How best to manage Australia’s large and diverse native forest estate has been controversial for decades. The management options deployed by agencies have been researched, field-tested and improved over a long period.
Debates have escalated about the merits of active forest management, especially timber harvesting and how best to manage threats from the increasing frequency of wildfires. Unfortunately, opposition to forestry practices by environmental activists has become highly politicized, coordinated, ideological, and based on the selective application of available scientific information, often free of genuine practical-lived experience.
There is a disturbing failure to acknowledge differing scientific evidence, practical experience and opinions, even by some academics, and thus misinformation is perpetuated.
ABARES estimated that, in 2016, Australia had 132 million hectares of native forest cover, of which 28.1 million hectares are considered suitable for wood production on public and private land. After accommodating local restrictions, the net area of multiple-use public forest available for harvesting was about 5 million hectares. Of this, in 2015-16, only 73,000 hectares (1.5%) were harvested. Over the past 20 years, the national wood harvest from native forests has fallen by 75% to 2.5 million cubic meters in 2022-23, approximately equally split between sawlogs and pulp logs.
Here, we identify and provide brief commentary on the six key areas of misinformation used to oppose the sustainable management of native forests.
Key areas of misinformation and controversy:
1. Harvesting of native forests is an uneconomic burden carried by taxpayers
This simplistic criticism ignores that harvested forests are managed for multiple values and that wood processing and value-adding industries support significant employment and generate economic benefits for rural communities. For example, in NSW for 2023-24, when native forests operations incurred a net financial deficit of $29 million, about $23 million of this was spent on ‘community service’ operations across about two million hectares of public forest – including maintaining road, bridge and track infrastructure, provision of fire protection, production of clean water and maintenance of facilities to encourage visits by local communities and tourists.
A study by Ernest and Young covering the 2021-22 period showed that the hardwood (native forests and plantations) growing and processing sector across NSW employed nearly 9000 people and created about $2.9 billion in gross revenue ($1.1 billion in Gross Value-Added). Native forests contributed more than 75% to these benefits. Further, well-managed native forests also provide significant amounts of water to regional communities, towns, and cities. If native forest managers received income from this water, they would become highly profitable enterprises.
The conservation forest estate (national parks and other conservation reserves) also requires substantial public funding for its management, which can be higher per hectare than for managed multiple-use native forests, where revenue from timber sales contributes to some management costs.
2. Harvesting is deforestation and destroys forests.
Critics frequently and deliberately misinform by claiming that harvesting involves intensive removal of trees from “old” forests with high conservation value – whilst, for decades, almost all harvested forests have been regrowth stands regenerated after prior harvesting or wildfire. Harvesting is permitted only in planned and well-identified small parts of the forests. It is also asserted that harvesting leads to permanent loss of forest (deforestation) even though every harvested hectare is required to be effectively regenerated under legislated codes of forest practice.
Regeneration methods are well-researched and applied, and results are monitored so that corrective action can be taken when needed. Most native forest harvesting now uses selective removal of trees, not clear felling. Sustainable harvesting is not forest clearing but mischievous propaganda continues, equating sustainable harvesting and regeneration practices with deforestation. Forests are a renewable natural resource. Regenerating multiple aged forests in the landscape also provides a greater diversity of habitat for native animals and plants.
3. Harvesting native forests damages forest ecology, especially threatened species such as koalas.
Here again, critics deliberately ignore scientific evidence and that considerable effort is made to apply science-based harvesting prescriptions so as mitigate impacts on the forest and the wider environment. For example, research by NSW Primary Industries, including monitoring of koala populations at 224 sites over a 7-year period, concluded that well-regulated timber harvesting or low-severity fire did not reduce koala occupancy rates. Harvesting prescriptions ‘provided sufficient habitat for koalas to maintain their density immediately after selective harvesting and within 5-10 years after heavy harvesting’.
Recent aerial surveys show that koala densities and occupancy are similar in both National Parks and adjacent harvested forests – questioning whether the creation of the proposed Greater Koala National Park (GKNP) in northeast NSW is necessary. Recent extensive surveys by CSIRO in northern NSW also show that koala numbers may be up to 10 times greater than estimates made earlier, suggesting that koalas should not be regarded as ‘threatened’ in the region.
Extensive, high-intensity wildfires are a much greater threat to forest biodiversity than harvesting or the use of fuel-reduction burning. The fires of 2019-2020 killed billions of native animals and significantly reduced the populations of many threatened species. In addition to damage to vegetation and wildlife, high-intensity fires cause major soil erosion and damage streams and water quality. Environmental damage can persist for decades or centuries but is commonly forgotten by environmental activists soon after wildfires.
4. Expanding plantations can quickly and easily replace the wood currently sourced from native forests.
It is naïve in the extreme to suggest, as is frequently done that it is easy to transition to plantation sources for all wood products needed in Australia. The area of hardwood plantations has declined during the last decade (mainly due to conversion back to agriculture). The softwood plantation estate has been static over the previous 30 years. Australia has a serious and increasing wood shortage that is delaying and increasing the costs of building new houses, and this will worsen given the ambitious national plans to address the ‘housing crisis’. Research by Forest and Wood Products Australia suggests we must build about 2.5 million new dwellings by 2034 to keep pace with population growth and address historic unmet demand. Shortfalls in wood supply are projected and will either be met by imports or the use of steel or concrete with very high embedded carbon emissions. Claims that additional construction timber can be easily sourced from existing or new plantations are flawed and unrealistic.
