Reconciling timber harvesting, biodiversity conservation and carbon sequestration in Queensland, Australia

In many countries, forest policies have been enacted that reduce opportunities for public and private native forests to be sustainably managed for multiple uses, including timber production. Such policies have typically been implemented out of concern for the environment, but policy-makers often make poor assumptions about or ignore the associated perverse ecological and economic trade-offs that can threaten global action to conserve biodiversity and mitigate climate risk. The purpose of this paper is to inform and promote research on the application of the land sharing–sparing framework to better accommodate ecological and economic trade-offs in forest policy evaluation. The regional context is Queensland (QLD), Australia, where consideration is being given to policy changes that will substantially increase land sparing within the public and private native forest estate by contracting the area available for management under land sharing with selection timber harvesting. A modified conceptualisation of the land sharing–sparing framework is introduced, which explicitly accounts for the role that international trade can play in facilitating domestic land sparing policy. Critical reviews of literature concerning six important ecological and economic trade-offs that are associated with domestic forest policy are presented: (a) international biodiversity conservation; (b) climate risk mitigation; (c) securing domestic wood supply; (d) resourcing domestic forest management; (e) management of wildfire risk; and (f) domestic biodiversity conservation. Under existing policy settings, increased land sparing in QLD has a high risk of unintended negative outcomes, including for international biodiversity conservation and carbon emissions. While land sparing can benefit species that require long undisturbed forest habitat, conservation of most native flora and fauna in QLD is not substantially affected or is enhanced by selection harvesting practices permitted in the state. Decades of poor government resourcing of conservation estate management and timber plantation expansion suggests increased land sparing will have negligible benefits for domestic biodiversity conservation and wood supply in the absence of a considerable and permanent reallocation of scarce resources. In contrast, land sharing can provide greater long-term climate risk mitigation benefits, promote high biodiversity values through creation of heterogeneous landscape mosaics and leverage private sector resources for conservation activities. These complex ecological and economic trade-offs have been collated for the first time in an Australian context and justify further research to explore their quantification and accommodation within the land sharing–sparing framework to better inform forest policy-making.