Friday, March 29, 2024

We need a new shared vision for Australia’s forests: Forestry Australia

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This response is part of the ongoing open debate: Bushfires, Logging, Burns & Forest Management

Forestry Australia members William Jackson, Michelle Freeman, Blair Freeman, Howard Parry-Husbands, Response to Australian Rural & Regional News, 3 December 2021

Recent catastrophic bushfires and reports of threats to species have highlighted concerns about the management of Australia’s forests.

Regeneration after bushfire
Photo: Jamen Percy

Most prominently, there are increasing concerns that forest management is failing to ensure forest health, build ecosystem resilience and protect threatened species.

These concerns are real, but the key drivers are not well understood. A body of opinion and media coverage often presents timber harvesting as the primary threat to forest ecosystems and suggests that creating more national parks will protect threatened species and habitats and reduce the risk of severe bushfires. Yet the situation is far more complex. The fact that the adverse impacts of bushfires and invasive species exist in protected forest areas around the country show that the problems will not simply be solved through simplistic solutions, such as ceasing timber harvesting.

The major direct drivers of forest degradation in Australia include a historical legacy of extensive clearing for settlements and agriculture, as well as ongoing impacts of invasive species, and changes to the frequency and intensity of bushfires. These drivers are being amplified by climate change.

Current information about the impacts of bushfires, invasive species and land clearing on forest health is inadequate and available data does not allow the public to readily monitor the effectiveness of forest management and policy decisions.

To address these problems, we need a new vision for our forests, recognising that Australia has not updated a national vision for forests since the National Forest Policy Statement in 1992. Although the 1992 vision enabled major improvements to forest management and conservation at the time, it needs updating to better reflect what is needed to address climate change, and incorporate the interests, perspectives and practices of Indigenous Australians and the changing views of society.

We envisage that a new vision would move us towards more holistic and integrated approaches to forest management that will enable us to build back better from the 2019/20 Black Summer bushfires and the COVID-19 pandemic. These approaches should be based on active and adaptive management that is informed by science, practical experience and traditional ecological knowledge. In this context, we consider the new vision should be targeted at:

  1. reshaping forest management to enhance ecosystem resilience in the face of climate change,
  2. working with Indigenous Australians to better manage all forests for all values (i.e. water, biodiversity, tourism, forest products etc.), and
  3. realising the opportunity to develop a more circular economy, based on the use and recycling of renewable products that are grown and manufactured in Australia, rather than reliance on more emissions-intensive construction materials, energy products and imported products.

There are three key strategies that we believe will help Australia to achieve these objectives.

Firstly, Australian states and territories should develop integrated land management agencies focussed on more collaborative approaches that bring together Indigenous Australians with government, the private sector and civil society to galvanise resources, skills and knowledge more effectively. These agencies must have increased accountability for all forest values across all land tenures.

Secondly, Australia should develop systems, processes and models that support new active and adaptive approaches to forest management. Humanity has altered forest landscapes to such an extent that they now require active management to ensure forest health and to build resilience to bushfires and climate change. This will require us to use all the tools available to us in an adaptive way, with ongoing monitoring and reporting on all forest values.

For this, we should look to both Indigenous Australian philosophies and international case studies to inform how we move to a new way of managing forests. Indigenous Australians managed Australia’s landscapes for tens of thousands of years, viewing the natural world within an interconnected ecological, cultural and livelihood system. In the United States, there are strong calls for more active forest management to address catastrophic wildfires, and in Europe, adaptive forest management is seen as an integral part of the overall strategy of ‘avoiding the unmanageable and managing the unavoidable’; a clear call for action by European researchers who see adaptive management as critical to society’s response to climate change.

Thirdly, Australia should implement strategies to better integrate credible scientific evidence, practical experience and traditional knowledge to improve understanding of the status, trends and effectiveness of forest management and policy decisions. Comprehensive, reliable, and timely data and information is essential to making informed decisions for active, adaptive forest management and must underpin future policies and practices for all forest values across all land tenures.

A new vision for forests can also drive Australia’s transition to a circular economy that supports human health, the environment, and the economy through avoiding waste and pollution, recycling existing products and materials in use, regenerating natural systems, supporting the development of advanced technologies and creating a more highly skilled workforce. In this context, no other material has the renewability or versatility to both tackle climate change and grow employment, technological innovation and transformation towards a sustainable system than locally sourced wood, from sustainably managed forests.

It is time to move beyond the era of conflict around forest issues and develop a new shared vision for the management of Australia’s public forests. We encourage the Commonwealth and State governments to engage with a broad range of stakeholders to discuss and develop this new shared vision to reverse ecosystem decline and establish Australia as a global leader in forest management and sustainability.

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