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Science the biggest loser from Tasmanian World Heritage decision

By Mark Poynter - posted Thursday, 17 July 2014


Last month, the United Nation's World Heritage Committee took less than 10 minutes to reject the Abbott Government's bid to delist part of a 170,000 hectare, so-called 'minor' extension to Tasmania's Wilderness World Heritage Area (the TWWHA) that had been engineered by the former Gillard Government.

In announcing the decision, the Committee described our Government's attempt to delist a 74,000 hectare portion of the 2013 extension as 'feeble' and said that delisting part of a World Heritage Area would have a set a bad precedent for other countries.

However, the decision to reject this delisting proposal has itself set an unfortunate precedent for Australia that it is now OK for politics, personal agendas, and nepotism to override science and due process in determinations of resource use and environmental policy.

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This can be inferred from the manner in which the initial 2013 TWWHA extension was achieved without requiring independent scientific study of supposed heritage values, and because the process itself was overtly manipulated for ideological and political purposes.

The imperative to extend the TWWHA arose from the Tasmanian Forest Agreement 2012 (aka the 'forest peace deal') which had resulted from two years of horse-trading between two narrow and self-interested groups – environmental activists (ENGOs) pursuing an ideological 'save-the-forests' agenda; and timber industry representatives bargaining under duress for their economic survival.

As neither group had been elected by the public to determine the future of a state-owned natural assett, many have derided this whole process as undemocratic. Accordingly, in stark contrast to past forest reservations based upon government-sponsored scientific evaluation and wide public consultation, the 'peace deal' simply allowed the three participating ENGO's to choose new forest reserves.

These proposed new reserves totalled over 500,000 hectares. They included areas of State forest adjoining the TWWHA that had been previously identified as having significant heritage values in a 2008 report prepared for the Wilderness Society by 'world heritage consultant', Peter Hichcock. The ENGOs had used his report at that time to underpin a failed attempt to have these same areas added to the TWWHA.

As part of the 'peace deal' process, the Gillard Government had appointed an Independent Verification Group (IVG) in 2011 and charged it with the task of veryifying the suitability of these ENGO-proposed new reserves. Unfortunately, the independence of the IVG was compromised from the start by the conflicted links of some of its members to environmental groups negotiating the 'peace deal' and the Greens party.

Most notably the IVG's Chairman, Professor Jonathon West, had formerly been a National Director of the Wilderness Society. In addition, its lead researcher, Professor Brendan Mackey, had been a previous Director of the ANU Wild Country Research and Policy Hub established as part of a financial partnership with the Wilderness Society. He had also been the lead author of a 2008 paper effectively advocating the end of Australian native timber production in favour of 'saving' forests for carbon. Given this background, concerns were raised about the independence of the IVG process.

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This lack of independence was further exemplified when Professor Mackey subsequently appointed Peter Hitchcock to assess the appropriateness of the areas proposed under the 'peace deal' for World Heritage listing. As he had originally proposed the same areas of State forest for addition to the TWWHA in 2008, his work for the IVG essentially entailed verifying his own earlier work.

Following the completion of the IVG process, the Tasmanian Forests Agreement was eventually signed in 2012. Soon after, the then Environment Minister, Tony Burke, oversaw preparation of the Gillard Government's nomination for extending the TWWHA. This was submitted to the World Heritage Committee in February 2013.

Significantly, the nomination misrepresented the proposed TWWHA extension as a 'minor boundary modification' even though it exceeded the nominal 10% threshold for such an addition to an existing World Heritage property.

There was a political incentive to misrepresent the proposed extension in this way because, under its operational guidelines, the World Heritage Committee can approve a 'minor' extension to an existing WHA property without the normal 18 months evaluation process required for a new nomination or a larger extension.

That the extension was pursued with undue haste for political purposes was confirmed by Greens Leader, Christine Milne, after the nomination was accepted, when she said: "In parallel with the IGA (ie. the 'forest peace deal') process, Bob Brown and I worked with Minister Tony Burke to develop this extension and get this World Heritage nomination in....... so that it could be decided ahead of the Federal Election."

Ms Milne's role as a key driver of the nomination also raised some concerns given that she is a former Vice President of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) which acts as an Advisory Body to the World Heritage Committee. It is also notable that Professor Mackey is an IUCN Regional Councillor for its Oceania (Asia-Pacific) Region. Whether these affiliations permitted any undue influence to be exerted over the outcome of the nomination is unknown, but they certainly created a perception of that possibility.

The haste with which the 2013 TWWHA extension was pursued also suggests that the Federal Labor Government used World Heritage listing as a tool to insulate these proposed forest reserves from the strong expectation that a new Tasmanian State Government would be elected in early 2014 with a mandate to reverse the unpopular Tasmanian Forest Agreement. As this has duly occurred, the former Federal Government's actions could be construed as subverting the Tasmanian Parliament's democratic right to act in the best interests of the majority of its constituents.

Despite some reported misgivings, the World Heritage Committee did indeed waive the normal requirement for exhaustive independent evaluation of the proposed extension's world heritage values, thereby allowing the 170,000 ha area to be World Heritage listed before the September 2013 Federal Election.

