Can't see forests for the wood

NSW Greens candidates Susan Stock and Andrea Vickers in front of a marked habitat tree in Doubleduke State Forest.

There’s a large red H spray-painted on the side of a tall tree in Doubleduke State Forest, just south of Coraki. The ‘H’ stands for habitat and has been marked on the tree by Forests NSW during a pre-logging survey of the public forest. Around the bottom of the tree is a large pile of wooden debris consisting of broken branches and stripped bark (called ‘slash’), left behind after the area was logged recently.

Ecologist Dave Milledge stands on a nearby sawed-off tree stump and addresses a group of politicians and members of the public who have come to the forest for a meeting to discuss how our public forests are being managed. The group is being taken on a walk through the logged forest to see areas where breaches of forest logging licences have been found by the North East Forest Alliance (NEFA). Mr Milledge is one of a team of ecologists and botanists who, along with NEFA, have been monitoring the logging practices of Forests NSW over the past few years. He is concerned that illegal logging practices are endangering the forest habitats of native animal species and breaching the DECCW’s Threatened Species Licence and Environmental Protection Licence.

“These habitat trees contain hollows that are used as homes by endangered animals like the yellow bellied glider,” Mr Milledge said. “Under the Threatened Species Act, the logging operators are supposed to move the logging slash to five metres away from the bottom of the habitat tree, so when they come back through to do a hazard reduction burn, the burning debris won’t damage the tree... with logging waste piled up at the bottom, this tree will be destroyed by the hot fire.”

This is one of many licence breaches found in Doubleduke State Forest, and according to NEFA’s Dailan Pugh, just one example of what has been happening in Australian forests for decades.

“Ten years ago, every forest compartment we looked at had breaches, now we are finding a 10-fold increase,” Mr Pugh said. “The standards have gone downhill.”

In NSW, logging operations are regulated by the NSW Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water (DECCW) and Mr Pugh said, despite consistently reporting found breaches to DECCW, not enough has been done to regulate logging operations and ensure compliance with logging licence conditions.

“We found a breach here four months ago and reported it to DECCW and they wouldn’t admit to it,” Mr Pugh said. “Forests NSW have been mismanaging public forests and we need DECCW to get them to do the right thing by taking them to court and prosecuting them.”

In Doubleduke State Forest, the assembled group, including NSW Greens MLC Cate Faehrmann and local Greens candidates, is taken into another area of the forest where there are tree stumps surrounded by flattened bushes and more logging debris.

“This area is defined as an Endangered Ecological Community (EEC) on a floodplain wetland and you are not supposed to harm, pick, touch or disturb EECs,” Mr Milledge said.

“Every tree you are walking across here has been illegally cleared. Any qualified person looking for it should have been able to observe immediately that this is an EEC.”

Mr Milledge said, before logging operations commence, a forester’s duty was to mark off hollow-bearing habitat and recruitment trees and other areas that needed to be excluded from logging, such as water bodies and EECs.

“As you look around here, there are no markings on the trees in this area,” Mr Milledge said. “It’s like a drive-by marking process… the only habitat or recruitment trees which have been marked are along the edge of the track and none of the internal watercourses have been marked. The process of tree selection has been glossed over… done by a contractor driving around in his machine, selecting whatever he wants.”

Mr Milledge said lack of adequate pre-logging marking was commonplace in all the forests they had looked at.

“Forests NSW are rarely audited or prosecuted for breaching their licence,” Mr Milledge said. “It makes a mockery of the licence itself. We need to do more to protect biodiversity.”

Mr Milledge and Mr Pugh said that when they measured how much damage had been done to the area, they found 46 tree stumps that had been cut and 1387 other trees and shrubs that were bulldozed over or damaged.

“This is an offence under the National Parks and Wildlife Act with a maximum fine of over $16 million,” Mr Pugh said. “I have received notification from the NSW Environment Minister Frank Sartor, admitting that this area is an EEC and we are still waiting on action to be taken.”

