Re: Sustainable Forest Management

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• Subject: Re: Sustainable Forest Management
• From: Aled Hoggett <aledh@IRONBARK.FOREST.NSW.GOV.AU>
• Date: Wed, 6 Dec 1995 10:53:48 -0500
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On 5/12/95 Brett Diamond Wrote:

>Canada, on the other
>hand, has 65% of it's land area designated as wilderness, Austrailia 33%,
>Brazil 28%, and China 19%.

There is a difference between designated and protected wilderness and
between forested and non forested wilderness. I'm not sure where Brett is
sourcing his information from, but here are some additional facts that
relate to Australia.

The Australian Heritage Commission recently conducted an inventory of
wilderness based on  broad indices of remoteness and naturalness in New
South Wales. At around 80 million hectares NSW occupies 10% of Australia's
land surface. This inventory classified approximately 20% of the state
(estimated from the map they supplied) as of moderate to high
remoteness/naturalness value. It could be, and probably has been, argued
that the area identified by the inventory should be designated wilderness.
Maybe this is where Brett's figures come from?

The protected story is quite different. The NSW State of the Environment
Report says that 0.81% of the total land area of NSW is in declared
wilderness areas in protection reserves (National Parks). It also states
that no wilderness areas have been declared over other land tenures. The
implication is that wilderness values outside the 0.81% are afforded no
protection that exlicitly relates to their wilderness status.

So designated:protected could be put at approximately 20:1. (This proportion
is largely a result of a geography/human value interaction).

I don't have the figures on the proportion of forested and non-forested
wilderness. What I can say is that only 5% of Australia's total land area is
forested, and of this approximately one quarter is in dedicated conservation
reserves (National Park). The remainder is distributed evenly between state
forest, other public lands and private property (This information from the
Resource Assessment Commission, 1992). Even if 33% of Australia is protected
wilderness it is almost certain that at least 31.5 percent would be
non-forested.

Aled Hoggett

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