Lake Pedder too 'important' to drain, Guy Barnett says

Mr Barnett's comments come after the United Nations Environment Programme praised a local push to drain the iconic lake, saying it aligned with the organisation's ecological restoration objectives.

The Restore Pedder campaign is being led by former Greens leaders Christine Milne and Bob Brown.

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Lake Pedder was inundated in 1972 to accommodate three new dams in Tasmania's South-West.

This latest effort to have the lake restored follows a push in the 1990s, which was scuttled after a House of Representatives inquiry found there were no "compelling biological conservation or environment protection reasons for implementing the restoration proposal".

Mr Barnett said restoring Lake Pedder would "likely result in significant impacts on environmental, social and economic values".

"Lake Pedder is vital for Hydro Tasmania's renewable energy infrastructure, contributing around 40 per cent of the water used in the Gordon Power Station and powering over 50,000 homes and businesses each year," he said.

"Lake Pedder plays an important role in maintaining Tasmania's energy security."

Tasmanian Greens senator Nick McKim said the Greens would wait until the Lake Pedder Restoration Group completed an ecological management plan and a legal scoping study before thinking about moving for a Senate inquiry into the issue.

"Restoring Lake Pedder would put Tasmania on the front page of every news website in the world," Senator McKim said. "It would genuinely be one of the biggest rewilding projects the world has seen."

"When the 1995 House of Reps inquiry was done it became a platform for a lot of quite outrageous claims to be made against restoring Lake Pedder, which were unsubstantiated.

"There's lots of carbon in ... the peat soils and other vegetation and soil types in the Lake Pedder area and we certainly need to be looking at conserving that carbon."