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

I ask the minister why, in addition to avoided deforestation, she has not included forest protection. There are many people who have proactively chosen to covenant forests or who want to protect forests, and there is no current regime which would reward them for that. In order to prove avoided deforestation, they are going to have to show that they would have logged it and now will not because of this scheme. It seems to me unfair that those people who have chosen to protect their forests, or will choose to protect their forests, are not included. If you are going to respond by saying, ‘Well, that’s not additional,’ then you cannot prove additionality for people saying: ‘We’ve got a standing forest. We weren’t going to protect it. We would have logged it and now we want the credits for not logging it.’ That is why I find this whole issue of avoided deforestation quite difficult. I do not see how you are going to get any robustness in the methodologies.

You have said that the permits are subject to the development of robust methodologies, and it is clear that the methodologies do not exist now and will not exist for some time, depending on the degree of difficulty of proving this with each different category. Is the minister concerned that we could have a vast number of CPRS permits issued as a result of these abatement permits, and is she concerned that we could end up with, effectively, a lot of hot air permits?