New research has found that thinning and managing trees through silviculture — or planting trees in alleys on open pastures — can deliver more grass and more harvestable timber over a 20‑year period than a “business as usual” approach without those interventions. And for beef operations with areas of native hardwood timber, such as spotted gum, the analysis showed that retaining and actively managing regrowth outperformed clearing to open pasture on both production and profitability metrics.
Dr Venn said including the management of native remnant and regrowth forest in carbon accounting methodology would provide the incentives needed to encourage landholders to adopt silviculture over clearing, while also unlocking “a vast untapped timber supply” that would reduce Australia’s reliance on imports from countries deemed high‑risk for deforestation, illegal clearing and forest degradation.
A key argument, he said, lies in future “emissions avoidance” — with timber harvested from silviculture replacing emissions‑intensive steel, concrete or plastics in building and construction. “Presently, there is no method that allows you to manage natural vegetation to earn carbon credits,” Dr Venn told the Timber Queensland’s Paddock to Prefab conference this week. “But how is that any different from someone planting trees in a plantation forestry scenario? It’s not. So this should be eligible for carbon credits in the future ACCU methodology.”
According to Dr Venn, international and Australian studies show sustainably managed remnant forest systems can sequester more carbon than strict conservation alternatives, due to diversified carbon pools and the avoidance of carbon‑intensive substitutes in construction. “In the long run, production forests can sequester more carbon than a conservation forest, and that’s played out in many examples all over the world,” Dr Venn said.
As it stands, Australia’s area of state-owned native forest has declined over the past 30 years, resulting in an increasing reliance on timber imports — from 24 per cent of traded wood in 1996 to 46 per cent in 2022. Countries with a high risk of deforestation or illegal clearing make up a substantial share of those imports. “If we’re going to mitigate the climate and extinction crises, we need to supply more of our own timber domestically, rather than rely on high‑risk countries to grow the wood for us,” Dr Venn said.
Queensland’s hardwood timber supply is approximately 260,000 cubic metres of logs per year. Dr Venn said that applying silviculture to thin 16 per cent of the state’s remnant native forests — around 300,000 hectares — could double production to about 520,000 cubic metres every year.
Please note: For more information about Timber Queensland’s Paddock to Prefab conference, click here for Wood Central’s exclusive coverage including the Ministers speech.
