DEAR News Of The Area,

I RESPOND to the letter by Steve Dobbyns: ‘The potential carbon storage of trees’.

His argument in favour of using forests full of young thin trees in order to store more carbon is flawed on many levels.

While these young trees grow rapidly they are like hungry teenagers cleaning out a fridge.

They suck up the moisture, drying the landscape and making it more fire prone.

The last thing we need is more intense fires to endanger communities and release even more carbon to a heating climate.

It is the older mature forests that resist fire as was shown in 2019/20.

There is much scientific evidence that old, intact forests store far more carbon than logged, regenerating forests. Moreover it is the large old trees which continue to grow and accumulate still more carbon (Lindenmayer 2024, pp 179-181).

It can take up to a century for a regenerating forest to soak up all the carbon emitted from it when it was logged (Sanger 2022).

The argument that wood products fix carbon fails to take into account that less than one fifth a tree’s biomass ends up as long lived timber products, with much of it going to short-lived products such as pallets and left as mill waste.

The replacement of old mature trees by increasingly young ones as we see in our local forest is disastrous for the many endangered species that depend on them for food and shelter.

Loss of biodiversity has become as bad if not worse a threat to our survival than climate change so we need to halt the extinctions!

The most horrendous suggestion is that we should use biomass (left over waste from cut trees) to burn for fuel or electricity.

Most school children could tell you that burning more stuff is not a solution to climate change.

Yours sincerely
Judith KIRWOOD,
Valla Beach.