That is according to Dr Daniel Roberts, the lead of theCommonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation’s Energy Technologies Research Program, who will speak at this month’s Renewable Fuels Summit.

Liquid fuels account for more than half of all final energy Australians consume and 30 per cent of national emissions: “There are really two drivers,” Roberts said. “One is emissions reduction. The other is fuel security. These have motivated alternative fuels research and energy independence ambitions for a long time.”

And whilst electric vehicles dominate the public conversation, Dr Roberts said the harder problem lies in aviation, international shipping, and diesel engines powering remote mine sites and farms. These are sectors where electrification, as he put it, “is unlikely to be able to do the heavy lifting.”

Why forest residues are now worth their weight in fuel!

That’s why CSIRO is now focused on biogenic fuels — converting biomass and organic waste into liquid fuel — a pathway Dr Roberts believes will deliver commercial results ahead of synthetic alternatives. Forestry residues, plantation waste, agricultural by-products and urban waste streams are all in scope. “It’s about recognising the value in our waste streams,” Dr Roberts said. “We have the opportunity domestically to build on existing technologies and make something really useful out of waste.”

The scale required is not small. Dr Roberts described facilities processing thousands of tonnes of feedstock daily, power-station-sized plants backed by hundreds of megawatts of electrolysers and industrial-grade carbon capture. “The first time you do something, it’s always harder and more expensive. But that’s how you learn and improve,” he said.

CSIRO is already active in the field, having participated in a world-first Australia-India trial that demonstrated, at scale, the partial replacement of coal with agricultural waste in steelmaking. It is also working with the Heavy Industry Low-Carbon Transition Cooperative Research Centre to de-risk biomass gasification pathways and cut natural gas dependence across heavy industry.

And on the commercial side, CSIRO is an active partner in the AFWI Fibre to Fuels project, which will see HAMR partner with a dozen or more partners in the forest value chain to demonstrate that plantation residues in Tasmania, Western Australia and the Green Triangle in Victoria’s timber towns can be turned into low-carbon liquid fuels.

Dr Roberts said the industry’s appetite had shifted markedly over the past five years, with net-zero commitments and geopolitical concerns about fuel supply pushing boardrooms to act. The sticking point remains policy certainty — large-scale infrastructure requires confidence that demand will be there for the life of the asset. “Companies considering 30-year infrastructure investments need certainty that customers will be there,” he said.

It comes as the federal government last year committed $1.1 billion to accelerate Australia’s low-carbon liquid fuels sector — a package the Low Carbon Fuels Alliance of Australia and New Zealand, which represents more than 300 stakeholders from feedstock producers to project developers, described as a turning point for sovereign fuel supply.

• To learn why the global timber trade is now tied up in Iranian conflict, click here for Wood Central’s special feature on the Strait of Hormuz last week.

That is according to a peer-reviewed study published this year in npj Natural Hazards, which used the McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index (FFDI) and an ensemble of dynamically downscaled CMIP6 climate projections to model how extreme fire weather will evolve under different levels of global warming.

Across Australia, once-in-twenty-year and once-in-fifty-year extreme fire events are projected to become 2.7 and 3.7 times more likely under 3°C of global warming. Whilst in southeast Australia’s eucalyptus forests those same benchmark events are projected to be 2.1-2.5 times more likely at the same warming level.

Tasmania faces the sharpest trajectory of any region studied.

Under 3°C of warming, 20-year return interval fire weather events are projected to become 3.2 times more likely, whilst 50-year return interval events are projected to become 4.1 times more likely. And even at 2°C of warming, Tasmania’s equivalent risk multipliers are 2.0 and 2.3, respectively.

The study, led by Ryan McGloin, warns that the Tasmanian findings warrant special attention, describing the projections as “particularly significant given Tasmania’s history of destructive bushfires and unique and vulnerable ecosystems that are potentially at risk of being replaced by more flammable vegetation when exposed to more frequent fires.”

The warning is grounded in history. The 1967 Black Tuesday fires killed 62 people and destroyed nearly 3,000 structures across southern Tasmania. Whilst in January 2013, fires razed 203 homes in the village of Dunalley alone. And unlike mainland forests, Tasmania’s vegetation mosaic — fire-sensitive rainforests, alpine shrublands and wet forests — faces a feedback loop in which more frequent fires progressively shift the landscape towards more flammable, fire-adapted vegetation.

