Twelfth National Forest Summit Communique 25/4/99:

Friends of the Earth, Native Forest Network, Chipstop, Australian Conservation Foundation - forest campaign group, North East Forest Alliance, The Wilderness Society, Conservation Council of the South East Region and Canberra, Environment Victoria, Goongerah Environment Centre, Office of Senator Bob Brown, Concerned Residents of East Gippsland, Earthworker, Nature Conservation Council NSW, Conservation Council of Western Australia, Otway Ranges Environment Network, Radcon, Glasshouse Mountains Advancement Network, Wombat Forest Society, Tasmanian Conservation Trust, Tasmanian Greens, West Australian Forest Alliance, Southern Forest Alliance, North Coast Environment Council, North Coast Environment Council, Gondwana Forest Sanctuary - Oceania, Friends of Durras, Australian Rainforest Conservation Society, Queensland Conservation Council , Wingham Forest Action, GreenNet

Over 60 representatives from twenty national, regional and local conservation organisations working to protect Australia's forests have come together over the past three days in Melbourne to develop ongoing plans for forest campaigning over the next months.

All groups present declared the Regional Forest Agreements process a disaster, and rejected the legitimacy of the RFA Bill to be passed shortly by the Senate. Signing Regional Forest Agreements will not let the state and federal governments off the hook in terms of genuinely protecting forests.

The National Forest Summit helped to further unify the corporate campaigns across Australia targeting the woodchipping corporations. Groups have consolidated and fine tuned the excellent consumer and investment work that has been undertaken to date, and put the companies on notice that they will be proceeding with further initiatives to end woodchipping in Australia.

The Forest Summit also extended its commiserations to BBC Hardware in the light of recent actions by the National Association of Forest Industries and urged the company to reinstate "Forest-Friendly Building Timbers" throughout their stores for the benefit of the consuming public.

The Forest Summit placed on the record that anything short of full protection of the remaining 10% of Western Australia's old growth forests is not acceptable and called on the public to "take a stand" against the destruction of our precious forests across the nation.

The Forest Summit restated its opposition to the clearance of native forests for plantation establishment and expressed its strong opposition to the intensification of logging operations in native forests.

A further statement on Regional Forest Agreements is Attached

Contact:

Virginia Young, The Wilderness Society 0417 223 280

Tim Cadman, Native Forest Network 0419 628 709

.

Statement

The National Forest Summit expressed deep concern that the RFA process has fundamentally failed to address community concerns about the fate of our unique forest heritage

Each RFA signed to date has failed to satisfy the objectives of the National Forest Policy Statement adopted by government s in 1992, which were to:

_ Establish a Scientifically-based CAR reserve system;

- Protect old growth and wilderness forests;

- Ensure that our forests are managed in an ecologically sustainable way;

- Ensure that carbon storage and sequestration is maximised and

- To provide certainty to forest-based industries

Tragically for Australia, RFAs are now being enshrined for 20 years under federal legislation which will remove all remaining Commonwealth environmental control over the fate of our forests. This legislation will entrench woodchipping, clearfelling and intensive logging practices in our precious native forests.

As professors Norton, Possingham and Recher noted, declines in many forest species are now occurring.

"Such declines are of major concern. They contravene existing state and federal forest policies on the maintenance of forest species throughout their known distribution. In addition, such localised extinctions are themselves of major concern as the continued loss of local populations can ultimately lead to the global extinction of a species. Such losses can also affect the normal ecological functions and health of a forest. These recorded changes indicate that current forestry practices in Australian native forests are not ecologically sustainable. There are localised extinctions occurring due to current forestry practices and there is a significant risk of future global extinction."

The economic rationality of RFAs is called into question by their failure to acknowledge emerging greenhouse and carbon issues and their failure to develop industry strategies which maximise domestic processing of Australia's massive existing plantation resource.

Potential investors in the Australian native forest logging industry should be aware that RFAs to date have entrenched forest management systems which are ecologically unsustainable are: legally and constitutionally open to challenge, unlikely to deliver stated timber yields; and which will ensure that forest conflicts will continue.