Forestry academics have issued a warning over the Victorian Government's decision to scale back the harvesting of native timber forests in the lead up to a 2030 ban.
University of Melbourne Professor of Forest Ecology Patrick Baker said Victoria's silviculture research community was not consulted on the decision.
"What we should be thinking about is how we can shift our management towards what is best for the forest and how we can set up forests to be as resilient as possible to the future, because in 10 years we're going to have to walk away from them," Professor Baker said.
VicForests, the agency responsible for stewardship of forests on public land, did not meet the criteria for Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification late last year.
FSC certification is one of two certifications used to assess the sustainability of wood harvesting. Officeworks and Bunnings say they will only be sourcing wood from FSC certified businesses by the end of the year.
University of Melbourne Associate Professor Craig Nitschke said the 2030 forestry ban undermined the push for more sustainable harvesting practices.
"Does VicForests keep going the way of FSC certification, or do they not, especially when they're in areas impacted by fire?" he said.
"It might be quite easy to keep with the status quo and I would argue the status quo was a scorched earth policy, especially in East Gippsland."
But other forestry academics say bushfires justify the acceleration of the ban on native timber harvesting.
Professor David Lindenmayer AO said more frequent and severe bushfires caused by native timber harvesting were a reason to speed up the transition to plantations.
"We need to have a good long look at what's happening in the industry, the resource is declining because of fire and logging, we need to make the transition [to plantation timber] and we need to make it very quickly, otherwise we'll see what happened after the 2009 fires which was that the industry massively overharvested the resource," he said.
'Insane' short-term thinking
Professor Baker said he was also concerned the Government was not thinking about long-term effects of climate change.
"In a world where climate change is such an existential threat on so many different fronts, to not acknowledge that wood is probably one of the greatest renewable resources we have and therefore to not think carefully about sustainable wood resources, I just think is insane," Professor Baker said.
"The facile notion that you can just stop harvesting native forests and put everything in plantations and that will meet all of our wood supply needs is naïve."
Professor Lindenmayer disagrees.
"Eighty-eight per cent of all sawn timber in Victoria comes from plantations — for roof trusses, for furniture, for floorboards and the like — so it's straightforward to make that transition,” he said.
"The Victorian Government has set aside $120 million to make that transition, it’s good for rural communities, it’s good for the protection of communities from fire risks, and it gives people good and meaningful to protect communities through firefighting."