A cycle, the authors say, has no natural brake.

The drivers differ by region. In Tasmania and southern Victoria, for example, projected increases in extreme fire weather are driven primarily by rising maximum temperatures, compounded by declining spring rainfall, which lifts the drought factor and lowers relative humidity on the continent’s worst fire days.

In the subtropical eucalyptus forests of southern Queensland and northern New South Wales, increasing humidity associated with a shift towards positive phases of the Southern Annular Mode partially moderates the temperature impact, resulting in the study’s lowest projected increases. There, 20-year and 50-year return interval events are still projected to become 1.8 and 2.0 times more likely at 3°C — figures the researchers describe as not immaterial.

Spring has emerged as the season of greatest concern. Severe fire weather days (FFDI ≥ 50) are projected to rise substantially in north-western and central Australia, while Very High fire weather days (FFDI between 24 and 50) are projected to increase in both the north and south. The pattern points to an earlier onset and overall lengthening of the fire season — with a shrinking window for hazard-reduction burns, a direct operational consequence for fire agencies.

The study — authored by Ryan McGloin, Ralph Trancoso, Jozef Syktus, Rohan Eccles, Nathan Toombs and Andrew Dowdy — is the first to apply the latest CMIP6 downscaled projections under different global warming levels to fire weather extremes specifically for southeast Australia’s eucalyptus forests.

For more information: McGloin, R., Trancoso, R., Syktus, J. et al. Substantial increases in the likelihood of extreme fire weather events for fire-prone ecosystems in Australia. npj Nat. Hazards 3, 28 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44304-026-00193-9

Led by Marc Grünig, Werner Rammer, and Cornelius Senf, the study was conducted by researchers at the Technical University of Munich under the senior authorship of Rupert Seidl, Professor of Ecosystem Dynamics and Forest Management at TUM “Climate Change Will Increase Forest Disturbances in Europe Throughout the 21st Century” maps the impact of climate on stock.

The reference period the team used as a baseline is telling. The years from 1986 to 2020 were already marked by unusually high disturbance levels — yet even under the most optimistic scenario, with warming held to roughly two degrees Celsius, future damage is projected to exceed that elevated benchmark. Under a four-degree trajectory, the disturbed forest area more than doubles.

It comes as Wood Central reported that storms, bark-beetle outbreaks and extreme weather could wipe out up to €247 billion in standing European timber over the same time, with Central Europe already emerging as the continent’s costliest disturbance hotspot under modelling.

Southern and western Europe face the most severe projected changes.

And the researchers warn that damage hotspots will emerge across northern Europe too — and with European timber markets deeply interconnected, localised forest losses have a habit of becoming everyone’s problem at the sawmill and the building site.

The model itself was trained on 135 million data points drawn from forest simulations across 13,000 European locations, layered with multi-decadal satellite data — projecting future disturbance trajectories down to a single hectare, a level of regional precision previously unavailable to policymakers or forest managers:

How much carbon a forest stores, how reliably it supplies timber, and what species it supports — all of it is governed by disturbance levels, and the numbers on all three are headed in one direction. Seidl’s team is pushing for forest policy to get ahead of it, arguing that rising disturbance, while destructive, also creates openings to replace vulnerable monocultures with more climate-resilient forest structures.

“We need to be prepared for significant forest damage in the coming years,” Seidl said. “Forestry must address both the risks and opportunities of rising disturbance levels, supported by new scientific methods and insights.”

The research was conducted under the EU-coordinated Resonate project — Resilient Forests for Society — led by the European Forest Institute.

• For further information: Grünig, M.; Rammer, W.; Senf, C. et al: Climate change will increase forest disturbances in Europe throughout the 21st century, Science 2026, DOI: 10.1126/science.adx6329

Operating out of HAMR Energy’s Portland Renewable Fuels facility — backed by the Australian Government’s $1.1 billion Cleaner Fuels Program — the company is looking to produce up to 300,000 tonnes of low-carbon methanol produced from the Green Triangle alone. Whilst a second plant, Australia’s first methanol-to-jet facility, will go further: 135 million litres of SAF per year from an $800 million plant announced earlier this week.

Forestry residues are not waste.

Speaking about the recent announcements, Timber Towns Victoria President Cr Karen Stephens said the projects demonstrate the value of forest products (including residues) to the local economy: “Forestry residues are not waste — they are a valuable resource that can be turned into low-carbon fuels for use in aviation and shipping, creating jobs and new income streams for regional Victoria.”

