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Australia's Sustainable Forest Management
SFM manages forests to maintain their full range of benefits - environmental, economic and social. The relative importance of these benefits or values will vary depending on the nature of the forest and community expectations.
The concept of SFM has a long and evolving history in Australia. During the 20th Century, public forested areas - initially set aside to stop conversion to agricultural use - were managed to protect a range of forest values.
As our understanding of forest ecology has increased and community attitudes have changed, management practices have also changed to meet sustainable wood yield and maintain and protect other forest values. These management practices are applicable to public and private natural forest and plantations.
Through the 1992 National Forest Policy Statement Australia aims for sustainable management of all its forests for present and future generations, regardless of whether the forest is within a reserve, a production forest or a plantation, or whether on public or private land.
The NFPS adopts three principles as the basis for sustainable forest management:
- maintaining the ecological processes within forests (the formation of soil, energy flows, and the carbon, nutrient and water cycles)
- maintaining the biological diversity of forests, and
- optimising the full range of environmental, economic and social benefits to the community from all uses of forests within ecological constraints.
One of the most important international developments for forest management since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 has been the development of international criteria and indicators for the measurement of sustainable management.
- Criteria describe the broad forest values that society seeks to sustain.
- Indicators provide measures of change in these criteria over time.
Together, the criteria and indicators provide a common understanding of sustainable forest management and a common framework for assessing progress towards achieving it.
How do you measure SFM?
As well as the National Forest Policy Statement, SFM principles in Australia are supported by the development and implementation of codes of practice for forest harvesting, forest certification and environmental management systems. Australia also supports SFM through its commitment to continuous improvement through research and development, and education and training by various national institutions.
A key initiative to support SFM has been the 20-year Regional Forest Agreements between the Commonwealth and four State Governments.
Sustainable forest management is one of the main aims of the RFAs. The RFA process included the first independent, expert assessment of the systems and processes for sustainable forest management in each RFA state.
Using the information from the expert assessments, each RFA commits governments to improving SFM processes and practices, and to measuring and reporting their progress. This is a priority for the implementation and monitoring of RFAs which, in the five-yearly reviews, will include an assessment of progress in improvement in sustainable management of forest values.
Another recent key activity is the development of an Australian Forestry Standard as an objective benchmark for forest management. The standard was developed to enable Australia to compete in the international market place where consumers are increasingly demanding verification that timber and wood products have come from sustainably managed forests. Certification of forest management is one of many tools that have emerged to provide this sort of assurance.
The standard provides a basis for voluntary and independent certification of forest management practices in Australia. It applies to wood production from native and plantation forests, whether publicly or privately owned.
The development of the Australian Forestry Standard involved a wide range of stakeholders including scientists, community groups, forest owners, forest industries and governments, and includes public consultation on a draft standard.