Australia has 134 million hectares of forest, covering 17% of Australia's land area. Australia has around 3% of the world's forests, and globally is the country with the seventh largest forest area.
Australia’s forests are diverse, extensive, and highly regarded for their ecological, economic and social values. They provide a range of benefits including wood and non-wood forest products and ecosystem services. The range of services covers:
- water protection and supply
- soil protection
- carbon storage and sequestration
- habitat for flora and fauna species
- tourism and recreation
- cultural values for both non-Indigenous and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
Australia has a well-established institutional framework to support the conservation and sustainable management of forests.
The Australian Government aims to foster and enable productive, profitable, internationally competitive and sustainable Australian forest and forest products industries.
National Forest Industries Plan - Growing a Better Australia – A Billion Trees for Jobs and Growth.
The Australian Government’s National Forest Industries Plan, Growing a Better Australia – A Billion Trees for Jobs and Growth, was launched on 12 September 2018.
The plan provides a vision supporting the forest industries' aspirational goal of planting a billion new plantation trees over the period to 2030 to meet growing demand for wood and wood products.
Progress with the implementation of the plan and related measures is reported in the National Forest Industries Plan—implementation, election commitments and other measures.
The Australian Government provided $20 million over 4 years in the 2018–2019 Federal Budget to support implementation of the plan. Subsequent initiatives have built on this base and responded to emerging priorities, including assisting industry with bushfire recovery measures.
National University Wood Challenge
The Australian Government has provided funding to Forest and Wood Products Australia (FWPA) to deliver a National University Wood Challenge.
The challenge is supporting teams of university students and academics to create and develop innovative ideas for using wood to produce new, sustainable, everyday products. Funding is being provided to build, test or prototype ideas.
For more information, go to FWPA-National University Wood Challenge.
In this section
- Australia's forest industry
- Australia's forest policy
- The National Forest Industries Plan
- Supporting forestry bushfire recovery
- Wood packaging
- Australia's forests
- Australian Forestry - Planning for Tomorrow, Today
- International forestry
- Importing timber and wood
- Illegal logging
- Plantations and farm forestry
- Regional forest agreements
- Forestry and timber pests
- Sustainable forest management
- Wood export licensing
- Exporting plants and plant products