How do public production forests help store carbon?

A closer look

Trees naturally absorb carbon from the atmosphere and store it.

Sustainable Timber Tasmania sustainably manages approximately 812,000 hectares of public production forests.  That’s a lot, which means these forests play an important role in storing carbon.

Sustainable Timber Tasmania is committed to maintaining the carbon storage capacity of the forests it manages. Carbon storage capacity means how much carbon can be stored.

Carbon storage capacity is maintained in these ways:

• managing the forest’s sustainably
• maintaining informal reserves
• harvesting (felling) and regenerating forests.

The amount of carbon stored in Sustainable Timber Tasmania forests will increase over time as more trees are grown by Sustainable Timber Tasmania through forest regeneration.

Sustainable Timber Tasmania is an active participant in carbon projects.

For example, Sustainable Timber Tasmania currently has four registered Emissions Reduction Projects covering about 1,400 hectares of public production forests in the Huon Valley, Meander Valley, Georgetown, Launceston, Dorset and Northern Midlands.

One of these projects is called a ‘permanent environmental planting’. That means planting a diverse range of trees in a single location for conservation and never harvesting (felling) in that site.

The other three projects are in plantations and are focused on ‘silviculture’ techniques. That means influencing growth and structure through thinning and pruning to allow those trees to capture more carbon.