Restoring Forests and Rewilding lutruwita / Tasmania
Policy Principles
1. lutruwita/Tasmania forests must be managed in accordance with the principles of intergenerational equity, the precautionary principle, carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation and respect for the traditional ownership of lutruwita’s palawa peoples.
2. Tasmania’s public native forests have immeasurable value for the Tasmanian people, for carbon sequestration, oxygen production, water supply, biodiversity, the Brand, and as shared places for recreation and appreciation. They should be protected and managed for these purposes.
3. Ecological principles and scientifically robust information should guide forest management.
4. Investment in forest protection, restoration and ecologically underpinned management should be increased substantially, as part of a broader commitment to reversing the species extinction crisis, expanding skills and jobs and strengthening rural and regional economies.
5. Only plantation grown wood is considered as renewable.
6. Achievement of best practice plantation management throughout Tasmania is needed to minimize adverse impacts on local communities and local biodiversity, air, soil, water quality and carbon sequestration.
Background
Lutruwita/Tasmania has some of the most spectacular, biodiverse and carbon-rich forests on Earth. They tell a story of ancient Gondwana, have been shaped over millennia by the palawa, and are now scarred by decades of rapacious greed.
Our incredible remaining forests are the shared common wealth of peoples everywhere, and we are their stewards. We must protect what is left and restore what is lost.
Recreational access to forests inspires and sustains our communities. Imagery from our forests underpins our clean, green brand, and the protection of forests sustains our wildlife, including unique and curious creatures that exist nowhere else.
Forested catchments help to secure clean, reliable water supplies for communities, for agriculture, and the environmental flows needed to sustain healthy ecosystems. Forests help regulate and moderate water flows, mitigating floods and flooding impacts and alleviating low flow levels during drought.
While Tasmania has significant areas of native forest protected in secure, formal conservation reserves, including the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area (thanks in no small part to conservation campaigns and the Parliamentary work of the Tasmanian Greens), many areas that meet World Heritage or other reserve criteria remain under-protected or are being logged.
Incremental conservation gains have increased the size of the forested reserve estate on public land, including though the Regional Forest Agreement (1997), Tasmanian Community Forest Agreement (2005) and Tasmanian Forest Agreement (2012). However, native forest logging and major party support for the ongoing destruction of native forests has consistently hobbled efforts to comprehensively conserve all eligible native forest areas.
Meanwhile, the Earth is experiencing an extinction crisis, the first in history directly attributable to human activity. Australia and Tasmania are no exception and forest-dependent species continue to be pushed towards extinction due to a lack of Government interest and regulation, and ongoing native forest logging and burning.
Critically endangered species like the swift parrot and giant freshwater lobster languish without long-promised ‘recovery plans’ to identify actions needed for a path to species survival. Native fauna populations continue to decline due to logging and its associated impacts.
Parallel with the extinction crisis, climate change indisputably presents the greatest challenge for this and future generations. Protecting forests is the only credible means to capture and store carbon available to humans. This is a simple, effective and common-sense step in the complex journey towards meaningful action to combat global heating and the fires, drought, floods and pestilence that are already impacting on life around the world.
As stewards of this island’s living forest ecosystems, the complex web of life they sustain and the climate solution they offer future generations, we have a solemn responsibility to turn around an unfolding ecological and human tragedy. And, we have the tools to do so in our hands.
An assault on Nature
The detrimental environmental impact of native forest logging is now beyond credible contention. Peer reviewed scientific papers and expert advice have repeatedly highlighted the impact the logging and burning of native forests has on human health and wellbeing,[1] species decline,[2] wilderness values,[3] water quality[4] and a warming climate.[5]
Forestry Tasmania (now ironically trading as Sustainable Timber Tasmania) has now twice failed its application for Forest Stewardship Certification (FSC) and issues pertaining to logging old growth and swift parrot nesting and foraging habitat remain unaddressed.[6]
Using taxpayer funds given explicitly to progress FSC accreditation,[7] Forestry Tasmania has taken almost a decade to make its case and has repeatedly failed when assessed against both the international and Australian accreditation standards.
While Forestry Tasmania does enjoy ‘Responsible Wood’ (and consequentially, PEFC) accreditation for its operations, these schemes are widely discredited and not seen as a reliable measure of environmental sustainability.[8]
These accreditation schemes are industry-led[9] and have approved practices now comprehensively rejected, such as the poisoning of native wildlife with 1080, the conversion of native forests to plantations, and the clearfelling and burning of high conservation value forests, including oldgrowth and rainforests now recognized as of World Heritage quality.