Despite about a 75% decline in wood supply from native forests during the last 2 decades, plantation expansion has not been stimulated. Securing appropriate land, community support and private investment to enable expansion is a major challenge. There is also about a 20–30-year delay between plantation establishment and saw log harvest creating major financial and logistical impediments. It is also unrealistic to suggest that the private hardwood plantation sector can be directed to process currently harvested trees onshore when the plantations were established to meet a more profitable export market. Nor are the main eucalypt species planted suitable for commercial sawlog production.
Harvesting cutbacks lead to more imports. Forest and Wood Products Australia estimated hardwood imports into Victoria increased by 40% over the period 2019-23 following the announcement and then closure of the native hardwood industry. Most imports were sawn timber and moldings from countries such as Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, China and USA.
5. Harvesting and prescribed fuel reduction burning increases forest flammability and threats from wildfire.
Extensive wildfires are major threats to life and property as well as most forest values (soil and water, carbon stocks, timber supply, biodiversity). Millions of hectares of densely stocked young eucalypt and acacia trees have regenerated after the Black Summer wildfires in SE Australia – critics of prescribed burning claim that such areas should be managed for many decades without further application of timber harvesting or prescribed burning. Adopting such a strategy will present increased wildfire risks for communities and ecosystems.
The repeated claim that native forest logging increases flammability and consequently the risks from high severity wildfire at landscape scales has been categorically discredited in three detailed published analyses of fire severity and spread during the Black Summer wildfires of 2019-20. These demonstrated that prior logging had little effect on either the extent or severity of wildfires over very extensive areas in NSW, Victoria and the ACT.
Recent ‘theory’ claiming that prescribed burning promotes understory ladder fuels thereby making eucalypt forests more flammable, rather than assisting with fire suppression, has been strongly questioned. A 2025 review of these claims published by the Commonwealth Forestry Association concluded that field evidence does not support such claims, with long unburnt areas burning at high intensity and areas regularly prescribed burnt having almost no understory. Strategically applied prescribed burning is an important part of the toolbox for managing the risk and impacts of intense wildfires in Australia’s native forests.
Opponents of fuel reduction burning are advocating a response only strategy to bushfire management as a conservation strategy. This strategy has been tried in the fire adapted forests of the Western United States where an aggressive fire suppression strategy was pursued for decades. This is now recognized as a failure because of negative impacts on forest health and the widespread destructive wildfires that have occurred in the last few decades. Low intensity burning and thinning of dense forests are now being introduced on a broad scale together with mechanical fuel reduction. A leading US ecologist recently stated in the journal Nature that ‘wildfire suppression (in fire prone systems) is a deeply misguided and unsustainable conservation strategy’.
6. Harvesting causes large emissions of carbon and is bad for the climate.
Reliable assessment of the complete carbon (C) balance associated with harvested native forests requires the application of a full Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) framework that accounts for temporal changes in C stock at the harvested site; C emissions associated with managing and harvesting the forest, transporting and processing harvested wood products (HWP); storage of C in wood products in service and in landfill; any C emissions saved by using residues to generate energy otherwise produced by combustion of fossil fuels; benefits of substituting wood for more C-intensive materials such as steel, aluminium or concrete in construction; and the C footprint of wood products sourced from overseas to replace Australian production
A comprehensive review in 2024 concluded that so far only one Australian study has used a complete LCA. It concluded that harvesting of sustainably managed native forests and the subsequent use of forest biomass to produce HWP or energy can make a positive contribution to mitigating national net C emissions. Other studies claiming that native forest harvesting increases net C emissions have either been incomplete, used inappropriate parameters to estimate components of the total C balance, or overestimated the rate of C gain in older forests and the ability of unharvested forests to store C for the long-term under threat from wildfires, and consequently have underestimated the C benefits due to wood harvest and use. This has led to the erroneous conclusion, and subsequent propaganda, that cessation of harvesting would provide better C outcomes than sustainable management including wood production in selected areas.
These findings mean that a proposal to establish a new INFM (Improved Native Forest Management) methodology to estimate C emissions savings from the cessation of harvesting in native forests lacks any scientific logic. The method development is backed by the NSW government’s Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, and it has been prioritised by the Federal Government via the Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee for further development. Claims that a total ban on harvest of native forests will yield large amounts of monetised C credits are fanciful.
Conclusions
Many decades of research and practical experience are used to guide and support the sustainable management of our native forests. Despite this, some still advocate a total ban on the harvest of native forests and claim that science supports that. However, ‘theoretical’ claims that timber harvesting increases the intensity of wildfire, leads to greater net C emissions, reduces catchment water yields and threatens koalas have all been discredited in several detailed scientific analyses during the last few years. The use of strategically applied prescribed burning as part of integrated approaches to fire management has evolved over the last 60 years and assists with early suppression and reducing impacts of wildfires – and in improving safety for fire fighters.
We have the knowledge, practical skills and regulatory framework to sustainably manage our native forests, including for timber harvesting on small carefully targeted areas. Most harvested native forests are now subject to sustainability certification using international best practice methods. Rural communities and the nation can benefit in a number of ways by adopting science-based policies and management practices. Forest practices systems such as those used in Tasmania are world leading and delivering continuous improvements.
The public, policy makers and politicians should be wary of the increasing selective and unbalanced use of science wrapped in ideology to promote anti-forestry views.
About the authors
- Dr John Raison and Dr Sadanandan Nambiar AO are former CSIRO Chief Research Scientists. Over several decades, they have led research and assisted policymakers and managers of forests in Australia and internationally.
- Dr Glen Kile AM is a former Chief of the CSIRO Division of Forestry and Forest Products. He oversaw important native forest and bushfire research conducted by CSIRO.
- Dr Tony Bartlett, AFSM, has extensive experience in managing native forests and is a leading expert in forest fire management and suppression.
