Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I will take you up on that offer at another time. What guarantee is there that people would not use bushfire as a mechanism for land clearance so that they did not have to account for their emissions—both in Australia and in other parts of the world? What would be the guarantee that that would not occur? Secondly, how would you treat a catastrophic fire event in, say, Indonesia, where a tropical forest had been converted to a palm oil plantation and where irrigation channels had drained that tropical forest, causing the peat to catch fire and burn indefinitely with massive emissions? Would that be regarded as a natural disturbance or would that be something that would have to be accounted for? So there are two questions: firstly, how would you avoid bushfire being used as an excuse for land clearance and therefore not accounting for emissions; and secondly, how would you treat a fire in a tropical forest converted to a palm oil plantation? The ecosystem has been altered by the draining of the land and by having peat catching on fire and burning for years in some cases.