Russell Broadbent (McMillan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is addressed to the Minister for the Environment and Water Resources. Would the minister inform the House of the Australian government’s efforts to reduce deforestation globally?

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment and Water Resources) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for his question. Deforestation is the second biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the world today. It has been largely overlooked by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It is not factored into the Kyoto protocol. As a consequence deforestation continues apace. Action is needed to breathe new life into the forests, which are after all the lungs of the world.

The Australian government—the Prime Minister, the Foreign minister and I—announced today a $200 million program to kick-start a global initiative on forests and climate change. This is designed to support new forest plantings, limit destruction of the world’s remaining forests and promote sustainable forest management, which is so essential not simply to battling climate change but to relieving poverty in developing countries.

We will be building the technical capacity of developing countries, particularly those in our region, to assess their forest resources, putting in place the effective regulatory arrangements to protect forests and to promote the sustainable use of forest resources.

We will be working with like-minded countries both in the developed world, like the United States and the European Union, and in the developing world, in particular our neighbour Indonesia, which is the second-largest deforester in the world because of its large tropical forests—a nation which has been criticising the failure of the Kyoto protocol to address deforestation and which will welcome the initiative that we are taking today.

This initiative is the beginning of the opportunity to build the momentum to breathe new life into the lungs of the world. We cannot wait for the Kyoto protocol framework to catch up with this anomaly. We must deal with it now, and we will.