In Tasmania, recommended upgrades of the Forest Practices Code’s biodiversity protections have been long-ignored. It remains common practice for expert advice recommending against logging due to environmental values (such as swift parrot habitat) to be overridden by regulators and for logging to proceed.
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A Just Transition out of Native Forest Logging |
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We will end native forest logging and post-clearfell burning of native forests on public lands and establish a Just Transition Team in the Department of State Growth. This team will assist native forestry workers and businesses transition to processing plantation-grown timber or other activities, such as reforestation, carbon conservation, reserve management, retraining and career reorientation. |
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Industrial Forestry and impending native forestry collapse
Native forest logging in Tasmania has been in structural decline since 2005,[10] despite being heavily subsidised by the taxpayer and afforded unwavering political support from the major political parties at the state and federal levels.
Native forest logging accounts for less than half of the jobs attributed to the forestry sector in Tasmania.[11] Employment levels have steadily declined since 2005 (figure 4.6.1).
Figure 4.6.1: Jobs in Forestry 1984-2021[12]
While the jobs profile of the industry somewhat stabilised post 2013, this is largely due to native forestry job losses being offset by growth in the plantation sector. Tasmania’s plantation sector now accounts for 80% of total production by volume.[13] Figure 4.6.2 shows that native and plantation hardwood timber have effectively swapped places in terms of value over the last decade.
Figure 4.6.2: Value of harvested wood by source[14]
While this highlights the ever-diminishing significance of the native forest logging sector in an industry-wide context, it must be noted that hardwood plantation sector is still largely limited to woodchip and whole-log export with minimal downstream processing occurring in Tasmania.
The failure to develop on-island processing options that can transition the native forest sector to a plantation focus is significantly due to the ongoing subsidisation of logging on public lands. Tasmanian stumpage is half what is achieved in other jurisdictions due to uncommercial contracts with Forestry Tasmania’s customers.[15] Forestry Tasmania itself has also argued that the 137,000m3 minimum sawlog quota is not commercially viable.[16]
Subsidising logging on State owned lands through Forestry Tasmania results in the sale of high-quality native forest logs to sawmills for less than it costs to produce them. This has stifled market-driven investment in plantation management and innovation in the processing of solid wood products from Tasmania’s hardwood plantation estate.
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Value-adding in the Plantation Sector |
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We will assist the plantation sector to meet the solid wood supply needs of processors and the market through regulatory and other settings that encourage pruning, thinning and other management actions that maximizes Tasmanian production of plantation-grown high-quality sawlogs. |
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So long as Tasmanian sawmills are fed a diet of cheap, high quality sawlogs from the state-owned forest manager, while also receiving grants for mill upgrades to process native forest logs, research and development that allows processing of plantations will never be implemented.
However, Forestry Tasmania’s own wood supply data[17] demonstrates the transition to processing high quality plantation timber can and must happen immediately or the Tasmanian timber processing sector will decline further.
With a legislated minimum supply of high-quality sawlogs from public land set at 137,000 m3, wood supply data demonstrates that this is not, and never again will be, met purely from State-owned native forests. A fact acknowledged by the board of Forestry Tasmania.[18]
Wood projection tables (figure 4.6.3) demonstrate that in 2022, the volume of native forests sawlogs will drop to just over 100,000m3 and by 2026, it will be somewhere below 75,000m3.
That said, according to Forestry Tasmania’s Three Year Wood Production Plan, one million tonnes of native forest woodchip will be exported from Tasmania this year to non-FSC markets such as China. Similar volumes are projected to be exported in the following years.
Figure 4.6.3: Predicted yield of high-quality eucalypt sawlogs[19]
In 2019/2020 Forestry Tasmania supplied 119,000m3 of native forest sawlogs to the processing sector. No high-quality sawlogs were supplied from hardwood plantations. [20]
To meet the legislative minimum, data tables demonstrate that sawmills currently unprepared, with no history or commercial experience in processing plantation sawlogs will be supplied their contracted volume in part with plantation-grown sawlogs from 2022.
In short, a long history of political and financial support for native forest logging at the expense of the plantation sector and the Gutwein Government’s promise of a new native forest logging nirvana is slowly but surely walking Tasmanian sawmills off a cliff.
