Reporting by the Sydney Morning Herald 'Fiasco: State government loggers caught out exaggerating wood harvesting' today, Friday 7th February, reveals significant data errors in Forestry Corporation of New South Wales’ (FCNSW) biomaterial reports. These reports form a part of its sustainability reporting requirements, detailing the volume and quality of timber harvested from coastal forests. The reporting finds that FCNSW:
...exaggerated the volume of timber it extracted from state forests by nearly 30 per cent in at least three years’ worth of legally required reports, while also claiming the logs were bigger and higher quality than the reality.
Frontier Economics has been closely analysing the NSW public native forest logging sector for some time. Economic analysis of public native forest logging’s contribution to regional economies relies on the integrity of the data contained in FCNSW’s sustainability reporting.
Our research has found that public native forest logging is a small part of NSW’s forestry sector and regional economies. A correction of FCNSW’s data errors do not compromise this key finding – indeed, the corrections would strengthen our findings on the small size of the public native forest logging sector.
Read some of our reports on this sector:
