Amid talk of managing forestry and environmental conservation, Labor governments continue the destruction of forests across Australia. Sue Arnold reports.
AUSTRALIA HAS AGAIN been ranked amongst the world’s worst climate wreckers in the latest edition of an influential UN-backed report. The 2024 Sustainable Development Report, recently published by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), assesses national progress towards the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
Receiving one of the lowest scores for “climate action”, Australia ranked fourth-last out of the 168 countries that were scored in the report. Australia was only ahead of Qatar, Brunei and the United Arab Emirates for climate action.
As current Federal and state Labor Governments continue to approve industrial logging in NSW native forests, the ongoing destruction, in terms of climate action, can only be described as collective insanity. The continued destruction of forests in NSW in the face of overwhelming evidence of their critical importance in negating carbon emissions is deeply concerning.
In NSW, the situation is dire with important forests being converted to plantations by an enthusiastic Minns Government with disastrous results.
Within the proposed Great Koala National Park, native forests converted to plantations are being logged, with cascading losses of forest fauna dependent on the converted plantation habitat.
A recent case study of the proposed park led by Dr Tim Cadman demonstrates:
Forest conversion, or the clearing of native forest and its replacement with plantation timber, significantly affects biodiversity. Plantation forestry itself can also have a negative impact, due to the practice of clear-felling, which involves the complete removal of forest canopy, requiring koalas to leave these areas and find suitable habitat elsewhere.
Overuse of clear-fall forestry, notably the creation of large gaps and the subsequent replacement of cleared areas with nonpreferred browse tree species, as well as the removal of favoured koala tree species in native forestry and an emphasis on encouraging the regrowth of secondary, non-favoured, species, have been criticised as incompatible with koala conservation.
The state-owned Forestry Corporation of NSW (FC) oversees over 1.8 million hectares of native forests and around 35,000 hectares of hardwood timber plantations.
Native forest hardwood plantations are often indistinguishable from surrounding native forests and many are the result of natural re-seeding. Some of the plantations currently being logged are 40-60 years old and are being progressively replaced by short-rotation monoculture plantings.
The management of native forest plantations is complex and contradictory. Native forest logging is controlled by the FC and plantation approvals are governed by the Plantation and Reafforestation Act 1999 administered by DPI Forestry.
Under the Coastal Integrated Forestry Operations Approval (CIFOA) as authorised by the Forestry Act 2012, certain conditions relevant to endangered species, such as the koala and greater glider are supposed to provide increased protection from logging. Under the Plantations and Reafforestation Act 1999, which governs plantations, there are no similar provisions.
The process of declaring a plantation creates a familiar bulwark against public citizen action. First off, FC identifies a forested area as a plantation. DPI Forestry gives the okay, confirming the proposed plantation is in a legally plantable area. DPI Forestry is supposed to comply with CIFOA’s weak prescriptions for endangered forest fauna.
Koalas provide an excellent example of the discriminatory nature of plantation legislation.
DPI Forestry is responsible for any breaches as the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) has no powers under the Plantation and Reafforestation Act.
Under the CIFOA, public complaints of FC non-compliance are made to the EPA, which has fined FC several times for breaches, but the record of fines is flimsy. The agency’s response to forest activists’ complaints is selective, slow and often unresponsive. Conservation groups have significant evidence of the EPA’s failures to take action over serious breaches.
Under the Plantations and Reafforestation Act, public citizens can write to the minister for agriculture responsible for DPI Forestry, requesting he/she take action over wildlife concerns. If complainants make contact with the EPA, they are referred back to the DPI and the usual merry-go-round occurs. Sometimes the DPI will undertake a minimal survey, largely a desktop exercise and biodiversity losses are not documented.
Hardwood plantations have historically been indistinguishable from native forests. Forest fauna can’t read or notice the different descriptors. Given the growth time of these older plantations, which is 40-60 years, plantations make great habitats.
A recent paper, co-authored by several experts led by Dr Cadman, explained the damage that forestry practices involved in plantation planting create:
The destruction of natural ecosystems and their replacement with plantations, for such commodities as palm oil, soy beans, or pulpwood, referred to as conversion, is one of the most significant causes of global deforestation. Plantation establishment is occurring at the expense of natural or semi-natural ecosystems and planted forests have in some instances become the antithesis of places for biodiversity conservation This is having long-term effects on ecosystems, carbon and nitrogen cycling, biodiversity, and productivity.
The bureaucratic tangle is described:
‘In NSW, three different government bodies have oversight and management of forests (DPI, 2022), the Forestry Corporation of NSW (FCNSW — the primary manager of native forests and plantations), the Department of Primary Industries (DPI — largely responsible for plantation oversight and authorisation), and the Environment Protection Authority (EPA — responsible for the oversight of native forests, but not plantations).’
'Regrettably, the current regulatory environment in the NSW plantation estate facilitates incremental deforestation and forest degradation, with cumulative impacts at the landscape level,' says Dr Cadman.
He describes the proposed Great Koala National Park as “Swiss cheese” with a mix of clear-felled plantations and forestry compartments.
NSW Environment Minister Penny Sharpe made it clear in Parliament last year that the Government supports plantation forestry:
I make it very clear that Labor supports plantation forestry. Those trees were put in the ground to be harvested. We must be very clear about what is plantation and what is native forestry and the way in which that is managed throughout the process of creating the Great Koala National Park. It is not Labor's intention to have plantation forests included within the Great Koala National Park.
For all of the talk about the support for plantation, we have plantation trees that have been growing for many years that are ready to be harvested. We must work with that. Obviously, we need rules about how that harvesting occurs, as well as an absolute precaution in relation to any threatened species.
But it is important to draw the distinction because I am asked about it every single day. We must be very clear that we will be very careful. We are working closely with Forestry Corporation on the operation of planned forestry activity into the future.
Ongoing Labor double-speak on forestry issues is worthy of a royal commission.
Sue Arnold is an IA columnist and freelance investigative journalist. You can follow Sue on Twitter @koalacrisis.
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