Region Archives: International

The Tasmanian Government welcomes Forico’s second Natural Capital Report released today. This is a tangible example of the Tasmanian timber industry’s commitment to responsible and sustainable management of our forest assets. Forico is Tasmania’s biggest private sector forest management company and was the first forest company in the state to publicly release their natural capital accounts. The report clearly shows the economic and social benefit this company alone delivers to Tasmania and Tasmanians each year amounts to $400 million going directly into Tasmanian businesses and $3 billion going to the community more broadly.

HELSINKI — Growing a productive forest requires hard work and commitment. Correctly timed thinning improves the forest’s growth conditions and makes trees grow sturdier more quickly. Thinning supports forest biodiversity when part of the forest is always in the growth phase. “Thinning can also be called improvement felling, as it ensures the productivity of the forest, and the high quality and health of trees,” says Tuomo Moilanen, forest specialist at Ponsse. “The better a forest grows, the better it sequesters carbon. Thinning ensures that trees can be processed into high-quality products that sequester carbon for dozens or even hundreds of years,” says Moilanen. In cut-to-length (CTL) harvesting, trees are already processed up to the intended length in the forest, enabling thinning to be ecological… without needing to move around unnecessarily in the forest.

Europe’s biggest timber nations lined up at an Austrian conference on Tuesday to reject a climate strategy proposed in Brussels to sustainably regulate how woodlands are managed.  Forestry ministers from Germany, France, Finland, Slovakia and Sweden, as well as industry representatives declared Tuesday after meeting in Vienna that the European Commission should steer clear of any rules that restrict national control over the continent’s 640 billion-euro ($742 billion) timber business.  “Forest policy rests in the hands of EU member states and that’s how it should stay in the future,” said Austria’s Agriculture Minister Elisabeth Koestinger, who hosted the meeting, at a press briefing on Tuesday. The group sent a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen outlining their red lines. …But ministers who convened in Vienna said the commission plan risks undercutting employment and depriving its economy of resources. Monitoring of forest inventories should remain the province of national governments, according to Koestinger. 

There is growing pressure on the Tasmanian government to rethink its native forest management practices, after new University of Tasmania research found regenerating forests are more prone to high-severity bushfires than mature forests.   The study focused on Tasmanian eucalyptus forest, aiming to assess how fire danger changes as forests mature, to help predict bushfire behaviour.  Wildfire ecologist James Furlaud said the study found fire risk in older forests was much lower than in young forests, and clear-felling — the practice of removing all trees from a coupe — could increase fire risk.   “The older forests, especially really old forests, had moister understories, and because they had taller trees in the canopy it was much harder to have these very large, intense fires in older forests than in younger forests,” Dr Furlaud said. 

Although forest cover in the EU has grown in the past 30 years, the condition of those forests is deteriorating. Sustainable management practices are key to maintaining biodiversity and addressing climate change in forests. Taking stock of the EU’s 2014-2020 forestry strategy and of key EU policies in the field, a special report from the European Court of Auditors (ECA) points out that the European Commission could have taken stronger action to protect EU forests, in areas where the EU is fully competent to act. For instance, more could be done to combat illegal logging and to improve the focus of rural development forestry measures on biodiversity and climate change. Funding for forested areas from the EU budget is much lower than funding for agriculture, even though the area of land covered by forests and the area used for agriculture are almost the same.

EU countries, industry and lawmakers are pushing back against the European Commission’s new forest strategy, criticising a lack of balance between the different roles performed by forests – economic, social and environmental. Governments … are concerned that the forest strategy encroaches on their rights and ignores the multiple uses of trees… Climate and biodiversity are all properly dealt with in the strategy but the economic and social aspects were not given sufficient consideration. …For the forestry industry, the European Commission strategy places too much emphasis on the global warming mitigation role of forests and their capacity to act as “carbon sinks”… This overlooks the ability of forest biomass to replace fossil fuels in transport or provide sustainable wood-based alternatives …Wood -based products cannot replace fossil fuels if trees remain standing, said Timo Jaatinen Director General, Finish Forest Industries Federation. [replanting will] ensure a renewal of the stock while forming a closed carbon cycle.

Prince Charles and Queen Elizabeth

In 2022, Queen Elizabeth will celebrate her Platinum Jubilee, marking 70 years since she took the throne. In May, the queen joined with Prince Charles to announce a program called Plant a Tree for the Jubilee, urging people across the United Kingdom to celebrate the Windsors by improving the environment. On Friday, the queen and Charles did their first in-person engagement to promote the program at an elementary school near the family’s Balmoral estate in Scotland. …The jubilee tree-planting project is just one of the initiatives begun under the Queen’s Green Canopy, an organization that is also doing a variety of projects to raise awareness about the U.K.’s ancient woodlands. Charles is the group’s patron, and its board is composed of forestry and environmental experts. The organization is encouraging people to begin planting their trees between October and March, and it has supplied a step-by-step guide on its website.