After concerted efforts and court actions by conservationists in the 1990s, the NSW Government developed codes of practice for logging, which were designed to facilitate ecologically sustainable forest management. In

2000 the Regional Forest Agreement (RFA) resulted in the remaining public forests in NSW being either allocated to reserves in National Parks, thanks to concerted campaigns and national forest policy, or earmarked for logging. At the time, the NSW Government also made future timber supply commitments to the logging industry which saw high quality sawlogs promised in 20-year Wood Supply Agreements (WSAs). In 2004, despite two reviews by Forests NSW that found there was not enough timber available to meet the WSAs, the government committed more timber resources to industry than could be identified in available forests.

“Since then, Forests NSW have had to buy back timber committed in WSAs and compensate mills they couldn’t meet supply commitments to,” Mr Pugh said. “This is part of the reason why Forests NSW are increasing logging unlawfully. With native forest yields declining, Forests NSW is running at a loss of $8 to 14 million per year.”

Mr Pugh said, because there are not enough large high-quality sawlogs available to log, Forests NSW is now logging more of the smaller sawlogs to meet industry commitments.

With the need to log smaller trees, Mr Milledge said logging operators had developed new mechanical technologies to get the logs out, which had resulted in a greater level of disturbance to the forests being logged. The results of some these logging practices can be seen in Doubleduke State Forest, where large areas of forest are now disturbed from the intrusion of machinery into sensitive wetlands and EEC areas.

Joseph Natoli, who earlier addressed the meeting, likened the situation in our public forests to the government’s over-selling of water resources from river systems. Like the rivers that will run dry if agricultural water allocations are not cut back, our public forests are in danger of being degraded or destroyed through over-cutting if something is not done soon to stop it.

While the desire for wood and wood products exists, there will always be a need to grow trees and log them for timber. Tim Smith, a local small scale forest plantation owner, believes that any land that once had loggable forest on it should be reseeded to grow tree plantations as a timber resource.

“We should be converting cow pastures into plantations,” Mr Smith said. “But we need sustainable models for logging them… we can’t keep clearfelling them and we can’t keep growing monoculture plantations that don’t support biodiversity. We need to sustainably and selectively log them, so they are there forever; what’s the point of growing them if you are just going to knock it over?”

With so little native forest left in Australia, it is the process of how these forests are grown and logged that has been the point of contention between conservationists, the logging industry and government for many years.

While Nationals Clarence MP Steve Cansdell said he believes that forests should be logged sustainably and that we are selling timber too cheaply, he also believes that too much forest was locked up by Bob Carr as a result of the RFA process. With the state election approaching and the possibility of a Coalition government holding power, NSW Greens MLC Cate Faehrmann said people should be concerned about the Coalition’s attitude to conservation.

“We’ve had several members of the Coalition in opposition talk about repealing National Parks and repealing some zonings of Marine Parks,” Ms Faehrmann said. “We’ve got the Coalition not hiding the fact that they think we’ve gone too far when it comes to conservation. When Steve Cansdell said ‘we have locked up too much forest’, that’s a very clear indication about where we are going and I think people need to be very concerned about that.”

Greens candidate for Tweed Andrea Vickers said she believes the key issue behind why DECCW has not been monitoring logging operations is a lack of resources.

“There doesn’t seem to be enough people out on the ground to do the assessments and there appears to be a lack of will within the department to find ways to realistically enforce the legislation that is in place,” Ms Vickers said. “The officers only go out with the department’s forestry people; they don’t go out and look with other groups like NEFA, so they never find anything. We need a cultural change in DECCW so that the laws are effectively enforced. We also need to push for funding and identify if there are any officers in the department who are not addressing their roles.”

With a lack of response from the NSW Government and Forests NSW continuing to conduct illegal logging operations, Mr Pugh said more drastic measures are needed.

“NEFA is now calling on the bodies that certify timber sourced from public lands in Upper North East NSW to immediately withdraw their accreditation of Forests NSW,” Mr Pugh said. “In 2006, Forests NSW were issued an accreditation for their operations which meant that timber logged by them was supposed to be ecologically sustainable and lawful in accordance with the Australian Forestry Standards (AFS).

“As well as being from illegally logged forest, the timber sourced by Forests NSW also does not satisfy 17 specific criteria of the AFS, and has wrongly been accredited with a green stamp. People in Australia and overseas are paying a premium to buy AFS certified timber. They have a right to expect that their timber will not be sourced from such acts of environmental vandalism.”