Nature Conservation and the Regional Forest Agreement Process

The regional forest agreement process (RFA) arose from bitter, politically difficult, debates on the future of Australia s forests. The approach to solving this debate that arose from the ecologically sustainable development and other processes was to take care of the reasonable conservation needs first, then facilitate economic development in the remaining forests. Unfortunately, the scientifically derived criteria for forest conservation developed by the Commonwealth were amended in the course of the RFA process such that the approach effectively became yet another compromise between conservation and development. To date, the public involvement in the development of regional compromises has been in the form of information and opinion input rather than decision-making, and the outcomes of both the East Gippsland and Tasmanian RFAs have not been accepted by conservationists as adequate. In the Tasmanian RFA in particular, there is a large distance between the outcomes and some of the indicative targets as expressed in the original Commonwealth criteria. The major gaps are in the security of the reserve system from development, the assured protection in reserves of known elements of biological diversity, and the failure to assure that existing public native forest, whether reserved or not, is not converted to other land uses.