Australia’s Native Forests

When left to grow, forests capture up to 30% of our CO2 emissions and store significant amounts of carbon.

They play a major and fundamental role in the carbon capture capabilities of our earth’s biosphere, which, if left intact, remove up to 50% of CO2 annually.

In 2019-20, 87% of logs harvested in Australia came from plantations.

Native forest logging provides far fewer jobs than the plantation sector and does not produce substantial employment opportunities in any mainland Australian state.

About 87% of sawn timber used in home construction is derived from plantations.

The vast majority of native forest logged in Tasmania, Victoria and southern NSW goes into woodchips and paper pulp.

• WA is ending native forest logging by end of 2023
• VIC is ending native forest logging by 2030, still leaving many years of logging.
• NSW and Tasmania have not made the same commitments.

There’s now irrefutable evidence that logging native forests make them prone to more severe bushfires. Analysis of the 2019-20 Black Summer fires showed logged forests burn more severely than intact ones.