When comparing the Forestry Stewardship Certificate Guidelines and the Australian Forestry Standards document, numerous differences appear.
The FSC Guidelines are succinct and robustly worded in 13 pages by authorities who want to achieve world-wide sustainability of forests; that is, something very worthwhile. Compare this slender volume to the Australian Forestry Standard’s 86 page treatise. However, once the preface , appendixes and the rest apart from Section 4 are removed, what is left is a comparable volume to the FSC Guidelines. The only part of any import from the AFS document is Section 4 “Forest management criteria and requirements”(9 pages). The AFS is riddled with bureaucratic practiced language at its most damning. Both discuss ‘High Conservation Value Forests’ but the intended outcomes are not in agreement. The AFS is nothing but smoke and mirrors.
The most glaring bone of contention is that the FSC states “The rate of harvest of forest products shall not exceed levels which can be permanently sustained”.
The Australian Forestry Standards doesn’t impose any obligation on the forester to ensure that the forests are sustainably managed.
Rather, it requires the forester to maintain “the productive capacity of the land” considering amongst other things “future land use intentions”.
This is an example of how Australian Forestry Standard “weasel-words” its way around more robust standards of sustainablility in order to pull the wool over the public’s eyes.
Consider the following examples: “encourage meaningful participation of stakeholders”; “foster appropriate relationships”; “shall implement practices to support”; “shall progressively establish”; “as far as reasonably practicably” and it goes on and on and on.
“Selective harvesting” is an example of separate meanings depending on which view is held. To fine furniture makers and most of the public it means going into the forest and selecting specific trees for harvest and leaving the bulk of the forest intact. To Forestry Tasmania it means ‘selectively harvesting’ large areas out of a whole.
“4.3.2 The forest manager shall not convert native vegetation to plantation forest cover or non-forest cover except in the limited circumstances as follows”. There are 14 of them.
“4.3 Forest management shall protect and maintain the biological diversity of forests, including their seral stages, across the regional landscape”.
“Note: The intent is to protect and maintain the elements of the biological diversity of forests including the range of ecosystems across the landscape, by maintaining representative species populations across their range.” (paraphrased)
Translation: as long as you’ve got those species somewhere, you can devastate any individual locality. For example, if there is an area populated with orange bellied parrots, only one small habitat area needs to be kept, and the rest can be felled. The ‘intent’ has been followed.
Forestry should be geared around the high-value end as was discussed in “Forest Design”. That is, taking a tree and using it to the nth degree. The Australian Forestry Standard’s sustainable land use contains the biggest loophole you could bulldoze a forest through. It doesn’t regulate sustainable forestry; it allows any future use of the land. Some bureaucrat in Hobart will decide the future use. The future use is plantation rather than native forest. This is a very cleverly written bureaucratic document – dazzle the public with their wordsmithing.
It is in Forestry Tasmania’s interests to have huge areas locked up as forest reserve. It gives them a free hand in other areas as a consequence. Professor West comments on a particular area because you can’t look at one place individually because AFS considers the forest as a whole rather than looking at the management of individual forests as FSC do. That’s why Professor West was “wrong”.
The maintenance of ecological biodiversity as a whole under Forestry Tasmania is to keep individual exemplars in the preserved area to avoid scrutiny in other areas that it wishes to clearfell.
The fundamental difference is that the consequence of AFS is that forests are viewed as a whole. FSC certification applies to each and every forest. Viewing forests as a whole is really good in some ways but really bad in others but that’s okay, according to AFS. Professor West’s comments would matter for FSC certification. His concerns are irrelevant to what Forestry Tasmania intends to do.
At this point in time, we are just competing with the dirtiest forests in the world. We need to adopt FSC certification. We should have done it 15 years ago. If we had FSC certification, we would have a viable forestry industry. It will take Forestry Tasmania 15 years to comply with the criteria. If we’d started then, it would be done by now. It’s never too late.