Meanwhile, OneFortyOne’s Director of Corporate Strategy, Nick Chan, recently called the project “a defining moment for plantation forestry in Australia,” pointing to the Green Triangle’s year-round operations, established logistics, and sheer scale as the natural feedstock advantage.

Australia has almost no domestic SAF production.

That gap is the opportunity. And with federal funding already flowing and aviation partners already committed, the Green Triangle doesn’t need to wait for someone else to build the market — it just needs Victoria to recognise what’s already here.

“Our communities have always understood the value of the plantation estate,” Stephens said. “This investment is proof that the forestry sector has a strong and diversified future – and we call on the Victorian Government to recognise the strategic importance of the Green Triangle and ensure regional communities capture the full economic benefit of Australia’s emerging renewable fuels sector.”

• To learn more about the ‘Fibre to Fuels’ project, click here for Wood Central’s special feature last month. And to learn more about the opportunities for Victoria’s timber towns, click here for Timber Towns Victoria’s media statement.

Introduced in Congress last week, Senators Chris Coons (from Delaware) and Jacky Rosen (of Nevada) put forward the Housing Tariff Exclusion Act, which would automatically exclude lumber, OSB, engineered wood products, cement, glass, insulation, plastics, adhesives, and stone products from President Trump’s current and future tariffs.

And for anything not covered by exemptions, the bill would direct the Secretary of Commerce to establish an expedited application process, providing importers a legitimate path to relief when domestic supply simply can’t fill the gap.

After the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s tariff powers under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the administration moved quickly to implement a new 10% global import tariff that took effect last week. And that levy landed squarely on construction materials, catching builders, dealers, and developers who had barely had time to process the court ruling.

“President Trump’s tariffs are making it more expensive to build homes in America, and it’s driving up the cost of housing for everyone,” Senator Coons said. “In a housing crisis, this is the last thing we should be doing.”

Senator Rosen was even more direct. “We know that one way to address the affordable housing crisis is by making it easier and cheaper for developers to build more housing — but Trump has done the complete opposite over the past year by imposing cost-raising tariffs on virtually all homebuilding materials,” she said. “The Supreme Court found many of his tariffs illegal, but it’s clear that he’ll use the many other tariff authorities at his disposal to continue imposing them.”

Wood Central understands that if passed, the legislation would apply to all tariffs implemented since January 19, 2025. It deliberately leaves long-standing anti-dumping and countervailing duties alone, meaning the existing AD/CVD orders on Canadian softwood lumber will remain in place.

More than 60% of builders are bleeding

The National Association of Home Builders, which worked directly with Rosen and Coons to shape the bill, didn’t mince words on the scale of the problem. As it stands, 60% of builders have already reported cost increases attributable to tariffs, which are being passed directly to buyers and renters.

Last year, Wood Central reported that NAHB members were budgeting for tariff-driven material cost increases of between US$7,500 and US$10,900 on a typical single-family build, before the latest levy was added. “This bill is an important step forward to create more certainty for American businesses and to address the nation’s housing affordability challenges,” said NAHB Chairman Bill Owens.

And there’s a structural problem that makes the tariff pain worse than it looks.

As it stands, more than 93% of U.S. homes use timber framing, and the country imports roughly 30% of the softwood lumber it consumes, with 85% of that coming from Canada alone.

That’s why NAHB has been warning for months that soaring Canadian lumber duties, now exceeding 35% before the new global tariff, were squeezing builders already battling high material and labour costs. Single-family housing starts fell nearly 7% in 2025 to 943,000, the weakest result since the pandemic recovery.

The lumber and building materials sector is united on this one

The National Lumber and Building Material Dealers Association, which had direct input into the bill’s scope, put its endorsement on the record immediately. “Lumber and building material dealers operate within a supply chain that depends on stable and predictable trade policy,” said Jonathan M. Paine, President and CEO of the NLBMDA.

“Tariffs on essential construction inputs have been shown to increase costs, create market volatility, and can delay or discourage new housing starts. By establishing a transparent and timely exclusion process for critical homebuilding materials, the Housing Tariff Exclusion Act will help stabilise prices, strengthen supply chains, and support the increased construction activity needed to improve housing affordability nationwide.”