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Transition to Plantation Timber |
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We will end all public subsidies to native forest managers and processors to facilitate a rapid transition to plantation timber and to assist the plantation sector compete and replace demand for native forest logs. |
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Loss-making, highly subsidised native forest logging
Since the election of the Liberal Government, large-scale subsidies going to Forestry Tasmania have totalled at least $185 million, all of which have been disguised in various forms. This includes a direct equity transfer of $30 million from TasNetworks,[21] $45 million from the privatisation of state-owned plantations,[22] and the transfer of a $110 million defined benefit liability to the State Government.[23]
This is on top on annual funding from the Government of $10 million,[24] and an undisclosed amount of money being spent on Forestry roads.[25]
Predating the current Government, since the signing of the Tasmanian Regional Forest Agreement in 1997, hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer funding has been injected into the operations of Forestry Tasmania to maintain its solvency.
In 2018, respected Tasmanian economist John Lawrence estimated Forestry Tasmania’s total 20 year accumulated loses at $1,396 million, including direct cash losses of $454 million.[26]
Native forest logging is a loss-making industry in Tasmania. It has been propped up by the taxpayer for decades, taking money out of essential services in health, housing and education.
It is past time the Tasmanian people received a real return on this island’s remaining forests, left standing and protected, their carbon reserves increasing in value by the day.
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Protecting and Restoring Tasmanian Forests |
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We will repurpose Forestry Tasmania and appropriate staff to a new agency, Forests Tasmania, tasked with restoring degraded forest landscapes to maximise carbon sequestration and managing lands to conserve existing and future carbon stores in Tasmania’s forests. We will formally protect under Tasmania’s Nature Conservation Act 2002 all areas of Future Potential Production Forest (FPPF) land, including the creation of a new Aboriginal-owned and managed National Park tenure that will allow the return of land to the Aboriginal Community as national parks. |
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Rainforest logging for specialty timber
For decades, the supply of ‘specialty’ and craft timber was essentially a by-product of the woodchip industry and the clearfelling of tens of thousands of hectares of old growth forests and rainforests in areas that should have been reserved.[27]
As a result, specialty timber production was heavily subsidised, with wood-chipping and the taxpayer underwriting road access and harvest activities. This created a supply and market dynamic where an unlimited supply of high-quality, cheap specialty timber flooded the market.[28]
Excess timber to market demand was torched in logging burns in the rush to convert native forests to plantations or even-aged native forest crops.[29] Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of high-quality specialty timber was burned on the forest floor over many decades with the specialty timber sector largely complicit in this waste and destruction.[30]
Despite an overdue and irreversible change in the structure of the logging industry, expectations of ongoing timber supply that mirrors historical price, volume and quality profiles continue to be sought by some advocates within the rainforest timber sector. These expectations are unrealistic, but they have generated a predictable political and ideological response from the Tasmanian Government.
Rainforest logging for specialty timber has now been approved in formal conservation reserves managed by the Parks and Wildlife Service, via a Tasmanian Special Species Management Plan (2017)[31]. This includes Conservation Areas and Regional Reserves, including areas that were explicitly protected from rainforest species logging in 2005.[32]
This Management Plan is inherently unviable. Logging 600-year-old rainforest trees cannot be considered sustainable and is, in essence, a mining operation that has been demonstrated to have negative impacts, like disease and drying, on surrounding retained rainforests.
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Banning Special Species Logging in Reserves |
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We will abandon the Specialty Timber Management Plan (2017) and ensure all forms of reserves under Tasmania’s Nature Conservation Act (2002) explicitly prohibit all forms of timber harvest, including selective logging. We will also reintroduce a ban on the cutting of live Huon pine trees and restrict all Huon pine supply to salvage operations only. |
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Rainforest timber use is a non-essential, fashion-oriented decision by architects and consumers. Social license issues are paramount and rainforest timber products logged from gazetted conservation reserves will attract significant attention and taint supply from other, more socially accepted sources like salvage.
Significant volumes of rainforest timber are currently held by private citizens in collections that are unlikely to ever be put to best use. Similarly, species like celery top pine and myrtle continue to be used for low-value purposes such as house cladding and flooring.
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Non-Harvest Craft Timber Management |
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We will repurpose Island Specialty Timbers (IST) as a standalone specialty timber manager responsible for the sourcing, storage and sales of specialty timber at full cost recovery. IST will – · Run a program to salvage of specialty timbers from logged coupes and road lines, and expand production of hydro wood. · Instigate a purchase program of unused, historically-harvested specialty timber. · Discourage the use of specialty timbers for low-value uses such as house cladding and flooring. · Establish a full cost-recovery program of specialty timber selectively logged and salvaged from the Carbon Capture and Conservation land tenure, utilizing only existing infrastructure and minimizing disturbances. · Establish a program to identify and best utilize macrocarpa pine that is cut from Tasmanian farmland and maximise the substitution of macrocarpa for traditional uses of celery top pine. |
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Illegal firewood harvesting at significant volumes occurs in public forests across Tasmania, including gazetted conservation reserves. This has had a significant impact on the habitat of threatened species. Illegal firewood harvest is formally identified as a threat to species such as the swift parrot and the forty-spotted pardalote.
