Region Archives: International

Important legislation has been introduced in Australia and in the United States that would have a very meaningful and positive effect on wildland firefighters. In Victoria, Australia a bill titled “Forests Amendment (Forest Firefighters Presumptive Rights Compensation) Bill 2021” extends the presumptive disease program to forest firefighters. … The presumptive disease program ensures that if a firefighter is diagnosed with any of the 12 listed cancers, they will not have to prove that it was caused by their employment, and it will be considered an on the job injury. In the United States amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), if they are approved and the bill is passed, would affect wildland fire in two ways. A housing allowance would be provided to any federal wildland firefighter hired at a location more than 50 miles from their primary residence… And, a mental health awareness and support program would be created …

Nils Torvalds

There is no such thing as a European forest, and those trying to introduce an EU-wide forest strategy that does not take account of regional differences “live in fantasyland,” Finnish lawmaker Nils Torvalds told EURACTIV. … “Take biodiversity for example – it diverges radically from one country to the other. Those measures need to be defined by the member states. And that’s the principle of proportionality. I’m against the power creep in the Commission’s forestry proposal… In France, forests are biologically much older than the Finnish boreal forest, which started developing after the Ice Age 10,000 years ago. France did not have an Ice Age, and the forest there is probably 100 times older than the Finnish forest, which means that the biodiversity is much more complicated and less general than in the Finnish forest… So again, any discussion on this needs to be based on facts, not ideology.

On November 11, 2019, volunteers planted 11 million trees in Turkey as part of a government-backed initiative called Breath for the Future. In one northern city, the tree-planting campaign set the Guinness World Record for the most saplings planted in one hour in a single location: 303,150. … Less than three months later, up to 90 percent of the saplings were dead, the Guardian reported. The trees were planted at the wrong time and there wasn’t enough rainfall to support the saplings … These campaigns often don’t work, and sometimes they can even fuel deforestation… Instead of focusing on planting huge numbers of trees, experts told Vox, we should focus on growing trees for the long haul, protecting and restoring ecosystems beyond just forests, and empowering the local communities that are best positioned to care for them.

Russia has endured its worst forest fire season in the country’s modern history, according to recent data from the Russian Forestry Agency analysed by Greenpeace. Fires have destroyed more than 18.16m hectares of Russian forest in 2021, setting an absolute record since the country began monitoring forest fires using satellites in 2001. The previous record was set in 2012, when fires covered 18.11m hectares of forest. The record was surpassed late last week after a long fire season that has also produced unprecedented levels of global wildfire emissions and upturned daily life for hundreds of thousands of people living in Siberia and elsewhere in central Russia.

Hours after Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro painted a rosy picture of his administration’s environmental record during a United Nations speech, Greenpeace released a set of photos showing continued deforestation and fires in Earth’s largest rainforest. Speaking to the U.N., Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro cited a 32 percent reduction in deforestation in the month of August relative to a year ago, the country’s near decade-old Forest Code, and lands set aside as Indigenous territories as evidence of Brazil’s contributions toward mitigating climate change. But activists pushed back on Bolsonaro’s statement, noting rising deforestation in the Amazon and his administration’s rollback of environmental laws and law enforcement, while publishing dramatic images. Brazil does have some of the strongest forest protection laws on the books among major tropical forest nations, but enforcement has been lax.

NEW ZEALAND — The company which owns retail giant Ikea has bought 5500 hectares of Otago farmland to plant into forest. Ingka Group was approved to make the purchase of Wisp Hill by the Overseas Investment Office. A lease-back requirement will allow the former owners to properly phase out their operations over a minimum three-year period. The company said it planned to plant 3300 hectares with radiata pine this year, with the long term plan of planting 3000 hectares with over 3 million seedlings in the next five years. Some 2200 hectares would be left to naturally revert into native bush. …Krister Mattsson said the focus was on growing the forest over 30-plus years to contribute to removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Ingka Group currently owns around 248,000 hectares of forest in the US, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania.

The WA Forestry Minister says a request for a $25 million grant from the owners of the state’s largest native timber mill shows the industry knew the viability of native logging was coming to an end — a claim the company rejects.  WA Forestry Minister Dave Kelly said Parkside Timber had approached the government with a proposal for the grant in August to assist with expansion plans of its three mills in Nannup, Manjimup and Greenbushes.  In it, the proposal states unless the $25 million state government grant funding was secured, the company would be forced to shut its Greenbushes site by December 2021, and scale down operations at Nannup.  Native logging in WA will be largely ceased by 2024 following a surprise recent announcement by the McGowan Government.  Forestry Minister Kelly said the proposal laid bare the company’s outlook of the native timber industry in WA.

