The Federal and Tasmanian Governments have announced the signing of a new Conservation Agreemenet that forms the next step in progressing the Tasmanian Forsts Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA).

 

The agreement with Forestry Tasmania, which comes under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, excludes hundreds of thousands of forests from rotation forestry while an analysis of forest conservation values and industry timber supply requirements is undertaken.

 

While Federal Environment Minister, Tony Burke, remained said the government remained committed to conservation of the state’s forests, he admitted the deteriorating market conditions in the forestry industry.

 

“The Conservation Agreement is the next step of the Intergovernmental Agreement which is supporting the community led agreement to deliver long term job security and a good conservation outcome for Tasmania’s ancient forests,” Mr Burke said.

 

“With this agreement in place, all parties can now concentrate their efforts on assisting the important work of the Independent Verification Group, which is assessing the conservation values of the entire 572,000 hectares nominated by environmental non-governmental organisations, in addition to verifying long-term timber supply requirements and availability.”

 

To inform the details of this Agreement, independent forestry experts undertook a thorough investigation of existing harvesting work within the 430,000 hectare interim area in the Intergovernmental Agreement, and explored all options for rescheduling this harvesting outside the interim area to the maximum extent possible.

 

The interim Conservation Agreement can be found here