Logging to save the planet

As life and property concerns now dictate the need to actively extinguish summer wildfires, the scientifically acknowledged requirement to regularly burn the landscape to mimic natural processes must be undertaken by land management agencies during cooler months. Recent experience suggests that government agencies charged with this responsibility increasingly lack the necessary resources, expertise, confidence, and at times, the will, to keep pace with the amount of burning annually required to meet ecological and fire protection objectives.

The link between the ability to adequately manage fire and the active management of forests for multiple uses, including timber, was acknowledged in several government enquiries conducted after the massive “Alpine fires” in southeast Australia in 2003.

They noted that the progressive withdrawal of hardwood timber industries has had a deleterious impact on the level of active management being conducted in public forests. Reasons for this include the loss of government revenue traditionally generated from timber sales, a decline in the number of professional foresters who were experienced and confident in fuel reduction burning, and altered management objectives associated with the transfer of State Forests to the National Park estate.

In particular, the loss of skilled fire practitioners has been keenly felt due to the increased degree of difficulty in conducting burns as more and more people choose to live in close proximity to public bushland.

In addition, the increased willingness of the media to criticise every slight mistake is further sapping the confidence to burn. Fuel reduction programs once attacked with enthusiasm are now reportedly approached with trepidation due to the fear of an escape with its consequent potential to damage life, property, and the careers of bureaucrats and field officers. Yet the reality is that unless occasional escaped burns are accepted as an inherent risk, very little burning is done and this is progressively increasing the risk of unnaturally severe summer wildfires.

The 2003 fires also demonstrated the massive potential for unnaturally severe wildfires to damage stream flows and water supplies. Over a two-month period, 1.3 million hectares of alpine and mountain forest in NSW and Victoria were burnt. On the Victorian side of the border, this included about 550,000ha of forest classified as either killed or very severely burnt.

The CRC for Catchment Hydrology has predicted that the regrowth stimulated in these areas will absorb 430 billion litres of water a year for the next 50 years - water that would otherwise have flowed into headwater tributaries of the Murray River. In addition to this, there was an estimated eight-fold increase in sediment loads entering streams in the year following the fires: this had a severe impact on water quality.

Despite this, the massive impacts of wildfire are being largely forgotten as environmental NGOs focus on the effects of logging which are by comparison almost benign. For example, Victoria’s sustainable hardwood timber industry is being regulated to harvest and regenerate about 650,000ha over a 100-year period in accordance with environmental care prescriptions such as streamside reserves and habitat trees. Being staggered over such a long period, this has far less impact compared to severe wildfires that can kill or severely damage everything in their path across massive areas in just a few days.

The unwillingness of environmental NGOs to accept the far greater environmental damage wrought by fire, suggests their opposition to catchment logging has far less to do with saving water than achieving an ideological “no native timber industry” agenda. After all, every forest is part of a catchment regardless of whether it is used for domestic water supply.

If they were sincere about addressing future water shortages, environmental NGOs would end campaigns to stop logging and instead embrace its potential to be a crucial tool in active management strategies that could substantially improve stream flows in catchments dominated by fire regrowth.

For example, about 40 per cent of Melbourne’s catchments is comprised of 67-year-old regrowth from the 1939 bushfires. Research in the early 1980s showed that actively thinning this for sawlogs and pulpwood could increase run-off by as much as 2.5 million litres per thinned hectare per annum - enough water for 23 people for a year at a per capita consumption of 300 litres per day.

This increased run-off was persisting when the trial was re-measured 10 years later, and it has since been postulated that a staggered program of progressive thinning could substantially mitigate the reduced stream flows typically associated with regrowth.

Western Australia has been quick to take advantage of thinning as a water management tool. In 2005, a 12-year thinning program in the Wungong Dam catchment was initiated and is expected to deliver 1 billion litres of additional run-off a year for every 1,000 hectares thinned. As this regrowth is mostly too small to be commercially utilised it is being poisoned via herbicide stem injection despite the efforts of “green” objectors who were reportedly silenced only by Perth’s critical lack of water. Objections to logging as a sensible means to thin older regrowth in the future may not to be so easily dismissed.

The debate about logging in catchments should not be about whether or not it is permitted, but how and where it could be used as a self-fnuding water management tool that also produces valuable wood products. Until environmental NGOs demonstrate maturity by accepting that logging even a minor portion of our forests provides substantial benefits in addressing global warming and long term water shortages, their ideological “save-the-forest” dogma will threaten to counteract government and community initiatives that are endeavouring to address these problems.