. The carbon stocks locked away in standing forests are the basis for functioning ecosystems that keep our threatened species from tipping into extinction — protecting forests serves the climate and nature at once.

That connection is already written into the promises Australia has made to the world. Under the Paris Agreement, we have committed to cut emissions sharply this decade and reach net zero by 2050. Under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, we have signed up to protect 30% of our land and sea, and to have restoration underway across 30% of degraded ecosystems, both by 2030. Forests sit at the centre of these commitments.

Yet our policies still pull the other way. In several states, native forests are still being logged, and land clearing continues at some of the highest rates in the developed world — releasing carbon and destroying ecosystems we have promised to protect. In the year Australia presides over the COP31 negotiations, that contradiction undermines its leadership.

The Commonwealth has recently approved a new Australian Carbon Credit Unit (ACCU) method for native forest management, meaning that protecting standing forests can generate offset credits. The Improved Native Forest Management (INFM) method lets state governments earn ACCUs by stopping harvest in public native forests, creating a financial incentive that competes with logging.

The INFM method is unusually rigorous: it credits only outright cessation of harvesting, not deferred or “improved” logging; it includes a 100-year permanence period rather than the 25 years commonly used; and it applies layered deductions to limit leakage. The method’s definition of plantations is overly broad, and a fixed 5% buffer against reversal is inadequate in one of the world’s most fire-prone landscapes. In California, on the same self-insurance logic, wildfire drained almost the entire century-long fire reserve within a decade.

While the method may be a step up in integrity over existing forest offset approaches, the core issue remains: our over-reliance on offsets, which are an increasingly dangerous distraction from the imperative to cut our gross emissions.

A carbon offset delivers a genuine climate benefit only under three conditions: that it represents real emissions reductions; that the abatement is additional to what would have happened otherwise; and that it is permanent. Because fossil fuel emissions are effectively permanently in the atmosphere (their removal taking thousands of years), any carbon used as an offset must be stored over the same timescale. This means biospheric carbon — the carbon held in forests and other natural landscapes — cannot justify the continued release of fossil carbon, even if the method keeps that carbon in the forest for 100 years.

What makes the approval of this method even more dangerous is that the NSW government has now made establishing the Great Koala National Park, a long-awaited election promise, conditional on generating carbon credits through the INFM method

The credits the park earns will be sold to the facilities that must account for their emissions under the Safeguard Mechanism. A company over its baseline can surrender an ACCU instead of cutting its own pollution; each credit allows one more tonne of fossil carbon into the atmosphere. In 2024, facilities surrendered 7.1 million such credits rather than reduce emissions. Forest protection is traded off against climate goals: a tonne held in trees that fire or drought could release within decades, exchanged for a tonne drawn from a geological store where it would have stayed for millions of years.

Australia can and should do better. The federal government is abdicating its responsibility to protect nature and climate, leaving the states without adequate resources or political capital to do so. The science is clear: protecting standing forests is the land sector’s most significant contribution to climate mitigation. Rather than walking away from its obligations to protect forest biodiversity by devolving all responsibility to the states, the Commonwealth must prioritise a revised National Forest Strategy that increases the political and financial resources for forest protection.

Dr Kate Dooley is an ARC DECRA Senior Research Fellow in the School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Melbourne.