The bans that have closed native forestry in Victoria and Western Australia, along with the campaign to extend them across NSW and Tasmania, rest on misinformation and a flawed promotion of science that cannot be squared with the published evidence. That is according to lead author John Raison, a former Chief Research Scientist at the CSIRO with nearly five decades studying native forest ecology, writing in the journal Australian Forestry alongside fellow former CSIRO scientists Sadanandan Nambiar and Glen Kile and University of Melbourne hydrologist Leon Bren, who together have more than 200 years’ experience in the field.
As it stands, just 0.05 per cent of Australia’s 132 million hectares of native forest is harvested in any year, the authors point out, a figure equal to about 1.5 per cent of the net harvestable area and one that sits awkwardly beside anti-forestry campaigners’ claims of wholesale destruction. The harvested coupes are scattered and non-contiguous, and the law requires each to be regenerated and monitored.
The review puts the case against native forestry down to misinformation, a flawed use of science, and the exaggeration of occasional management failures, and finds no basis for the campaign’s central demand. “There is no scientific basis for imposing a total ban on harvesting,” Raison told Wood Central.
Rather than back the closures, Raison and his fellow scientists argue the opposite — that there is a case for reversing bans in some jurisdictions and modestly increasing the harvestable area elsewhere, as a warming climate and a deepening domestic wood shortage raise the cost of leaving productive forest locked up. The six adverse claims against native forestry that they evaluated, ranging from deforestation to threats to water yield and quality, are each found wanting when the evidence is weighed at the landscape scale.
[IN-TEXT IMAGE 1 — Huon valley regrowth sequence 1989–2002] Caption: Early phases of regeneration after clearfall harvest and slash burning of wet forest in the Huon valley, southern Tasmania, between 1989 and 2002. (Source: Sustainable Timber Tasmania)
The charge that harvesting equals deforestation draws a firm rebuttal, on the grounds that almost all harvested stands are regrowth, regenerated and monitored under legislated codes of practice rather than cleared for other land uses. A sequence of images from the Huon Valley in southern Tasmania, taken across thirteen years from 1989, shows a clear-felled and slash-burnt coupe replaced by dense young forest.
At the landscape scale, accounting for the dynamics of growth and the harvest-and-regrowth cycle, the authors say that sustainable harvesting leads neither to forest degradation nor to deforestation. The same evidence, they argue, undercuts the broader claim that managed native forests are being run down.
Carbon has become a major rallying point for activists, and it is here that the review is at its bluntest, dismissing the idea that ending harvesting would generate saleable carbon credits. The Australian Climate and Biodiversity Foundation has put that abatement at more than one million tonnes of CO₂-e a year for NSW, worth roughly $100 million, yet the authors calculate that all logs harvested nationally carry only about 2.5 million tonnes of CO₂-e — 0.6 per cent of Australia’s total net emissions — with a full life-cycle analysis showing sustainable harvesting aids mitigation rather than driving emissions.
That conclusion presses directly on the NSW government’s proposed Great Koala National Park, which the review says rests on contested science. Recent CSIRO survey work suggests national koala numbers may be up to 10 times higher than earlier estimates, with NSW data putting the state’s population near 274,000, and drone and acoustic surveys finding densities broadly similar within national parks and in adjacent harvested forests.
Harvesting in dispersed coupes has little bearing on the extent or severity of wildfire at the landscape scale, the review finds, whilst well-planned fuel-reduction burning cuts the area burnt by one hectare for every three treated. The long record from south-west Western Australia makes the case plainly: as the area treated by prescribed burning fell away from the 1960s, the area lost to bushfire climbed.
Melbourne’s water supply is another recurring alarm, and the authors are equally firm that fears of a logging-driven shortage in the city’s catchments rest on falsehood and misinformation. A long-used catchment model, they note, has for years overstated how much water regrowing forest actually uses.
A blanket ban on harvesting would only deepen a supply problem the country already faces, with wood-product imports reaching $6.5 billion in 2023–24, compared with $2.7 billion in exports and an estimated 2.5 million new homes needed by 2034. Plantations are no quick substitute, the authors argue, given a softwood estate static at about 1.2 million hectares for two decades and a first-year bill of roughly $1.5 billion to close Victoria’s native forest industry.
Native forests where harvesting previously occurred formed a net carbon sink of 35.7 million tonnes of CO₂-e in 2021, on the authors’ figures, equal to 8 per cent of Australia’s total emissions that year. The authors say regrowth forests make a significant contribution to meeting Australia’s emissions-reduction targets, and warn that propaganda built on the flawed use of science is undermining the case for managing native forests for community benefit. “There is a strong case for walking back from this,” the authors conclude.
For more information: Raison, R. J., Nambiar, E. K. S., Kile, G. A., & Bren, L. J. (2026). Australia’s native forests can be sustainably managed for wood production together with other important forest values. Australian Forestry. https://doi.org/10.1080/00049158.2026.2663997