David Dworkin, President and CEO of the National Housing Conference, said the legislation would lower building and preservation costs, reduce supply chain pressures, and ensure trade policy stops worsening the affordability crisis the sector is already trying to dig out from.

Other endorsers include Third Way, Up for Growth Action, Habitat for Humanity, Local Initiatives Support Corporation, and the Housing Assistance Council. The bill is co-sponsored by Senators Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Delaware), Tim Kaine (D-Virginia), Angela Alsobrooks (D-Maryland), Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico), and Andy Kim (D-New Jersey).

• To learn more about the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Trump’s tariff powers and what it means for construction imports, click here for Wood Central’s special feature. To find out how engineered wood products bound for the U.S. are now caught in the new Section 122 surcharge, click here for Wood Central’s report from last week.

When International Paper closed its mills in Liberty and Chatham counties last year, regional demand fell by 3 million tonnes, and nearly 1,655 jobs disappeared seemingly overnight. Pulpwood that fetched US$15–16 a tonne before the closures now sells for US$5–6. As a result, demand, as of January, is down 60 per cent.

As a result, the economics have turned against landowners.

The average pulpwood price before International Paper’s exit was US$1,125 per acre. Last month it was US$375. “It costs about $350 to get an acre replanted,” according to Shane Harrelson, owner of Ohoopee Land and Timber in Vidalia, who spoke to local media over the weekend. “So to timber land owners, it doesn’t seem to make sense anymore.”

It’s that kind of mathematics that brought Georgia’s timber leaders to a summit in Midway  — looking for markets that paper and pulp can no longer provide.

Al Williams, state representative and Liberty County Development Authority Chair, said debt is pushing some to bankruptcy. “It’s devastating. If you own $2 million worth of equipment and you’re not hauling any logs… That’s scary.”

Joe Hopkins, CEO of Toledo Manufacturing and a landowner, was blunt. “We’re barely breaking even.” Whilst Steve Strickland, vice president of Beach Timber Inc. and owner of two pole mills, watched raw material supply evaporate.

“If you have 1,000 trees in that stand of timber, about 10% of that is going to be straight enough to make poles out of,” he said. “The other 900 trees that aren’t being harvested don’t have a mill anymore, so nothing is being cut.” A third mill he owns sits closed. “With the market in such bad shape, we have no current plans to bring it back online without major capital investment.”

Harrelson — whose business sold only 5% of its wood to International Paper — was nearly sunk by the paper giant’s collapse anyway. His company was shifting a maximum of 30 loads in the first two weeks after the closure.  “A year ago, I was selling 90 to 100 loads a week,” he said. “(But) if we were to sell under 40 loads a week for four to six weeks, we wouldn’t be able to keep going.”

But instead of despairing, Harrelson pivoted, harvesting mixed tracts of soft pine and hardwood across different species to reach different product markets. “It got him me back to 60 to 65 loads a week,” he said.

The December summit became as much a therapy session for embattled business owners as a venue for solutions. House Majority Leader Jon Burns, one of Georgia’s largest timber farmers, focused on the enormous opportunities in sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) with local producers responding to new European mandates to progressively lift SAF content in aviation blends.

A Model T that’s been running for 90 years vs a brand-new F-250.

However, Burns was candid about many of the obstacles. Europe blocks chemically treated wood from American mills, he said, and the unstable tariff situation makes US wood uncompetitive. “SAF also competes against cooking oil and municipal waste for feedstock — Georgia doesn’t own this market outright.”

“We can support our existing businesses,” Georgia Forestry Commission executive director Tim Lowrimore told state lawmakers. “But we also have the capacity to do more. To get where we want to be, you, as state leaders, have to be committed.”

Mass timber was another idea that gained traction. According to Byrnn Grant, CEO of LCDA, it’s more eco-friendly than steel or concrete, and far more durable than particleboard. Whilst Patrick Shay, architect from Gunn Meyerhoff Shay Architects, told the room that timber-based floor slabs can remove the need for a concrete pour, cutting time and cost.

“Georgia is uniquely positioned,” Marshall Thomas, president of F&W Forestry Services, recently told a state Senate study committee. “We can add jobs and tax base and position Georgia as a leader in the transition to a green economy.”

Amongst the roadblocks is the age of machinery and its equivalent. Seven of Georgia’s eight remaining pulp mills were built before 1961. “Brazil, China, and Indonesia are building brand new, state-of-the-art mills, and we’re running mills built in 1936,” one figure said.

