The survival of WA’s hardwood timber industry now hangs by a thread, with the industry’s short-term future now hinges on an environmental assessment of Alcoa’s mining operations and its plan to clear sections of the state’s forest for bauxite extraction.
It comes as Wood Central reported last week that regional towns are suffering from an “exodus” in financial and human capital as communities prepare for a future without native hardwoods.
One of the major storylines of 2023, the closure of the Victoria and WA industry from January 1, 2024, has divided public opinion.
From last week, more than 5 million hectares of native forests have been transitioned from state forests to “protected” conservation parks – removing 600,000 hectares “managed” for timber cultivation.
As a result, the industry in WA has expressed concerns that the decisions made by its government could lead to a hardwood supply shortage, with businesses that remain in the industry still waiting for further details about the much-vaunted “transition plan.”
Now, the WA industry is banking on logs from mine site expansion in the southwest to make up for the shortfall in supply from the closure of more than 400,000 hectares of karri, jarrah and wandoo forests — and a total of 2 million hectares of native forest.
Back in July, Wood Central reported that Alcoa had allegedly failed to rehabilitate any of the almost 28,000 hectares of forest fully cleared during 60 years of mining despite repeatedly stating it had rehabilitated more than 75%.
It found that none of the 28,000 hectares of native vegetation cleared by Alcoa up to 2021 has been found to meet the government’s rehabilitation completion criteria, according to an article in WAtoday.
At the time, there were concerns that the former McGowan government was trading sustainable management of WA’s jarrah forests for bauxite strip mining. Wood Central contributors Gavin Butcher and Jack Bradshaw expressed concerns over rehabilitation practices and the state’s forest plan.
“Based on the current Forest Plan, the government is unwilling to specify a quantity. So, one wonders how it expects industry to plan and invest without any supply commitment,” Mr Butcher exclusively revealed to Wood Central in July.
“One industry destroys forests and is allowed to dig up increasing areas of forest while the other industry which has achieved international certification for sustainability can only pick up the waste from mining.”
Gavin Butcher, former director of the WA Forest Products Commission.
However, WA’s Forest Industries Federation (otherwise known as FIFWA, representing the forest products industry in WA) is hopeful that the sustainable extraction of mining will provide supply chains that rely on supply from karri, jarrah and wandoo state forests with much-needed salvaged timbers for new flooring, furniture, firewood and sawdust.
According to FIFWA CEO Adele Farina, the remaining timber mills could fed by Alcoa’s land-clearing for bauxite mining at its Huntly and Willowdale sites on the Darling Range, southeast of Perth.
“The sawmills, which are reliant on the larger diameter logs, are looking to that mine site clearing operation to feed their mills,” she told AAP.
The Environmental Protection Authority, responsible for conducting the environmental assessment on the lands, has said it will “comprehensively scrutinise” the impacts of Alcoa’s current and proposed mining activities after the WA Forest Alliance raised concerns.
However, this could take up to two years, and in the meantime, Alcoa has an exemption to continue operations during the review, which Ms Farina said could “supply about 10,000 tonnes of logs per annum.”
Further complicating matters, contracts for harvest and haulage have yet to be finalised, with Ms Farina urging WA’s Forest Products Commission (which manages WA’s State Forests) to act quickly to correct a “desperate situation” for those that have not already left the industry.
Last week, Wood Central reported that the Cook-led government was “ill-equipped to manage the transition and are desperately looking to make up the shortfall due to poor public policy.”
According to Ms Farina, “Over the last 12 months, there has been very little product coming from mine site clearing because of the environmental issues between the government and Alcoa … forcing Alcoa to go into already rehabilitated areas, which rarely have any trees.”
This issue and the government’s decision to focus on firewood production – to avoid a wood famine – have meant there has been just a “trickle” of logs.
“Sawmills are under significant financial and viability pressures at the moment, and they’ve got no clarity yet going forward,” Ms Farina said.
The WA’s Department of Water and Environmental Regulation, responsible for overseeing the environmental policy in the forests, said the government’s forest management plan “permits timber from native forests be logged during management activities, including when land clearing is approved mining operations.”
“Alcoa has received approval for clearing for mining operations that will enable timber harvesting by the forest management plan,” a spokesman told AAP-aligned media publications.
In response to media requests, Alcoa said land clearing would be capped at 800 hectares yearly while the environmental regulator conducted the impact assessment. The exemption conditions require the company to double its rehabilitation activities to reach 1000 hectares per year by 2027 and protect black cockatoo nesting trees.
Under the commercial agreement with the state government, Alcoa must also allow the Forest Products Commission to log its land leases before undertaking bauxite mining.
The commission determines what trees are logged and the tonnage harvested. However, Jarrah and Marri have been historically targeted, and Alcoa has not received payment for allowing the logging.
Questions still need to be made about where WA’s long-term hardwood supply will come from, with Ms Farina speculating that it will likely be imported from overseas, which could challenge plans for WA’s low-carbon future.
“A lot of that timber is not sourced from sustainably managed forests,” she said.
“In terms of that furniture grade and feature timber, it will become scarcer and scarcer, and the cost will increase significantly.”
Before the commercial native forest ban, WA’s karri forests were predominantly being chipped and exported overseas, while jarrah sawlog products were mostly sent interstate, the government has previously said.
After receiving government exit payouts, the largest export-focused timber mills and harvest and haulage businesses left the industry in 2023.
The remaining smaller locally-owned sawmills will be able to process jarrah and karri logs from ecological thinning activities for forest health and mine site clearing.
These products will remain in WA for high-end furniture makers and carpenters working on heritage projects.
The Cook government is also investing $350 million to expand WA’s softwood plantations to address a 20-year Australia-wide reduction in plantation estates, which it claims will supply the construction industry for the coming decades.