Additional coverage from the Royal Forestry Society: The Queen’s Green Canopy – Junior Forester Award

The Daintree has been returned to the Eastern Kuku Yalanji people in Queensland in a historic ceremony on Wednesday. The world’s oldest living rainforest saw official ownership once again bestowed to traditional custodians. In the co-management agreement with the state government, the rainforest, as well as Hope Islands, Kalkajaka, and Ngalba Bulal national parks make up over 160,000 hectares of land formally recognised as ancestral ground… While a portion of the land has been already recognised under native title since 2007, the new development will see more oversight, input, involvement, and healing for First Nations communities. In 1988, UNESCO listed the Daintree as a World Heritage site for its biodiversity… “It’s an opportunity to work our way up … we will be looking at long-term gains out of this, but we need to work our way up to get our people trained up confident,” incoming chair … Chrissy Grant said.

In mid August, the leader of the Republic of Sakha, in Russia, told residents not to go outside, and to avoid breathing unfiltered air if at all possible. Wildfire smoke filled the streets of Yakutsk, reducing visibility to less than a block. Smoke spread to the North Pole for the first time ever. It spread across the Pacific Ocean. Fires in California this year stunned forest stewards with their size and intensity. But they look puny compared to the fires raging in Siberia… A report from Greenpeace, based on statistics from Russian fire services, estimates that 65,000 square miles have burned — more than six times the area burned in the United States so far this year. At their peak, in August, 190 blazes were spreading across Sakha and Chukotka, Russia’s farthest northeastern regions. 

Landowners stand to create a $1trn investment opportunity by the end of this century, through action to restore degraded forest ecosystems, according to a new report. Co-authored by forest-tech startup Terraformation and consultancy Frontier Economics, which is led by former Climate Change Committee lead Matthew Bell, the report plots the ever-improving business case for forest restoration. It states that several factors have led to a growing restoration economy, including the growth of corporate interest in carbon offsetting and subsequent launch of bodies designed to ensure robust carbon markets for nature-based projects… Other factors which have made reforestation more popular and easier to invest in include increased research into biodiversity loss and restoration and falling costs of forest restoration technologies… All of these factors mean that net financial returns resulting from investment into reforestation schemes could surpass $84bn by 2030…

The Democratic Republic of the Congo  (DRC)is finalizing an ambitious—and risky—new plan for the future management of its rainforest, which, as the second largest on Earth after the Amazon, plays a key role in storing Earth’s carbon. Among other measures, the new strategy will lift the long-standing moratorium on new industrial logging permits, Environment and Vice Prime Minister Eve Bazaiba tells National Geographic … The shift comes just weeks before the November UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland, where the DRC is hoping to find substantial funding for its plans. The government is seeking $1 billion for forest protections from the Central African Forest Initiative (CAFI), a coalition of donors including Norway, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.The move to allow industrial logging is part of a wider program to manage the forest…

The Morrison Government has welcomed a unified approach from state and territory forestry ministers to work together to grow the forest estate and secure the future of the Australian forestry industry. Speaking after a meeting of ministers, Assistant Minister for Forestry and Fisheries Jonno Duniam said the Morrison Government believed that collaboration with jurisdictions and industry was key to growing the forestry industry going forward. “I was pleased to bring together forestry ministers today from across the country and hear directly from industry representatives about the opportunities and challenges for the industry going forward,” Assistant Minister Duniam said. “Over the last three years the forestry industry has demonstrated its resilience, continuing to kick goals despite the Black Summer bushfires and interruptions to international trade.

Timbeter participated in the program of the business delegation of the state visit of the Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid to Kenya. During the visit from 7 September to 11 September, a series of co-operation meetings were held to introduce the Timbeter solution to Kenyan government agencies, companies and UN agencies in Nairobi. On September 11, a high-level seminar on the importance of digital solutions in sustainable forestry was organized in cooperation with the Kenyan State Forest Service. Timbeter began activities in Kenya as early as 2019, after the application was introduced at the UN Environment Assembly in Nairobi. Among the countries interested in Timbeter was Kenya, and cooperation with the Ministry of the Environment and the State Forest Service started. In 2020, Kenya formally confirmed its desire to use the Timbetter solution, and a two-year cooperation project was launched this year to digitalize Kenya’s forestry. 

…The summer of 2021 will be remembered as one of the worst European wildfire seasons on record, with more than 350,000 hectares — and counting — burnt across Italy, Greece and Spain, nearly three times the average over the past decade.   …Driving this increase is a demographic shift that has been underway in Europe for more than a generation.  “We do not respond to the root of the problem,” said Castellnou. “Our society is becoming an urban society.”  “The young generation is leaving the countryside,” said Goldammer.  …As a result, he said, land once intensively farmed and occupied is being abandoned and reclaimed by new, rapid-growth forests that fuel larger fires, Goldammer said. In Greece, forest cover has actually increased, despite successive devastating fire seasons. …Worse, century-old land management techniques, like controlled burns of brush when clearing fields for farming, have become incredibly dangerous as heat waves dry out the countryside.