Forestry Tasmania shows little interest in containing these illegal practices on land it manages and the Parks and Wildlife Service appears to have limited resources to address it. While the problem is well known, it is rare that illegal wood hookers are caught and charged by Tasmania Police, although there has been one recent high-profile example.[33]
As a consequence, stolen wood is flooding the local market for firewood, affecting the viability of legitimate firewood suppliers.[34] Customers usually have no real idea if the wood they are buying has been legally and sustainably harvested or not.
An appropriately resourced, cross agency system of licensing, monitoring and reporting for firewood sellers is clearly needed and long overdue. This should be matched with a community education campaign, to inform consumers of the dangers of firewood theft and implore concern over the providence of firewood purchases.
To provide a sustainable resource for firewood harvesters into the future, we need to establish a system of post-harvest firewood salvage and sales from Tasmania’s plantation estate and plantation processors.
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Illegal Firewood Harvesting strategy |
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We will implement an Illegal Firewood Harvesting Strategy. This strategy will involve increased monitoring and enforcement efforts, a licencing, monitoring and reporting system for all firewood sellers, a post-harvest firewood salvage scheme, and a community education campaign to promote sustainable firewood harvest and purchase, as well as inform the public of the impacts of firewood theft and sale. |
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The role of forest carbon in mitigating climate change
Tasmania’s recent achievement as a jurisdiction with a net negative emissions profile is significantly due to incremental reforms in the forestry sector (figure 4.64.). This includes the steady decline in the logging of native forests over recent decades, particularly the cessation of the conversion of native forests to plantations, the collapse of global native forest wood chip markets, the close of the Triabunna woodchip mill and the subsequent Tasmanian Forest Agreement.
Figure 4.6.4: Forest carbon stock change (kt C02-e) and significant forestry events[35]
Native forests store carbon in biomass, wood debris and soil. Logging native forests releases much of this carbon into the atmosphere, through disturbance, forestry burns and short-lived forestry products like paper - the dominant product derived from Tasmania’s native forest logging.
While regrowing forests will then, over decades, recover some of that carbon, it will never be allowed to reach original levels as harvest rotations will again render stored carbon released emissions. Native forest logging is, therefore, a net carbon emitter. It is exacerbating global heating.
Conversely, forests allowed to grow to maturity, free from rotational commercial harvest continue to sequester carbon from the atmosphere and store it in a living ecosystem. Tasmania’s public forests are estimated to contain 1,100-1,400 Mt CO2e – between 70 and 80 per cent of carbon stored in all vegetation in Tasmania.[36]
Thus, protecting native forests from logging benefits Tasmania’s carbon accounts and global efforts to combat climate change two-fold. It reduces carbon emissions, commensurate with forest type and the level of logging reduction, and it increases carbon sequestration and long-term storage.
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Carbon Capture and Reforestation |
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We will end the Regional Forest Agreement and lobby for a Carbon and Biodiversity Conservation Agreement with the Federal Government. We will rezone Permanent Timber Production Zone Land to a Carbon Capture and Conservation tenure under the management of Forests Tasmania. These forests will be protected from logging and legislatively tasked with securing and conserving the maximum amount of carbon possible. We will institute a program of reforestation of logged lands, employing reskilled forestry workers, to increase carbon sequestration activities on both private, and Carbon Capture and Conservation tenured, land. This will be aligned with ecosystem restoration and Job Guarantee programs to maximise public and environmental benefit. |
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Monetising forest protection
In a climate and biodiversity crisis, carbon sequestering and life-giving native forests are unarguably worth more standing. Protecting them would deliver a win-win for the environment, climate, communities, Tasmania’s Brand and the economy.
Protecting forests from logging avoids emissions, avoids taxpayer subsidy, conserves habitat and protects native animals, enables carbon sequestration and opens opportunities to earn credits and an ongoing financial return from carbon markets.
