Sustainable Forest Management
As a community, we need timber to build our homes and infrastructure like bridges, railways and wharves. But at the same time, we want to maintain the presence of our unique native plants and animals, conserve and be inspired by Aboriginal cultural heritage, have clean water to drink and enjoy four-wheel driving, camping, bushwalking and other recreational activities in our forests.
Photo: istock
Forest sustainability is about maintaining biodiversity and ecological processes, the formation of soils, energy flows and carbon, nutrient and water cycles. It is about meeting our current needs and expectations while retaining opportunities for future generations to meet theirs.
The ‘Montreal Process’ is a comprehensive international framework of criteria and indicators developed by an international working group to achieve sustainable forest management. The criteria describe the broad forest values that society seeks to sustain, whilst the indicators provide a means of measuring change in these criteria over time.
In 1998 the Australian Montreal Process Implementation Group used this existing framework to develop local indicators based on the regions defined by the nation’s Regional Forest Agreements. The group developed seven broad criteria and 74 regional indicators, which can be used to evaluate progress toward the goals of achieving sustainable forest management nationwide. Australia has recently adopted the use of these criteria and indicators for monitoring, assessing and reporting on the state of forests, as well as identifying where action needs to be taken to improve management practices.
The seven criteria of forest values, which are the basis of sustainable forest management in Australia, are:
- Conservation of biological diversity;
- Maintenance of productive capacity of forest ecosystem;
- Maintenance of ecosystem health;
- Conservation and maintenance of soil and water resources;
- Maintenance of forest contribution to global carbon cycles;
- Maintenance and enhancement of long-term multiple socio-economic benefits to meet the needs of society; and
- Legal, institutional and economic framework for forest conservation and sustainable management.
For more information about the Montreal Process go to: www.rinya.maff.go.jp/mpci
Case study – Measuring sustainable forest management
Seeing Report
Photo: Created by HC Designers
Eye/Forests NSW Image Library
Sustainable forest management is about managing forests for the long term, retaining opportunities for future generations to meet their needs and expectations while also providing for the present.
It means sustaining the many things we value about forests as a community now and into the future and is a challenge for forest managers across the globe. Values include such things as employment, timber products, cultural heritage, recreation, native plants and animals, water and research.
Forests NSW was the first forestry agency in Australia to report on sustainability performance by monitoring a series of indicators of sustainability. These indicators range from the number and type of recreation facilities, regional employment in the timber industry and types of products through to native forest regeneration, threatened species surveys and plantation establishment.
Each year the indicators are measured, refined and reported upon, and every second year the report is independently audited to verify the data as true and accurate. In this way the complex relationship between the social, environmental and economic values we hold for forests can be better understood.
For more information about sustainability reporting read the Bush telegraph magazine on NSW Department of Primary Industries website.
Copies of Forests NSW Reports can also be viewed online.
To read more information about sustainable forest management in Australia see an article titled “Painting a different landscape” taken from In the living forest: an exploration of Australia’s forest community.
Painting a different landscape - (PDF - 238KB)