“It’s a Model T that’s been running for 90 years vs to a brand-new Ford F-250.”

It comes as an estimated 7,000 tonnes of paper machine clothing is discarded from paper machines across Europe each year, with most of it currently burned or sent to landfill. The program, which launched at industrial scale in January 2025, collects end-of-life fabrics and felts made from polyamide (PA) and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) at several UPM mills in Finland and Germany, with HolyPoly coordinating the collection and ensuring the material is recycled in full compliance with European regulations.

Each tonne of recycled paper machine clothing prevents roughly three tonnes of CO₂ emissions that would otherwise result from incineration, and the recycled material is already substituting virgin polymers in new components, with demand described as high and the process fully scalable.

Heiner Schütte, Senior Sourcing Manager at UPM, told Andritz that the collaboration represented a step-change in how the company manages its waste streams. “We at UPM are delighted to collaborate with Andritz and HolyPoly to recycle our used paper machine clothing,” Schütte said. “With this initiative, we are moving the utilisation of used paper machine clothing higher up the waste hierarchy, from energy recovery to material recycling.”

In parallel, Andritz is working to optimise the quality and specifications of the recycled granulate, with the long-term goal of feeding the material back into the manufacture of new paper machine clothing — a move that would close the loop entirely. The initiative also forms part of Andritz’s broader push to meet the EU’s planned extended producer responsibility (EPR) requirements.

Tan Peng Juan, president of the Malaysian Timber Association, told the Daily Express Malaysia that he had serious concerns over attempts by the European Union and the United States to propose the inclusion of tropical timbers under Appendix II of CITES at the 20th Conference of the Parties (CoP20). Those proposals were ultimately not tabled, but he said it has sent the Malaysian industry scrambling to prepare for what many expect will be a second attempt.

Shorea species, traded as meranti, seraya and balau, underpin Malaysia’s tropical timber value chain and are processed into sawn wood, veneer sheets, panels and plywood. And whilst an Appendix II listing would not ban the trade outright, it would impose new permit requirements, documentation and compliance costs, enough to dramatically slow the flow of Shorea-based products into markets at a time when the industry is already being squeezed.

In a letter to Natural Resources and Environmental Sustainability Minister Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad last year — written by then-MTA president George Yap  — the association warned that “CITES regulations must also consider socio-economic impacts” and pledged to assist the government in preparing “technical and socio-economic counterarguments” while rallying support from regional bodies.

That letter also pointed out that “deforestation in Malaysia is driven by multiple factors, including urban development and population growth, rather than timber production alone,” describing the EU and US approach as disproportionate and urging Malaysia to present “a compelling case against the broad-brush proposal.”

It comes as Wood Central reported last year that Malaysia’s timber sector was already being hit from three sides — a domestic Sales and Service Tax (SST) that has pushed operational costs up by an estimated 8–12%, Trum’s tariffs dampening export volumes, and the since delayed (and water downed) EUDR resulting in a compliance quagmire for traders into global markets.

At the time, Deputy Minister of Plantation and Commodities, Datuk Chan Foong Hin, told more than 400 attendees at a Timber Exporters’ Association of Malaysia (TEAM) event: “Although export products aren’t directly taxed, rising production costs are starting to erode Malaysia’s long-standing export strength.”

The CITES proposal adds an entirely new layer.

Wood Central understands that the push to list Shorea is not driven solely by conservation. In March last year, the US-based Hardwood Federation wrote to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lobbying for both Shorea and Apitong to be added to the CITES list — arguing that “protecting Apitong is crucial for environmental conservation and maintaining international trade sustainability.”

However, the real aim, according to the Malaysians, was to promote American Red oak as a potential replacement for Southeast Asian imports in a variety of local industries, including the US military supply chain.

Wong Kar Wai, treasurer of TEAM, was direct about it at the Export Furniture Exhibition 2025. “Keruing is a special type of timber primarily used for floorboards, with the US being its main market. A major buyer is the US military, which uses Keruing for the flooring of trucks and tanks due to its durability and strength,” Wong told SunBiz. “However, the US is now looking to rely more on its local timber, particularly Red oak.”

“As a result, there are discussions about placing Keruing under CITES, which could further restrict its trade and impact exporters, particularly from Malaysia,” he said — adding that “despite being sustainably harvested and certified, Shorea and Apitong face potential trade restrictions under the guise of conservation.”