Commissioned by a Green Minister for Climate Change, the 2012 Forest Carbon Study compared the potential for sequestering carbon through a range of forestry scenarios. The study found that ending native forest logging has by far the highest potential for emissions avoidance and carbon sequestration.[37]
Under the right settings, avoided emissions and increased sequestration from the protection of native forests in Tasmania could return hundreds of millions of dollars to the Tasmanian budget over decades. This can underwrite carbon management, conservation and reforestation activities.
The Federal Government’s Climate Solutions Fund (CSF - formally Emissions Reduction Fund) pays to reduce emissions and sequester carbon. According to its website, the CSF –
“offers landholders, communities and businesses the opportunity to run new projects that reduce or remove greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere. In running a Climate Solutions Fund project, you can earn carbon credits and sell them to the Australian Government, or to business and other private purchasers. Each carbon credit represents one tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent greenhouse gas emissions stored or avoided.”[38]
Despite being the simplest and most effective way to both avoid emissions and store carbon, a reduction in native forest logging is not eligible under the CSF. Political and ideological blockages have prevented the creation of a methodology and acceptance of protecting forests as being an eligible activity under the CSF.
Should a change of policy or government reverse this barrier, significant financial opportunities would open to Tasmania.
A 2016 study seeking to quantify the financial return to Tasmania if avoided native forest logging were an eligible activity under the CSF[39] has been updated in 2021. At a per tonne value of $15.94 CO2, the study estimated a net present value returns to Tasmania of $881 million.
This includes $324 million for the protection of Future Potential Production Forest land and $556 million for ending logging in Permanent Timber Production Zone land.
As these figures represent earnings out to 2050, the study estimates annual returns of between $46m and $52m until 2031, and $20m to $25m from 2031 to 2050.
Compare this return with the annual drain on Tasmanian coffers, the destruction of critical habitat and the massive contribution to global emissions and the choice is clear.
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Monetising Avoided Native Forest Logging |
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We will work with other State Government’s to change the rules and methodology relating to the Climate Solutions Fund, to ensure the carbon emission and sequestration benefits from avoided native forest logging are monetised and funds flow annually to the Tasmanian Budget. |
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The Role of Fire
Fire has been both a natural and human-induced phenomenon in the Tasmanian landscape for millennia. Some vegetation communities in Tasmania have a complex relationship, indeed dependency, on fire and this adaption and interdependency is recognised as an explicit value of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area.[40]
Conversely, other vegetation types are fire sensitive and the introduction of fire in these areas can be catastrophic. This includes alpine conifer communities, rainforest, deciduous beech, sphagnum moss and organic soils.[41],[42]
Fire intensity and frequency in some forest types can change the vegetation structure, perversely making these forests more flammable and dangerous over time.
Parallel with this, accelerating climate change and the consequential phenomenon of drier forest and soil profiles, longer and more intense fire seasons and more frequent catastrophic fire danger days makes fire management more challenging and fire risk significantly greater.
Similarly, logging native forests is proven to increase the risk and intensity of fires. A study of the 2020 Black Summer fires found logging had a profound effect on some areas that burnt.[43] Studies confirm logging in wet forests creates a rise in fuel loads, increases drying and reduces the canopy height, all increasing the risk and intensity of fires.[44]
Across the peak summer fire period, within the production forestry estate there exists hundreds of recently logged coupes comprising forest slash, bark, sawdust and logs deemed uncommercial and thus left behind awaiting a so-called regeneration burn in Autumn.
These sites present significant fire risk during summer, as both points of ignition (arson) and high intensity conflagrations within a broader fire landscape.
Contrary to popular rhetoric from logging supporters, logging does little to increase the ability for human intervention in certain fire conditions. This is even more so with increasingly frequent and intense fires caused by global heating, as the scarifying Australian summer inferno of 2019-20 confirmed.
In Tasmania, the 2019 Riveaux fire slowly snaked its way through a patchwork of logged coupes, regrowth and informal reserves over days, unable to be contained despite roads, logged forest, pre-constructed firebreaks and considerable firefighting resources. The fire went on to burn the Tahune Airwalk and Southwood, a massive wood processing facility on the Huon River.
Understanding how to manage fire risk in a warming climate is essential, as is the need to work closely with palawa peoples to make better use of fire in a warming, drying climate.
We need to change land management practices to keep communities, wilderness and infrastructure safe in the future.
Prescribed burns
Post-logging forestry burns are regularly and deliberately conflated with ‘fuel reduction’ burns despite being part of the silviculture process. They are lit to remove post-logging debris (including valuable logs), sterilise the soil of non-commercial tree species and prepare an ash bed for the sowing of an even aged eucalypt crop.
