Climate change and forestry
Forests and forest products
Moonpar State Forest, near Coffs Harbour NSW
Forests are linked to all of us in our everyday lives - from the air we breathe, the books we read and the shelter our houses provide. The forestry and timber products industry in NSW provides timber products for our everyday use. This industry contributes more than $2 billion annually to the NSW economy1 and directly employs more than 20 000 people - about half of these jobs are in regional NSW.
Growing trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through the process of photosynthesis, and store the carbon. Australia's plantations and commercial forests removed 51.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in 2005. To put this in context, Australia's annual greenhouse gas emissions total is 576 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.
Timber house frame
In NSW, timber is sourced from either plantations or native forests to provide the quantity and variety of tree species for the many uses we require. We don't produce all the wood we need in Australia, so we import some from New Zealand, Indonesia and the United States.
There are almost 27 million hectares of native forest area in NSW, covering 34% of the state. Two million hectares of this area is public state forest. Forests NSW manages a variety of forest types within native state forests as well as 340 000 hectares of plantation forest.
These forests include both protected and multiple-use areas ranging from rainforest reserves, native eucalypt and cypress pine forests to exotic pine and eucalypt plantations.
Each year only a small percentage (approximately 3%) of state forests in NSW is harvested for timber. While NSW state forests set aside areas for conservation, National Parks are totally protected. National Park forest areas cover more than six million hectares in 661 parks with increasing areas being declared each year.2
Bruxner Park Flora Preserve
Forester
A great variety of professionals are involved in forestry science such as foresters, botanists, ecologists, cultural heritage officers, supervising forestry officers, geographic information system (mapping) specialists and engineers. A key part of forestry science involves estimating the productive capacity of a forest and its ability to regenerate over a given land area to ensure that harvesting is carried out in a sustainable way and the forest will continue to be productive in the future. Sustainable harvesting is about maintaining biodiversity and ecological processes, the formation of soils, energy flows and carbon, nutrient and water cycles. Ecologically sustainable forest management aims to ensure that the amount of timber harvested from a forest is matched, over time, to the amount by which the forest grows. Find out more about sustainable forestry management.
There are few other materials used so frequently in our everyday society that can be produced with so few emissions or as little energy use as timber. A healthy productive forest is truly one of nature's wonders.
Avoiding terminology confusion
The term 'forestry' is sometimes misinterpreted as being the same activity as 'land clearing', 'land use change' or 'deforestation'.
- 'Land clearing' or 'land use change' is where forests are removed to establish another kind of use on that land area; examples are a forested area cleared for a new housing estate or agricultural pastures or crops.
- 'Deforestation' has a similar meaning and can include the loss of, or continued degradation of, forest habitat due to either natural or human-related causes.
Both of these cases result in the loss of the forest as a resource, so continued sustainable production of timber is not possible, and the carbon storage potential is lost.
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1Industry & Investment NSW Timber Industry profile http://www.business.nsw.gov.au/industry/timber/
2State of the Parks Report 2004, Department of Environment & Climate Change: www.environment.nsw.gov.au/resources/sop04/sop04chap2.pdf