World Forestry Day Celebrated

Media Release – NZ Wood

20 March 2009
World Forestry Day Celebrated

Cutting down a tree can help save the planet, according to NZ Wood in commemoration of World Forestry Day (Saturday 21 March).

That’s as long as the tree that is cut down is replanted.

Geoff Henley from NZ Wood says there has never been a better time to appreciate the role trees play in keeping the world’s atmosphere healthy.

Trees offer one of the only hopes for remediating the high levels of CO2 pumped into the world’s atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, he says.

“Every tonne of finished timber has sucked up around 1.7 tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere – that’s even allowing for all the energy and CO2 produced in its growth, harvesting and production.

“Recent studies suggest that timber has the potential to be a permanent store of carbon. If it’s buried in a properly designed landfill at the end of its service life, as little as three percent of the carbon may be released to the atmosphere as CO2 as the wood decomposes.

“This provides the mechanism for cleaning up the atmosphere of all the CO2 produced by fossil fuels and getting it back under the ground again where it belongs.”

The more wood we use, the better, he says. That means more trees are planted.

New Zealandhas around 1.7 million hectares of plantation forestry, producing around 20 million cubic metres of wood per year.

On its own, the volume of trees harvested each year removes a net amount of around 17 million tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere - year in, year out.

Equally valuable is the 6.4 million hectares of slow-growing native forest – all of which is protected, and may only be harvested sustainably. Less than 0.1 percent of total wood production comes from indigenous forests, Geoff Henley says.

ENDS

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