Demographic Change and the Implications for Commercial Forestry: Lessons from South-East Australia

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.