This outcome defied the reality that the Gillard Government's 2013 TWWHA extension nomination had included no new studies of the area's heritage values despite most of its component areas of State Forest being formally rejected for World Heritage listing just five years earlier.

In March 2008, a UNESCO Reactive Monitoring Mission had been sent to Tasmania by the World Heritage Committee to examine claims by local ENGOS that these same State forests should be added to the TWWHA. However, they had reported that there was no reason to extend the TWWHA boundaries because it already adequately represented forest values, and that similar values found in adjacent State forests were also being "well managed, but for both conservation and development purposes".

This was an acknowledgement that State forest management systems are effective in identifying and protecting significant environmental and cultural values, and that this can be achieved without reserving huge swathes of the landscape to exclude forest uses.

Undoubtedly there are special areas deserving of full landscape protection. However, in this instance, the 2013 nomination had neither established whether all of the areas proposed for addition to the TWWHA were deserving of landscape-scale protection, nor whether its forest or cultural values would be significantly disadvantaged if it remained as State forest.

Strangely, the 2013 nomination to extend the TWWHA made little or no mention of wilderness values despite it recommending additions to a 'wilderness world heritage property'. This was presumably because the most recent study of Tasmanian wilderness values undertaken in 1997 during the Regional Forests Agreement process, had found that the State forests component had low wilderness value. This had even been recognised during the IVG process in 2011, when Professor Mackey concluded that: "Forest wilderness issues warrant further consideration, especially in areas adjoining the TWWHA..... it will be important to assess the current extent of and potential to restore forested wilderness in areas which warrant formal assessment for World Heritage listing"

Yet no follow-up assessment of wilderness values had occurred prior to the 2013 nomination.In addition, no study of the proposed TWWHA extension's social and economic impacts had been undertaken despite this being required under the Tasmanian Forests Agreement which, in relation to World Heritage matters, had deferred to the 1997 Tasmanian Regional Forest Agreement.

Nor did the nomination provide any knowledge of the supposed indigenous cultural heritage values of the proposed extension. Indeed, when the TWWHA extension nomination was being considered, an Advisory Body to the World Heritage Committee had recommended that it be rejected due to its lack of cultural significance. However, this was able to be averted at the last minute by the personal intervention of Environment Minister Tony Burke who pledged $0.5 million of taxpayer funding to study of the extension's cultural heritage values should the nomination be accepted.

Despite such an obvious lack of required study and evidence, the World Heritage Committee was still able to be convinced that proposed areas which had previously been rejected in 2008 had, over the course of five years, suddenly aquired values deserving of World Heritage listing. It is apparent that something other than science had forced this change of heart.

Undoubtedly this 'something' was the changed political landscape under which a now minority Australian Government was willing to far more strongly champion the TWWHA extension to appease the Greens whose support was needed to keep it in power. Clearly the World Heritage Committee is more compelled to accept a world heritage nomination when it is strongly backed by the Government of the day. Although the experience of the Abbott Government in trying to delist part of the extension suggests that this doesn't work in reverse.

As much as the Abbott Government was hoping to delist part of this 2013 TWWHA extension, those supporting this move would arguably have been happy if the World Heritage Committee had deferred a decision subject to independent scientific scrutiny of the extension's world heritage values. This would have at least represented a return to the due process that had been by-passed for political purposes by the former Labor Government.

Certainly, those forest and conservation scientists most closely involved with Tasmania's forests would have supported such a move given that most had been incensed at how the proposed new forest reserves and the World Heritage extension proposal had arisen. Former Forestry Tasmania conservation biologist, Simon Groves, articulated this concern as 'a perversion of science ...... it rewards bad behaviour and .... those that engage in bad behaviour. It sends the wrong signals to the protagonists and the public. It sets up the rest of Australia's forested regions for similar processes .... and the conservation benefits are, I believe, largely delusional".

Despite this, it seems that Australia's broader church of environmental scientists who are mostly remote from practical involvement in Tasmanian forestry, may think otherwise. They almost universally celebrated the World Heritage Committee's refusal to accept the Abbott Government's nomination to delist part of a politically-motivated World Heritage extension. This, despite the precedent it sets which may well consign the need for their skills for independent scientific scrutiny to future irrelevance.

Of further concern is what this says about the hypocrisy of Australia's environmental community of scientists and activists. They would undoubtedly be crying blue murder if a proposed natural resource use was approved without any independent scientific study, but either remain silent or become cheerleaders for science-free decisions delivered when the political winds blow their way.

Appallingly deficient media coverage has largely denied the general public from any awareness of the corrupted process and political manipulation that led to the 2013 TWWHA extension which deserves to be regarded as an embarrassment to both Australia and the World Heritage concept. It may well be that a reluctance to acknowledge this embarrassment underpinned the World Heritage Committee's refusal to even countenance the Abbott Government's bid to redress part of this travesty.

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About the Author

Mark Poynter is a professional forester with 40 years experience. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Foresters of Australia and his book Going Green: Forests, fire, and a flawed conservation culture, was published by Connor Court in July 2018.

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