Leading lawmakers… in the European Parliament held contrasting views on forest policy during a EURACTIV event. …Jytte Guteland, a Swedish lawmaker, advocated for responsible forest management, where cuttings are allowed only in selected areas where trees have reached full maturity and absorb less carbon dioxide. …But that view was strongly opposed by Green lawmaker Ville Niinistö, a former Finnish environment minister. “Cutting down trees is never an answer to increasing [carbon] sinks,” Niinistö said. In Nordic conditions, even old or dead forests can store carbon for hundreds of years. The debate over whether to leave forests alone or to engage in active forest management – and regular harvests – is a contentious one for Nordic countries given the importance of their forestry sector. For the rest of the EU, however, forests are often seen as a “carbon sink” that plays an important role in achieving the bloc’s climate goals.

Forestry should be based on local conditions and knowhow in each member state, the Finnish government’s ministerial committee on EU affairs, chaired by Prime Minister Sanna Marin, said on Friday, highlighting that forest policy belongs to the competences of member states. Even if the Commission’s proposal has been praised for its position on biodiversity loss, carbon sinks and climate change, the government wants to secure the industry’s ability to invest in the future. According to media sources, Finland also has reservations about the new certification system, closer-to-nature, currently being prepared by the Commission. …But Finland is not the only country to be critical of the strategy. …Germany and Austria are said to be ready to reject the strategy for good, while EU agriculture ministers will discuss the strategy in mid-October.

Foresters are calling a proposed anti-forestry coalition of local bodies a prejudiced step backwards in time and destructive for their communities both environmentally and economically. The mayors of Tararua and Wairoa have written to fellow mayors throughout New Zealand wanting money to fund a report designed to show that forestry is negative and ought to be restricted. The President of the Forest Owners Association, Phil Taylor, says it is contradictory for the Wairoa District to declare climate change to be a key issue in its Long-Term Plan in January, and a few months later leads a national charge to put every obstacle in the way of achieving carbon sequestration through forestry. “Unfortunately, some council leaders are also off-beam with their understanding of the economics of forestry as well,” Phil Taylor says.

The Forest Products Commission (FPC) welcomes the announcement by the West Australian Premier, The Honourable Mark McGowan MLA, to invest a record $350 million to expand Western Australia’s softwood plantation timber industry. This record investment is expected to provide at least an additional 33,000 hectares of softwood timber plantation, with up to 50 million pine trees planted, sequestering between 7.9 and 9.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. It is estimated that around 60 direct timber industry jobs and 80 indirect jobs will be created as part of the expansion plan, with the new jobs initially associated with the plantation establishment program. The expansion plan will also protect 860 direct jobs and 1,120 indirect jobs, mostly in the South West timber industry, as well as support the many thousands of jobs in the State’s construction industry that depend upon the reliable supply of softwood timber.

When the COVID-19 pandemic first struck, and national governments responded with lockdowns of varying degrees, conservationists warned it would lead to a surge in illegal logging in tropical countries. They argued that with fewer eyes and ears on the ground for monitoring, combined with a ready supply of short-term labor in the form of unemployed people migrating from cities back to their home villages, the world’s rainforests were bound to take a hit. …But according to new research in Forest Policy and Economics, different forces acting on the global macroeconomics have largely balanced each other out, so that increases in deforestation in one part of the world have been offset by decreases elsewhere. …The paper questions other studies that linked reports of increasing deforestation with the pandemic. …Still, campaign groups say there are signs of unsustainable expansion plans among the forest products sector in Asia.

The fragile Cerrado grasslands and the Pantanal wetlands, both under threat from soy and beef exploitation, have been excluded from a European Union draft anti-deforestation law and there are many other concerning loopholes. The European Commission has pledged to introduce a law aimed at preventing beef, palm oil and other products linked to deforestation from being sold in the EU single market of 450 million consumers. But campaigners said a leaked impact assessment reveals “significant omissions” in the plans, including the exclusion of endangered grasslands and wetlands. …The long-awaited draft regulation, expected to be published in December, will be limited to controlling EU imports of beef, palm oil, soy, wood, cocoa and coffee, according to a report seen by the Guardian. …According to the 182-page document, these measures would “decisively contribute to saving biodiversity” and prevent 71,920 hectares of forests being chopped down each year by 2030.

Globally, tree-planting projects are becoming all the rage, but many are counting on old habits of planting monoculture plantations and calling them forests. Still, some researchers say there are ways to make plantation trees aid in actual restoration projects, including innovative projects in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil. Reforestation and restoration projects will require monitoring and scrutiny to make sure they are living up to their commitments in regard to both climate and biodiversity. …Yet at the very heart of this seeming tree-planting frenzy are questions about what restoration even means — and, perhaps most controversially, whether single-species tree plantations should count toward restoration targets. …A widely reported assessment in Nature in 2019 revealed that in many countries, the line between plantations and restoration is blurrier than it first appears. …So whether you think tree plantations should count toward reforestation or not, one thing’s for certain: As tree-planting projects proliferate, we sure need to keep an eye on them.