The Wilderness Society opposes INFM: ‘You can’t protect forests by trading away the climate’

The Wilderness Society opposes the Improved Native Forest Management (INFM) method and says Australia must reject a model where nature protection in one place is used to justify fossil fuel expansion somewhere else.

There is a line we will not cross: protected areas and Australia’s forests must not become a licence to keep logging or expand fossil fuel extraction. The Wilderness Society does not support protected areas across Australia becoming conditional on the generation of offsets. The Wilderness Society opposes the INFM method because it risks turning the protection of forests into a mechanism that can facilitate their continued destruction, while carbon markets are used to legitimise both.

For 50 years, the Wilderness Society has fought to protect the places that make Australia extraordinary—from the Franklin to Kakadu, the Kimberley to the Great Australian Bight.

The Wilderness Society has always stood for the principle that nature must be protected because it has value in its own right: for wildlife, Country and culture, communities and generations to come. That principle is now being tested by the growing use of environmental markets to trade nature protection against ongoing pollution and destruction.

The INFM method could set a dangerous national precedent. If approved, it could be rolled out across Australia’s public native forests—including in Lutruwita/Tasmania and Queensland, where native forest logging continues.

It also risks creating a perverse system where governments use carbon markets to fund or justify forest protection, while those same markets create incentives for continued logging and facilitate further coal and gas expansion.

Dr Kirsty Howey, Wilderness Society CEO said:

“We will not accept protected areas being made conditional on continued destruction elsewhere.

“A state government should not be in the business of selling the forests it is meant to protect, and no redesign of the method changes the perverse incentive at its core: governments profiting from expanding the very industries they are meant to be reining in.

“The Great Koala National Park should exist because these forests are worth protecting. This park was promised long before carbon offsets entered the equation, and the NSW Government should deliver on that promise with no strings attached.

“There is a profound difference between putting money into nature and putting nature up for sale. Protecting a forest cannot become a permission slip for a fossil fuel company to keep polluting somewhere else.

“Nature protection and emissions reduction are both essential. Neither can be used as a substitute for the other. We should make nature more valuable to governments, not more tradeable to polluters.”

The Wilderness Society supports greater investment in restoration, protected areas and First Nations-led conservation, but says conservation funding must not become dependent on creating permission for further environmental destruction.

For years, the Wilderness Society has campaigned for the Great Koala National Park and will continue to campaign for its protection and legislation. The organisation says the park should be funded and managed as a public good, rather than being held hostage to the success of a carbon market.

Where destruction can be avoided, it should be avoided, not traded away.

ENDS

Notes to Editors: please see the Wilderness Society’s full position statement on the use of carbon offsets in protected area management and the Improved Native Forest Management method.