The latest warning is from Dr Judith Ajani a forest economist at the Australian National University.
"The effect of the emissions trading scheme, with respect to the forestry sector both native forests and plantations, is potentially to be quite negative from a climate change mitigation perspective," Dr Ajani said.
Dr Ajani argues that under the proposed emissions trading scheme, plantation owners are likely to make more money from using plantations for carbon storage rather than for logging.
She and a colleague at ANU have used a mathematical model to prove their point.
Their research is included in a submission to the Government on its green paper for the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).
"We found that plantation growers would need only quite low CO2 prices before they would receive the equal revenue that, as the alternative of logging a plantation," Dr Ajani said.
"So we would be looking at prices for a hard wood plantation of around $10 to $15 a tonne of CO2 for plantation growers to be attracted by the carbon market rather than the wood market."
Dr Ajani says that is bad news for native forests. She argues plantations should be excluded from the ETS.
"If we see a curtailment of plantation processing in Australia, what will happen is we will revert back into more native forest logging," she said.
In the Government's green paper on the carbon pollution reduction scheme, plantations established since 1990 are able to opt into the scheme.
Dr Ajani says that policy will do little for reducing carbon emissions.
"More native forest logging rather than plantation logging means that we'll have more emissions, CO2 emissions going up because plantations are less dense in carbon than native forests," she said.
The Australian Conservation Foundation is also concerned.
The group's Tony Mohr says the Government's green paper is too heavily weighted in favour of industry.
"The Government's proposed to exclude the clearing of native forests from the emissions trading scheme but include plantation forestry inside the scheme on an opt in basis," Mr Mohr said.
"And that means the industry can make money out of credits, but doesn't have to pay for their pollution from clearing native forests."
But the National Association of Forest Industries has rejected the research.
Chief executive Allan Hansard says the proposed scheme will not see more plantations being used for carbon storage rather than wood processing.
"I can't see how that would happen because the products we produce from our forests are carbon stores as well, and if the Government recognises that in the emissions trading scheme it wouldn't make sense to actually do that at all," Mr Hansard said.
"There may be some cases in marginal land areas where, a long way away from wood markets, where trees could be grown just for carbon, but that would be in those sorts of special case areas only."
On Friday, economist Ross Garnaut will release a report on emissions tradings targets for Australia.
That is likely to turn attention to the price at which carbon will be set.
Adapted from a report by Sara Everingham for The World TodayABC News