The Tasmanian Greens support most types of prescribed burns, however, that support is conditional and it should be understood there are five, distinct types of deliberately-lit burns which are often confused. They have very different aims and objectives.
Cultural burns are burns carried out by members of the Aboriginal community that can have multiple aims. Cultural burns seek to build and share cultural knowledge and thus Aboriginal community connection to Country.[45] They can also be used to manage fuel loads around communities and infrastructure, and improve or restore the ecological health of vegetation communities.[46] The Tasmanian Greens support cultural burns and other activities that improve Aboriginal community health and connection to Country.
Ecological burns aim to maintain or enhance the ecological properties of vegetation communities - such as button grass or heathland. An example of a recent ecological burn is the prescribed burning of buttongrass around Melaleuca in the Southwest National Park, to enhance seeding to assist the survival of the orange bellied parrot.[47] The Tasmanian Greens support ecological burns.
Back Burns are a fire fighting technique carried out at lower-risk periods of an active fire event to attempt to contain and control an uncontrolled fire.[48] The Tasmanian Greens support back burns provided they are well planned, strategic and fully informed about the ecological values in the area, and fire sensitive vegetation is not being sacrificed to protect a lesser ecological or human determined value.
Fuel reduction burns aim to protect people and/or property by deliberately introducing managed burns well in advance of any fire emergency. [49] The Tasmanian Greens support fuel reduction burns provided they are underpinned by an understanding of the ecological values, and maintain the ecological integrity of vegetation communities in remote areas. The Tasmanian Greens do not support arbitrary volumetric targets for fuel reduction burns.
Logging (regeneration) Burns are a key feature of the commercial logging and silvicultural regeneration of native forest coupes. They are very high-intensity burns, that release vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere via deliberately designed, high altitude smoke and particulate columns. They kill native wildlife, destroy coarse woody debris relied upon for survival by invertebrates and other species, and terminate naturally occurring seed banks. Escaped logging burns regularly destroy retained and surrounding vegetation in a coupe. Forestry burn smoke blankets local communities for months of the year, impacting on human health and wellbeing, as well as recreational and industrial pursuits such as tourism and winemaking. The Tasmanian Greens do not support logging burns.
Fire has long played a critical role in the Tasmanian landscape, but we need to learn how to work better with fire to protect our communities, ecosystems and infrastructure on a heating planet. To do this, we need to end deforestation and dangerous logging burns, harness palawa knowledge and heed the science.
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Evidence-Based Burning Regime |
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We will abolish informal prescribed burning targets and ensure all fuel-reduction burning considers ecological values and the protection of the ecological integrity of identified areas. We will Initiate and support efforts to expand and integrate Aboriginal cultural burning in all aspects of fuel-reduction planning and delivery in Tasmania. |
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Apiary
The Tasmanian Greens strongly support the beekeeping sector in Tasmania and acknowledge the critical role it plays in sustaining agricultural productivity. Without pollination services, Tasmania’s cherry, apple, berry and many other horticultural pursuits would not exist.[50]
Despite the significance of the beekeeping sector and the importance of the leatherwood resource for sustaining hives during off-season periods, apiarists have witnessed the systematic destruction of leatherwood stands in Tasmania’s production forests.[51]
No amount of campaign, advocacy or inter-industry agreement has been able to stop the loss of leatherwood in Tasmania’s forests. Over decades, thousands of hectares of leatherwood-rich forests, importantly in commercially accessible areas, have been destroyed in logging and burning operations across southern, central and northwest Tasmania.
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Supporting the Beekeeping Sector |
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We will maintain access to existing apiary sites across Tasmania’s reserves and Carbon Capture and Conservation forest estate, including financial assistance for the maintenance of the existing road network, in recognition of the vital service the beekeeping sector provides the public through pollination of agricultural crops. We will promote and prioritise, as part of Forests Tasmania’s reafforestation program, the re-establishment of leatherwood tree resources in areas commercially viable and already accessible for the beekeeping sector. |
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Conclusion
For almost four decades, the Tasmanian Greens have been here to stand with the community to defend lutruwita/Tasmania’s forests.
We always will.
We stand with the palawa, peaceful protestors and with people young and old, who recognise the ecological and ethical imperative to protect the forests that are left and restore what is lost.
Our plan to protect and restore lutruwita/Tasmania’s forest is the only viable path forward, for the planet, its people, our budget and the Tasmanian timber industry itself.