Abstract
Plantation forestry policy in Australia is driven by a strategy with a notional target of trebling plantations from 1 million ha to 3 million ha between 1997 and 2020. Development of new plantations is focused on agricultural land in the high rainfall regions of Australia – the most densely populated part of the country, with rural landscapes undergoing profound change in demographics, employment, land tenure and management, and evidence of the decoupling of land prices and agricultural returns from the land as new settlers enter the rural property market. Results of plantation expansion were compared in two case study regions – the Murray Valley and the Green Triangle – in south-east Australia known to be undergoing differential rates of socio-economic change. In the Murray Valley region, a multifunctional landscape in that socio-economic change was bringing about more diversity and complexity in the way that rural landscapes were operated and used, plantation forestry had experienced difficulty in meeting expansion targets because of the high price of land driven primarily by buyers from Melbourne, and the generally low social acceptability of forestry. Further, the management of existing plantations was becoming more complex as a consequence of new neighbours with different values to long-term farmers. In contrast, in the Green Triangle, which was comprised of agricultural production and transitional landscapes, plantation expansion was occurring at a rate broadly expected by the forestry industry. Key strategies to increase the social acceptability of forestry in multifunctional landscapes, including integrated forestry development, are discussed.
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Notes
- 1.
Regions that receive, on average, at least 600 mm of annual rainfall.
- 2.
There are 15 National Plantation Inventory regions in Australia that form the basis for regional reporting of plantation statistics (Wood et al. 2001).
- 3.
An LGA is a spatial unit in the Australian Standard Geographical Classification that is commonly used by the Australian Bureau of Statistics to disseminate demographic statistics (ABS 2001).
- 4.
- 5.
Population statistics are based on analysis of enumerated population excluding overseas visitors.
- 6.
Nominal money value is the dollar value over time, in terms of the actual face value at each particular point in time. Real money value is the dollar value over time, with the effect of changes in purchasing power removed (Makeham and Malcolm 1988, p. 148).
- 7.
As measured by the change in the total estimated value of agricultural operations for 1997 and 2001, expressed in 2001 dollars, with data at the level of LGA aggregated for each of the case study regions (ABS 2007).
- 8.
‘Land capability’ is the identification of land where the biophysical growth requirements of a particular tree species are satisfied for a given management regime, whereas ‘land suitability’ involves the integration of biophysical factors and social and economic factors affecting the fitness of land for plantations (Stephens et al. 1998, pp. 5–6). Existing land-use, land price and distance to existing or notional markets are common attributes used to assess the suitability of land for forestry.
- 9.
In comparison, in the Green Triangle region, 1.4 million ha of land was assessed as having the capability for Radiata Pine plantations (Burns et al. 1999, pp. 95–96).
- 10.
Since 1998, privately-funded forestry managed investment schemes have been the main source of capital for expansion of plantations in Australia (Cummine 2009).
- 11.
Rural properties purchased by urban people for lifestyle purposes.
- 12.
Across Victoria during the decade 1996–1997 to 2005–2006, farm business profit was negative for every year (ABARE 2007).
- 13.
The term ‘integrated forestry’ as used here is consistent with the terminology of Robins and Marcar (2007, p. 8) in that it describes the establishment and management of trees on agricultural land for profit (both direct and indirect benefits), as compared to ‘environmental plantings’ established primarily for non-commercial purposes. Integrated forestry includes larger blocks of plantations managed by forestry companies on owned or leased land, smaller blocks of farm forestry managed by forestry companies and/or landowners, and agroforestry in which commercial trees are incorporated with pastures, for example configured as timberbelts (Robins and Marcar 2007). A vision of this latter land-use was presented by Reid (2008).
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported financially by an Australian Postgraduate Award (2005–2008), by Plantations North East Inc., and by a Writing Up Award (2009) provided by the Centre for Research and Graduate Training, Charles Sturt University (‘CSU’). Our thanks to the people who were interviewed for the research; to Jack Dunham, Valuer-General, Victoria, who provided rural property sales data for analysis; and to Simon McDonald from the Spatial Data Analysis Network, CSU, for assistance in acquiring demographic data.
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Stewart, H.T.L., Race, D., Curtis, A. (2010). Demographic Change and the Implications for Commercial Forestry: Lessons from South-East Australia. In: Luck, G., Black, R., Race, D. (eds) Demographic Change in Australia's Rural Landscapes. Landscape Series, vol 12. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9654-8_9
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