While most were on Christmas holidays in late 2021, the Queensland government quietly released its latest Statewide Landcover and Trees Study (SLATS) on December 29.
It found that 549,844 hectares of "woody vegetation" had been cleared between 2018 and 2019, a significant increase on the previous report which cited 392,000 hectares.
But, depending on which media release you read first, you could be forgiven for thinking there must have been two different reports.
"Producers commended for sustainable land management practices following new vegetation report," thundered the headline by Queensland peak farming body AgForce.
"Deforestation doubles in Queensland according to new data," the Queensland Conservation Council cried.
With consideration, both sides might technically be right, but the actual facts were more complex.
"The interesting thing is that [in] Australia, net forest increased by more than Europe and the USA combined between 2010 and 2020, and that's in the national carbon accounts," AgForce cattle board director and chairman of the Sustainability Steering Group for the Australian Beef Sustainability Framework Mark Davie said.
The 2016 State of the Environment report did report a 1.6 million hectare increase in net forest cover between 2005 and 2012.
Has forest cover increased or not?
But how a forest is defined in Australia is not the same as in other countries, and forest cover naturally fluctuates depending on the climate, so gains aren't always long term.
Ecologist Dr Don Butler spent decades working for the Queensland government mapping vegetation and ecosystems.
He said suggesting forest cover was increasing was "a bit of a misrepresentation".
"It's difficult using just satellite information to tell whether it's a flush of low shrubbery or actually woody vegetation that is more than two metres tall," Dr Butler said.
"There's no way that young regrowth, even if there's enough of it to kind of more than match the loss of mature vegetation, is equivalent to mature native vegetation.
The big consideration this year for the SLATS report in Queensland is that the data was gathered using higher resolution satellite imagery, recording more landscape changes than before.
So comparing this year's report with last year's report isn't like-for-like.
"What we do is told around the world, and we've changed how we're going to report and just broadcast this information into the public space [seemingly] without any consideration as to the damage that this does to the industry."
But Dr Butler said the SLATS data was "one of the few products that have a person look at every bit of change that's mapped".
"That's not the case for the national carbon accounting system or most other remote sensing-based products," he said.
Farmers vs bureaucracy
The Queensland Vegetation Management Act 1999 has long been a contentious and divisive law.
In 2018, under pressure to reduce rising land clearing rates and protect waterways running into the Great Barrier Reef, Anastasia Palaszczuk's Labor Government passed amendments to the Act, redefining "high-value regrowth", introducing new requirements for approvals to selectively clear and banned "broadscale clearing" to create new pasture or cropping areas.
The move saw thousands of farmers take to Brisbane streets in angry protest.
At the core of landholders' concerns was the loss of control over the property they owned.
At the time Minister for Natural Resources, Mines and Energy Anthony Lynham said:
"The Labor government has a long and proud history of delivering nation-leading reforms in vegetation management, dating back to the introduction of the original vegetation management laws in 1999. It was a Labor government that 14 years ago put an end to broad-scale clearing of remnant vegetation here in Queensland. Those reforms delivered the largest single reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in Australia's history and allowed the Howard government to tell the Australian people that we had met our international commitments under the Kyoto protocol. These nation-leading reforms came to an end in 2013 when the LNP set about removing the protections that the Labor Party had built over 13 years."
AgForce's Mark Davie suggests the law change has only increased tension between bureaucrats and landholders.
"I have so many conversations with producers, where we will be in paddocks and they will say, 'I wish I had more trees here', but history has shown them that if you leave the trees there, you lose your property rights."
The Queensland government sought to address this concern by introducing a property map of assessable vegetation (PMAV), which is "a property-scale map that shows the boundaries of vegetation categories on the property".
It was an attempt to reassure landholders that if their land was previously unregulated by the Vegetation Management Act 1999, they could update their property records to make sure that remained the case.
Mulga Lands and Brigalow Belt
The two major bio-regions where almost all land clearing in Queensland occurs are the Mulga Lands and the Brigalow Belt.
Mulga is a small, shrub-like tree, which grows across a huge swathe of the semi-arid western regions of New South Wales and Queensland.
Its vegetation is also often used as fodder by graziers, who will push down strips of trees during drought.
Brigalow is a medium-sized tree that grows over a large area east of the Mulga Lands, from north-west New South Wales to near Townsville in northern Queensland.
It's a nitrogen-fixing native species, and once cleared can create high-value cropping land.
Both these bio-regions have been hugely impacted by agricultural development, with up to 60 per cent of the Brigalow Belt now having been cleared.
But the current reality is that most of the clearing taking place in Queensland is regrowth on grazing land, which is legal.
"You're choosing to selectively manage your vegetation to generate grass and productivity that helps to produce beef but also helps to conserve the environment you have," Mr Davie said.
Indigenous practices on Mulga country
A common narrative shared by some landholders is that the country they are clearing was once managed with fire by Aboriginal people.
"Indigenous management had involved a lot of use of fire and a lot of maintaining of open woodland, and we've since allowed that to regrow," Mr Davie said.
"And there are numerous scientific papers and research papers that have documented that process."
Queensland ecologist Dr Butler said that reflection was "an oversimplification".
"In some regions, especially higher rainfall regions, on the edges of rain forest … we can confidently say that change in fire management, with the disconnection of traditional management from land has led to increases in woody vegetation," he said.
Dr Butler has spent a lot of his career examining survey maps and records from colonial explorers that recounted "dense Mulga" and "thick Brigalow".
"The explorers, who were some of the first white people that go through some of these regions commented on just how hard it was to get their party through some of these regions," he said.
Dr Butler said many landholders he meets cared deeply for their land, and most are doing their best to improve natural systems.
"I don't think that the majority of clearing is undertaken by the broad landholding base, I think actually often it's a few big clearing events that that contribute significantly to the totals," he said.
Won't more trees be needed to offset emissions?
Despite the tension, both environmentalists and farm lobby groups are committed to ambitious emissions reductions.
Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA), for example, has pledged to be net zero by 2030.
So won't more trees need to be left to offset emissions?
Though, a former Government emissions reduction policy expert recently called Australia's carbon offset market "a rort".
"The other challenge is that under the current methodologies, I believe trees and forests start to emit at 25 to 30 years, and break down methane, so that probably makes locking up of land not a climate solution in the long term," Mr Davie said.
"One solution is that we maintain a regenerating landscape, and we thin it to keep it productive."
However Dr Butler said Queensland still had net-positive emissions just from land use, and more regrowth would need to be left to meet the MLA commitment to net zero emissions by 2030.
"In my opinion, so long as the kind of regrowth that's happening now out there, in areas that have been fairly recently cleared, can be allowed to increase [there will be] storage of carbon in the landscape," he said.
"The key thing there is to avoid clearing of large areas of intact mature vegetation, which holds a lot of carbon per hectare.
"So it's plausible, but we're not there yet."
