After 11 Million Hectares Burned, Logging In Victoria's Native Forests Extended Another 10 Years
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Following this survey, Premier Daniel Andrews, the current state leader of the Victorian Labor party, announced that logging in old-growth forests in Victoria would cease by 2030. About 90,000 hectares (222,000 acres) of native forest would be protected, and an additional 96,000 hectares (237,000 acres) of forest would be exempt from logging because it provided critical habitat for the greater glider (Petauroides volans), a tiny, threatened marsupial that shelters in tree hollows. The Andrews government also said it would invest A$120 million ($78 million) to help the logging industry transition to a plantation-based supply over a 30-year period. “This industry is going through a transition,” Andrews said in a statement. “It means it’s not good enough for us to merely cross our fingers and hope for the best. We need a plan to support workers and support jobs. With a 30-year plan for transition, we’re providing much-needed certainty for workers and their families.”
Victoria’s RFAs has also been undergoing a so-called modernization process that promises to reinforce existing protections of forests, to provide “more timely interventions” to protect vulnerable species.” In April 2020, the Victorian government extended the state’s RFAs for another 10 years, shortly after the state went into lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “I think the fact that it was released … in the middle of when everyone’s focused on COVID-19 means that they know that people weren’t going to be happy with it,” Rice told Mongabay. “They wanted to get it out of the way in a low profile way.”
Chris Taylor, a research fellow at the Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University (ANU), said that neither the Andrews government’s 2030 pledge nor the modernization process is doing anything to protect the state’s forests. “Forest management and logging practices are not being reviewed, amended or revised,” Taylor told Mongabay. “Things are going ahead as business as usual.”
Taylor also pointed out that the 2030 logging phaseout date is “really misleading” since that’s the same year that an agreement between the Victorian government and Australian Paper, the country’s big paper manufacturer, runs out. Up until 2030, the state will continue to supply wood pulp to Australian Paper so it can produce office, printing and packaging papers. But if logging continues as it does now, there won’t be much native forest left in 10 years, Taylor said. “They’re literally going to run the forest off the edge of the cliff,” Taylor said. “They’re going to exhaust the resource, and that’s their intent. It’ll be highly unlikely that we will even make it to 2030 in terms of the capacity of the forest to supply wood.”
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https://news.mongabay.com/2020/05/australias-logging-madness-fuels-more-fires-hastens-ecosystem-collapse/