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The timber industry is reeling from ‘whiplash’ as high interest rates and sluggish new home construction have dried up demand following a boom period during the past several years. Source: The Australian In the long run, however, the forestry industry peak body said it needed support to expand soft­wood plantations, which took a significant hit during the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires. It said Australia faced a “supply cliff’ if it was to meet its housing targets as the nation struggled to keep pace with housing needs. At the centre of this double whammy is Tumut, a town of just under 7000, two hours west of Canberra in regional. NSW. It is situated in the Murray Valley, which itself was the nation’s sec­ond most productive softwood region – 18% of national production before the Black Summer fires, according to the federal agriculture department. “This facility was processing 500,000 cubic metres of logs, today we process 250,000,” AKD Softwoods chief executive Shane Vicary said at the company’s Tumut mill. AKD is the largest sawmill company in the country, produc­ing about a quarter of the nation’s timber consumption, according to Mr Vicary. “This mill is doing half the volume that it used to do, and it’ll do half for the next 20-plus years, based on the fact that those logs got burnt,” he said. Despite this dramatic re­duction in production, timber continued to sit on the shelf with­out being sold, he said. “We can’t get enough people to buy the timber,” he said. “At the moment, most of our employees are earning less because there’s less activity: we’ve got overtime bans, we’ve got employment freezes.” Long-time Tumut timber worker and CFMEU NSW manu­facturing president Sharon Mus­son said the industry was vital for Tumut. “It’s a trickle-down effect,” she said. “The whole structure of fam­ilies, they rely on the timber com­ing through. “We’ve got one family, there’s eight people all related to each other working together – you know, uncles, brothers, sons. “For them to lose their jobs, it wouldn’t just be the impact of one person losing their pay.” Mr Vicary said reduced supply and demand made them weaker. “You become more fragile,” he said. “You become a smaller oper­ation. You become more suscep­tible to cold winds. “The irony of our situation at a time when we need to be building more houses … we need the state governments to be investing in more infrastructure to enable more suburbs.” Australian Forest Products Association NSW chief executive James Jooste said the conditions for the industry had to stabilise amid the headwinds, especially if the nation was to meet its housing targets. “There is no other solution to meeting our housing needs other than making sure we have a stable supply of timber, and the demand needs to be stabilised,” he said. “It’s so important that we make sure that when we have these am­bitious targets, we also have a plan and a road map to get there, but under pining that all is making sure over the next 20, 30, 40 years we have a consistent supply of domestic Australian timber to meet those needs because timber. goes into 90 per cent of the new detached houses built every year.” The federal government has previously laid out ambitions to build 1.2 million new homes in the next five years. NSW Premier Chris Minns recently admitted the state would not meet its target this year. The Australian earlier this month reported construction industry chiefs warned the country was not on track to meet the target. “Targets are just targets without action so we need to make sure that we’re not seeing this boom-­and-bust cycle continue in our housing construction industry,” Mr Jooste said. ”We need an even pathway and we need investment in our most important material in that housing construction cycle, which is timber.”

Since the last ice age, the Earth’s forest cover has fallen by 20 million km2 or 2 billion hectares. Half of the loss occurred since the year 1900 due to expanding agriculture and industrialization. Source: Visual Capitalist Now forests cover about 30% of the Earth’s land, about 40 million km2, distributed unevenly across the globe. Data for article comes from the World Bank, using data for 2021 that was last updated in October 2023. Predictably, the largest country in the world also has the biggest forest area. Nearly 50% of Russia is forest, measuring roughly 8 million km2. This is bigger than the total land area of every other country in the world with the exception of China, the US, Canada, Brazil, and Australia. It also means one-fifth of the world’s entire forested area is in Russia. Most of Russia’s forests are boreal, to survive the colder, drier climes in the country, and are made up of deciduous and coniferous tree species including larch, pine, spruce, and oak. At second place, Brazil has nearly 5 million km2 of forest cover (about 12% of the world’s forests), thanks to almost two-thirds of the Amazon rainforest inside its borders. For context, Brazil’s forested area is almost twice the size of Saudi Arabia, the 12th largest country in the world. The Amazon also contributes significantly to Peru’s forest cover (ranked 10th on this list) along with Colombia (13th) Bolivia (14th) and Venezuela (15th). Canada and the US, rank third and fourth with roughly the same forest cover, 3 million km2 with several forests on both coasts extending across their shared border. China rounds out the top five, its forests covering slightly more than 2 million km2. Together the top five countries account for more than half of the world’s forests. When taking in the top 10, which adds in forest cover from Australia, the DRC, Indonesia, India, and Peru, this grows to slightly more than two-third’s of the world’s forests. Expanding the ranks to the top 20 will then accounts for 80% of the Earth’s total forest cover. Not all forests are created equal. Primary forests, forests undisturbed by human activity are better carbon sinks and have greater biodiversity than human-planted ones. Here’s how each country’s forest cover is divided between primary and naturally-regenerating forests (forest where there are clearly visible indications of human activities but are now slowly reverting back to their natural state) and human–planted ones. In countries like Bahrain and Kuwait, areas of extreme aridity, where forests would not occur naturally, human-planted forests account for all forest cover. But even across large parts of Europe, planted forests vastly outnumber primary and naturally-regenerated ones, indicating how much deforestation occurred on the continent in the last three centuries, which is now being steadily reversed. In China, which increased its forest cover by the size of Norway in the last three decades, nearly 40% of the total forested area is planted. Experts say that reversing forest degradation and protecting primary forests, holders of an incredible amount of carbon that would be released into the atmosphere when logged should be prioritized instead of just planting new forests. The full article with tables is at https://www.visualcapitalist.com/which-countries-have-the-largest-forests/