The South East Queensland Forests Agreement: Lessons for Biodiversity Conservation

In Australia, regional forest agreements formed the cornerstone of strategies for resolving disputes over the logging of native forests in the last decade of the twentieth century. These disputes, driven by an increasingly vocal and influential conservation movement, coincided with changes in the nature of relationships between Commonwealth and State Governments, with the Commonwealth adopting an increasing role in environmental management (Lane 1999). Following very public disputes about the renewal of export woodchip licenses from native forests (which culminated in log truck blockades of the Commonwealth Parliament, Canberra), the Commonwealth Government adopted regional forest agreements as the mechanism for achieving sustainable management of Australia?s native hardwood forests. This was underpinned by the National Forest Policy Statement (Commonwealth of Australia 1992), which outlined principles for ecologically sustainable management of the nation?s production forests. The Commonwealth and several State Governments reached agreement to develop regional forest agreements (RFAs) for the long-term management and use of forests in ten regions (Fig. 1) (Commonwealth of Australia 2004). Key goals of the agreement were to: reconcile competing commercial, ecological and societal demands on forests in a way that was consistent with the principles and goals of ecologically sustainable forest management (Davey et al. 1997, 2002; Lane 1999); and to establish a comprehensive, adequate and representative reserve system, based on the nationallyagreed JANIS criteria (JANIS 1997).