The most important challenge ahead

The Background

In Australia, native forest management on private lands is regulated by a variety of state laws that are aimed at both enabling landholders to produce and sell wood, while at the same time ensuring ongoing provision of environmental services, particularly those relating to diversity of native flora and fauna, management of fire risk, and control of weeds. A good example is that of the Private Native Forest Management Code that regulates private forestry in NSW[1]. This code is designed by the NSW Environmental Protection Authority and implemented by Local Land Services.

The PNF Code in NSW outlines the objectives of the regulations, but is vacant of procedures for doing this, or how to pay for it. It is further noteworthy that within the social and economic construct in which we live our lives, it is obvious that while forested lands cannot be compared with other land uses and show an economic and social advantage, then any forest is at risk of being lost with any change of government. In my opinion, the greatest challenge ahead for forest management on private lands is getting paid to practice good forest management.

It has been often proposed that this cost could or should be afforded by government given the recipients of the environmental services is the community as a whole. To be fair, there has been recent allocations of funds to landholders in NSW for the cost of undertaking some management activities. Much of this has been about repair following first of 2019/20, and is woefully inadequate when considering the scale of work that needs to be done and sustained. The shortfall is possibly eclipsed by the shortfall of funding for National Parks.

What then is the solution?

My field of work in forestry has primarily been about wood. How to grow high quality resources, and how to convert these, to products and income.  With this market approach in mind, there appears to be the basics of a possible solution. The first point is that the environmental services we speak of are a product of forest, are is in high demand. This is evidenced by the community through the ballot box and their “green” product purchasing behaviour. The second point to be made is that while environmental services have been provided free of charge in the past as a gift of natural ecosystems. That only works while there is an abundance of those natural places, and the services mentioned are a product of the landholdings concerned, and should be valued and marketed appropriately if they are to be sustained.

The definition of what is good stewardship of forests, (or what is environmental conservation) continues to form the basis for much discussion. Measuring or monitoring performance also[2]. The primary challenge is the cost of systems of definition and measurement. This cost can exceed the cost of management. Efforts of governments to create definitions and to measure against them have created complex and expensive procedures[3] Current approaches by government are designed to enable punishment of poor management. This may appear to answer the community demand for good forest stewardship, but does nothing to provide resources.

Very recently, I was invited to view the outcomes of the work of a business in our region of NE NSW, that advertised and sold the opportunity to sponsor the reestablishment of wet forests within the “Big Scrub” region of our coastal hinterland of the far northern rivers. The results this business has achieved are encouraging or possibly spectacular. That is at least in regard to the capacity to attract sponsorship, that had elevated to millions of dollars. These funds came primarily from European business, that were responding to international news stories of the destruction of rainforest during the summer of 2019/20 fires.

Building the Product

The product we seek to market is access to information that clearly informs potential customers of the outputs of their investment in a way that can be understood. In this time of digital technology, preparation of visual descriptions of land condition are relatively inexpensive to create. David Attenborough has formed a lifetime of spectacular work in this field. Of course, there is a need to provide some kind of index to the quality and quantity of product that can be understood as improvement or achievement. This involves survey and quantifying response. These things are the composition and abundance of flora and fauna for example. The appearance of organisms previously locally extinct. Stored carbon, water quality and supply.

The product is therefore on-line access to an information feed that is regularly updated that includes survey results boosted by comprehensive audio-visual evidence of the condition of forest.

Building the Trade Arrangements

The trade arrangements are important. A landholder does not want to encumber their assets indefinitely and seeks only to supply the relevant services not the full output of their holdings. Customers need to understand that the product is not a physical condition that can be purchased and held in stasis indefinitely it is in fact dynamic and its existence requires ongoing work, notwithstanding that when an ecosystem reaches a climax condition, its maintenance is far reduced compared to the recovery or regeneration.

The trading partners need to be able to negotiate what is being traded, and the price. Given it is service that is being traded, a time frame must be defined for each trade of funds for service.

Over the period of trade, the customer requires a continuous feed of information on what work is done to develop or maintain services, and evidence of those services as data or sound and video. This requires an accessible delivery platform ideally offered as digital and on-line content accessible globally.

Finally, access to the results of any work that is provide digitally, needs to be secured as the possession of the customer that has sponsored the management of the landscape. This enables business customers to reproduce content in their own operational space to promote their own environmental credentials as a responsible operator within the environment.

Who are the customers?

Anyone can contribute to good stewardship of the landscape and provision of environmental services to the community. This can be motivated by a personal goal to direct economic development toward sustained eco-cultural systems and the future. The most likely customers will be those corporate entities that seek to conduct their business and supply their own customers, while at the same time contributing to a sustained socio-economic condition that secures the future and generations to come.

