Only a tiny share of the private native forest estate along the New South Wales coast and tablelands is both available and commercially suitable for sustainable timber production, with new spatial modelling putting the workable area at 0.6 million hectares, or 17 per cent of the 3.6 million hectares assessed. That is according to Nick Cameron, study co-author and manager of the federally funded North East New South Wales Forestry Hub, in research published Monday in Australian Forestry.
The modellers then stripped out everything the industry cannot touch: forests legally off-limits, too steep or rough to work, environmentally protected, or commercially marginal. What remained split heavily north, with 0.5 million hectares in the northern private native forestry (PNF) code region, equal to 20 per cent of its gross private forest, while the southern PNF region held 0.1 million hectares, or 9 per cent.
“Much of the existing assessed private native forest is not commercially available and suitable,” Cameron said, citing small net harvestable areas, low-value species, poor site quality, and remoteness from mills.
Lead author and spatial modeller Masoomeh Alaibakhsh, of the NSW Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development, interrogated more than 40 spatial datasets across six weighted parameters, among them net harvestable area, haul distance to mills, slope, terrain roughness, species value, and site productivity. Each property carried more than 25 hectares and a net harvestable area above 15 hectares, the point below which the cost of floating in harvesting equipment and building roads outweighs the value of the timber recovered.
Private native forestry in the north is more likely to be economically viable than in the south, the study found, with the northern region holding more large and very large properties within reach of more mills. Properties in the south’s lowest suitability class sit an average of 98 kilometres from the nearest wood processing facility, compared with shorter hauls in the north.
Even inside the workable 17 per cent, timber values cluster in the middle, with nearly 62 per cent of properties rated medium and 0.2 per cent very high. Two or more decades typically pass between light selective harvests, the study noted, meaning much of the available resource is regrowth not yet ready to cut.
It comes as the Minns government makes permanent the closure of 176,000 hectares of state forest in the Great Koala National Park, a September 2025 moratorium that overnight hit six of the region’s 25 mills and more than 300 jobs, including Hurford Hardwood’s Casino and Kempsey operations. Canberra last month approved the carbon method, funding the park, ending harvesting across the reserve, and leaving private forests as the fallback for the mills that remain.
“Not all wood products can be produced by the plantation industry,” the research states, with Australian native timber production down nearly 70 per cent over the past two decades. Hardwood plantations remain far from a universal commercial substitute for a country that already faces a wood shortage, the authors say.
Blackbutt and spotted gum, species valued for their durability, stability, and low internal defects, supply the flooring and decking trade and the poles that carry the state’s electricity network. Private native forests were routinely harvested for sawlogs, poles and girders, sleepers, and fencing timber, the paper notes, with tall moist blackbutt and spotted gum forest weighted into the model’s top commerciality class.
Cameron’s hub last week hosted the Commonwealth’s regional forestry hubs in Newcastle, where new data showed Australia now uses twice as much elevated-risk imported timber as wood from its own native forests. Constrained domestic supply, as the meeting heard, pushes buyers towards higher-risk imports from conflict and deforestation zones.
From a conservation standpoint, the other side of the ledger is that 83 per cent of the assessed estate, five hectares in every six, is likely to be managed chiefly for environmental and social values rather than timber. Landholders, agencies, and processors now have property-scale suitability rankings to steer where limited harvesting effort is best spent, an output the authors describe as the first comparison of ranked results across two discrete forest regions.
Cameron said the private estate cannot meet the expectations placed on it, with just 0.6 million hectares of the 3.6 million assessed hectares rated commercially workable, and much of that is still decades from harvest.
For more information: Alaibakhsh, M., Cameron, N., Stone, C., & Samuel, J. (2026). Mapping and evaluating the suitability of the private native forest estate in northern and southern NSW, Australia, for commercial timber production. Australian Forestry. https://doi.org/10.1080/00049158.2026.2694856
