This stream on the Errinundra was protected in a national park by the efforts of scientists and environmentalists in the 1980s. Every new park, reserve or extension to reserves has been hard-fought.
People who have been involved in forest politics for a while will remember the effort that went into trying to make the Regional Forest Agreements (RFAs) mandated by the Keating Federal government in the early 1990s. These were developed on a state basis and Victoria has five of them to cover the major areas where native forests are destroyed for the sake of a dying industry that should have moved over to plantations a decade or more ago.
The RFA agreements have not been reviewed as the legislation required. Now, unless we get active, they may just be rolled over for another 20 years. That will be the end of the remnants of unprotected forest that remains; we will see more fights in the courts to save the habitat of endangered species, forest block by forest block.
Back in the 1980s when Concerned Residents of East Gippsland began its fight to keep woodchipping our of East Gippsland we thought that good sense would have prevailed and the forests would be safe by now.
Sadly this is not the case as the continuing destruction attests. It really is time to pull the finger out people and tell the Victorian Government that
No Way RFA!
GECO http://www.geco.org.au/no_more_lawless_logging and Victorian National Parks Association https://vnpa.org.au/give-your-time/take-action/regional-forest-agreements/ have made it easy for us to express ourselves. Please take advantage and add your voice. Here is my adaptation of the VNPA proposed response.
To whom it may concern,
I write regarding progress with implementation of the Victorian Regional Forest Agreements (RFAs) from 1 July 2009 to 30 June 2014. While five forest areas are covered by separate RFAs, I have particular experience of the impact of the RFA negotiated for East Gippsland, where I live.
The organisation, Network for a Sustainable East Gippsland (NetSEG), was set up to connect people who want an ecologically and economically sustainable future for this area for which we can see so much potential. One of the major deterrents to achieving such a future for East Gippsland is the stranglehold that the native forest-based timber industry has over forest management. The logging practices of the 1980s have hardly been altered by the RFAs which in hindsight were more about protection of the timber industry than threatened native species.
The rhetoric said that the RFAs would balance and protect the full range of environmental, social, economic and heritage values. However the Victorian RFAs have comprehensively failed to meet these objectives.
To see them rolled over for another 20 years would be the death sentence for our forests and expensive for government (and taxpayers) to retreat from when concern about forest destruction accelerates, as they promise the industry ‘resource security’.
VNPA has summarised the issues:
RFAs fail because they are:
- Obsolete and out of date – Many of the standards for the protection of ecosystems fall below international benchmarks. The agreements do not even mention climate change and its potential impacts.
- Threaten species and ecosystems – In 2015, mountain ash forest, one of the key target species for logging, was listed as critically endangered on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Ecosystems.
- Ignore fire impacts –RFAs ignore the successive or cumulative impact of bushfire, even though there have been extensive fires in the last 10 years.
- Ignore other forest values – RFAs do not recognise, include or account for non-wood forest values (such as water, ecosystem services, recreation and tourism) that are contributing significant sums to the state’s economy, and could contribute further.
- Ignores previous review – Recommendations relating to improved threatened species outcomes, from the previous RFA five-yearly review in 2009, have still not been complied with.
- Unjustified special treatment for native forest logging – Most industries have to follow the law, yet regional forest agreements are exempt from national environmental laws.
- Stifles innovation – the method of harvesting native forest, clear fell logging, has not changed significantly in 30 years and has a dramatic impact on the native habitats and drinking water production.
- Regulatory relic – Western Regional Forest Agreement. The last RFA independent review in 2010 recommended that the western RFA be canceled, but as recently as mid-2017, revised ecologically damaging logging plans have been released for targeted logging of woodlands right across the west, which will take place in areas known to harbour more than 20 threatened native animals and 14 threatened native plants.
NetSEG calls for the abandonment of native forest logging as it is currently performed. A sustainable timber industry for East Gippsland may still be possible but it will not emerge from the RFA regime. The intrusion of logging into precious areas like the Kuark are a signal of the RFA’s abject failure to protect forests and it has not made the industry sustainable; without government concessions and subsidies, the timber industry in East Gippsland would have drawn to a close years ago.
If not abandoned, the following modifications must be enacted, at a minimum ending the special treatment this industry enjoys under the RFAs by:
- end the regulatory relic which is the western forest agreement and comprehensively review proposed logging plans;
- discontinuing the industry’s exemption from national environment laws in all RFAs;
- accounting for other forest-dependent industries—such as conservation recreation, tourism, agriculture, water, and carbon—in any arrangement or agreements going forward;
- Strengthen management prescriptions for threatened species, climate change impacts, and fire;
- Make substantial additions to the formal reserve system.
The looming expiration of the RFAs provides a once-in-two-decades opportunity to put in place improved and modern and transparent arrangements for management of Victoria’s publicly owned native state forests—based on current science, and on community views about how our state forests should be valued, used and managed.
This overdue five-yearly review ought to recommend the RFAs be abandoned and a transition plan put in place to move out of native forestry, in its current form.
Sincerely,
Deb Foskey
-- Dr Deb Foskey 25 Warm Corners Track Cabanandra via Bonang Vic 3888 phone 02 64580399
Jingallala dreaming 