What is the infrastructure?

The business described will require a few ancillary services to support its credibility. As mentioned, a service is required that can undertake survey work and generate the audio-visual outputs that are invaluable to communicating outcomes. This in turn requires credible and responsible technicians able to produce true descriptions.

There is a need for a simple and inexpensive system of numerical description that can elucidate the changes over time that has resulted from investment in the landscape. The burden on this system to produce information is much reduced if evidence of the presence of flora and fauna are provided as audio visual content as discussed. Therefore, the quantitative demand needs to cover measures of physical structure, and species composition/abundance. Possibly some chemical data may be required to describe carbon storage or water quality, but these imply laboratory work that is expensive, and may not bring much to the value of the product demand

There are two primary foundations here. Firstly, it will be most beneficial, if a model landscape can be identified that can be measured to provide a target by comparison. This is useful for healthy landscapes, but most beneficial when measuring changing during recovery. The second is a system of description that can be used to compare outcomes with targets.

A first draft of design might be as follows.

1.      All the organisms within the forest offer something to physical character which in turn offers resources and protection. Physical character can be described as

·        The number and dimensions of discrete layers of foliage marked by a separation of unoccupied space. For example, a ground covered forest floor of grasses (0 – 0.5m) with an understory of small trees or shrubs (2 - 8m) topped by a primary crown of dispersed foliage and high light penetration (25 – 30m). This might compare to a deep forest floor layer comprised of small trees, shrubs and vines (0 – 8m) that are and interspaced with decaying organic matter and fungal bodies, overtopped by a primary substantially closed crown (25 to 40m)

·        The physiological condition of woody material such as the texture of decaying wood on the forest floor or the appearance of hollows in standing trees. The presence of small saplings versus mature stems are also important indicators of diversity. These describe to maturity of the forest but are critical variables contributing habitat. These can be quantified as counts within a survey area accompanied by some physical description.

2.      The species composition and abundance are primary variables describing diversity, and habitat. Often identifying species is very difficult and requires much training and experience. Despite that, ground surveys are sufficient to collect data.

3.      Soils provide an abundance of information that can be directly related to the above ground condition. Both microflora and nutrition are important, and could provide accuracy and precision to comparisons of different forests. This remains largely unexplored, and implies expensive laboratory procedures. However, soil sample collection is simple and cheap.

4.      Stored carbon is a topical service of forests currently, but is difficult to market because it can encumber land for long times. It may not be useful in this context.

5.      Water quality is also easily sampled, but incurs cost in the laboratory. IN field assessment of turbidity can be made inexpensively, and the character of pond life can be used to infer condition.

6.      Fauna surveying has improved markedly with technical developments in recent times. Of particular note is the use of audio recordings and AI algorithms to identify and count species of fauna present. Similarly, cameras triggered by movement can be left for long times to record macrofauna activity while operators are absent. Infra-red cameras have further improved detectability. Camera technology fitted to drones have substantially decreased the cost of surveying large areas. All this technology is critical to the audio-visual description of the product as already mentioned.

A survey approach might only involve ground surveys by trained operators supplemented with technology enabling cheap fauna surveys, could provide sufficient data to compare with known “healthy” sites to index the quality of environmental service products. Surveying would demand considerable detail initially followed by “review” scale surveying afterwards. If this work cost $20 to $50 per hectare depending on the detail required then a cost-effective system of quantification might be designed. If the system could be generalised into a fixed format, then the application is broadened and much bias can be removed.

The Message

The future of forest management demands a method of valuing forests such that this land use can be included in normal land use investment decisions. The current public approach which is to punish poor forest stewardship will not work in this context, as it implies complex and unwieldy systems of definition and assessment of ecosystem management. Additionally, the community of consumers have indicated through he ballot box the substantial demand for responsible land management.

A product may be formed that is access to description of land under management, made available through digital media, that offers customers the opportunity to fund ecosystem conservation and to exploit the results as demonstration of environmental responsibility. This in turn is a powerful marketing tool, or a sense of individual contribution and satisfaction.

[1] https://www.epa.nsw.gov.au/your-environment/native-forestry/private-native-forestry/codes-of-practice

[2] Sakar S., 2002. Defining Biodiversity; Assessing Biodiversity The Monist Vol 85 no. 1 pp131-155.

  Hilton M., Cook C, C., 2022 Defining Performance Thresholds for effective management of biodiversity within protected areas. Conservation Biology 36:e13963 https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13963

[3] NSW Office of Environment and Heritage 2019 Measuring Biological Diversity and ecological integrity in NSW.