Monthly Archives: February 2019

Victoria’s state-owned forestry corporation has been told to suspend the release of new areas of native forest for logging, in a decision the timber industry says has put scores of regional small businesses in peril. The Andrews government has intervened to stop VicForests putting out its next timber release plan, due to concerns about threats to protected wildlife and the impact of recent bushfires and climate change on the state’s forests. The timber release plan – a document that identifies areas, called coupes, that can be logged over the next three to five years – is already more than a year overdue. On Thursday VicForests said the Andrews government had directed it not to proceed with a timber release plan until further policy work was completed. …Internally, the Victorian Environment Department has been pushing for an end to native timber harvesting within all old-growth forests – a recommendation the Andrews government has not run with.

The company has agreed to a request by the NRW state government, signing a one-year moratorium on logging. The state asked RWE to halt logging to ease tensions at the site, which has become a flashpoint for protests.  North Rhine-Westphalia’s (NRW) State Premier Armin Laschet announced a moratorium on logging at the contentious Hambach Forest on Wednesday. Speaking to the state parliament, Laschet said that he had received written confirmation that energy giant RWE would not move forward with plans to deforest the site. Laschet told parliamentarians, “This means that there will not be any felling of trees until the autumn of 2020.” Laschet had asked for the moratorium as a way to calm a tense standoff between environmentalists and RWE. The Hambach Forest site has been the scene of violent clashes between police and environmentalists protesting to protect the woods by erecting treehouses and chaining themselves to RWE equipment.

When it comes to forests and woodland areas, Denmark is rather well off compared to a lot of countries. However, all is not entirely well down in the woods. A new report from the Danish environment protection agency’s national watchdog NOVANA reveals that the forest floor in a number of the EU-protected forests is showing evidence of species depletion. Signs of this were seen in four of the 10 types of woods that have been looked at, reports DR Nyheder. The main reason seems to be commercial forestry. Although the forests are on the protected list, it is still permitted to exploit them commercially. “We’ve examined the finest and most irreplaceable Danish forests and they are the ones showing the most signs of being cultivated. There are simply fewer habitats and less biodiversity in them,” said one of the authors of the report, senior researcher Rasmus Ejrnæs from Aarhus University.

We can agree that deforestation continues to be a massive global problem — in 2016, the world lost over 29.7 million hectares (73.4 million acres) of tree cover, an area almost as large as Italy. That doesn’t even include the loss of grasslands, wetlands, and other important ecosystems. But what exactly is deforestation? For that matter, what is a forest? This is not just semantics. The lack of clarity around defining forests generates difficulties in how we measure deforestation — and in turn, how we stop it. Does a patch of brand-new seedlings count as a “forest”? Should we count three trees or three hundred? What about woodlands with lots of open grassy clearings? And some trees are lost each year due to forest fires or log harvesting, but the forest will regrow. We generally don’t count that as deforestation, but it can look similar.

Peter Gooday

The Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES) has released Australia State of the Forests Report 2018. Acting Executive Director, Peter Gooday, said the five-yearly report covered all areas of Australia’s forests—public and private forests, forests managed for production and forests managed for conservation. …“In 2015–16 Australia’s forest area was 134 million hectares, and has increased by almost 4 million hectares over the previous 5 years. …“The area of commercial plantations did reduce, however, by 44 thousand hectares or 2 per cent between 2010-11 and 2014-15. “In 2015-16, the value of logs harvested from native forests and commercial plantations was $2.3 billion, and the value of production of wood products industries was $23.7 billion. “Australia’s trade in wood products experienced strong growth, with imports and exports combined exceeding $8 billion for the first time in 2015–16.

…NASA recently released new satellite photos and confirmed that the world is becoming a greener, and leafier place — thanks largely in part to the efforts by India and China to plant new trees.  In the past two decades, NASA reports, the planet’s green leaf area has increased a total of 5 percent, which is equal to about two million square miles or the entire area of all of the Amazon rainforests.  As Chi Chen — the study’s lead author and graduate researcher at Boston University’s Department of Earth and Environment — noted, China and India being leaders in the additional vegetation is especially unexpected given they are the two countries with the two largest populations.

AUSTRALIA — Environmentalists frequently talk about logging in terms of how many “football fields” or “soccer pitches” are felled. But in the lead up to last year’s Victorian state election, the Greens released a policy paper that measured logging in a slightly different way: MCGs [Melbourne Cricket Grounds]. “Five MCG’s worth of native forest are being logged in Victoria every day,” the paper claimed. …While the policy paper was unclear on just which measure of the MCG it used, the common practice of using a football field to measure logging activity provides a reasonable basis for assessing that the claim would be calculated against the size of its playing field — which is just over 2 hectares. Nearly 3,000 hectares of native forest was logged in Victoria in 2016-17, and forest harvesting crews generally work Monday to Saturday. This equates to around 4.7 worth of MCGs logged every working day.