Last year, Wood Central reported that the US Department of Defence had already developed a Red oak-based trailer decking prototype to replace Keruing, whilst the National Defence Authorisation Act had already classified Apitong as endangered and called for a transition to domestically sourced alternatives. “The timber sector now faces two major threats — tariffs and the potential CITES listing — which could severely impact trade,” Wong said.

• To read more about the impact of tariffs, taxes and CITES on Malaysia’s timber trade, click here for Wood Central’s special feature. For more on how the CITES ruling could drive up timber prices for Australian consumers, click here.

Speaking about the deal today, David Stribley, HAMR Energy’s co-founder, said the decision to set up camp in South Australia builds on its existing investments in Victoria: “The state’s world-class infrastructure, commitment to clean energy, and proximity to sustainable feedstock sources make it an excellent location to accelerate decarbonisation in aviation.”

Wood Central understands that wood residues from the Green Triangle will serve as feedstock for the massive plant, which will use Honeywell’s world-leading methanol-to-jet technology to produce more than 300,000 tonnes of low-carbon methanol, made from a mix of plantation residues and hydrogen, to provide up to 140 million litres of SAF every year. And according to Stribley, that’s enough to fully offset more than 4.5 million economy-class passenger trips between Adelaide and Melbourne over a 12-month period.

The science underpinning the value chain is advanced.

Already, researchers from the Australian Forest and Wood Innovations (AFWI) Fibre to Fuels project are working alongside 16 partners to test whether residues from the Green Triangle, home to the country’s most productive forest plantations, as well as forests in Tasmania and Western Australia, can be turned into low-carbon liquid fuels at a commercial scale. Led by Professor Mark Brown, Director of the AFWI Centre for Sustainable Futures located at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Professor Brown revealed to this masthead that the feed inputs will be provided to fuel the enormous facility.

Already, HAMR Energy has signed supply agreements with local plantation estates like OneFortyOne, which has been a vocal champion of the project since signing a memorandum of understanding last year. Meanwhile, in January, OneFortyOne Director of Corporate Strategy Nick Chan described the Green Triangle’s scale, year-round operations, and established logistics as key advantages for supplying feedstock for low-carbon fuels, calling the HAMR partnership “a defining moment for plantation forestry in Australia.”

The announcement, made just 18 days out from the March 21 election, is being framed by the state government as a win for jobs and investment, with Premier Malinauskas, a long-standing supporter of the state’s forest value chain, the runaway favourite to secure a second term. Speaking about the commitment, Joe Szakacs, the state’s Minister for Trade, said the investment didn’t happen by accident.“It follows persistent work and considered planning,” Szakacs said. “Our Government warmly welcomes HAMR Energy’s backing of South Australia.”

The $10 million Series A round brought Qantas, Airbus and thyssenkrupp Uhde onto the register — as Wood Central reported last month — locking in aviation and industrial partners who are betting on the methanol-to-jet pathway to decarbonise sectors where electrification isn’t an option.

Combined with HAMR Energy’s Portland Renewable Fuels facility in Victoria, which will produce the renewable methanol, the South Australian plant gives the company two large-scale projects running off feedstock. The Portland project, backed by the Albanese government’s $1.1 billion Cleaner Fuels Program, was first flagged by Wood Central in mid-2023, when then-Victorian Minister for Energy Lily D’Ambrosio spoke about the benefits of sustainable fuels manufacturing at the Port of Portland.

Aerospace giants are tapping into forest fibre to decarbonise

The Fibre to Fuels project has assembled a coalition of more than a dozen forestry, industry and research partners — from Sustainable Timber Tasmania, PF Olsen and Timberlands Pacific through to CSIRO, the University of South Australia, the University of the Sunshine Coast and thyssenkrupp Uhde, who, alongside Wespine, OneFortyOne, South West Fibre, HVP, GTFP, SFM and Hydrowood, are assessing the composition of different residues, trialling collection and transport logistics, and mapping carbon emissions.

Dr Joseph Lawrence, executive director of the $200 million AFWI research institute, said forestry has a rare window to show what sustainable plantation management can deliver value far beyond sawlogs: “I think the story goes through biodiversity, environmental protections… and the jobs it can create.”

For growers and processors across the Green Triangle, it is another revenue stream from wood that has historically gone nowhere. Now with two HAMR Energy projects in the pipeline and a research program spanning more than a dozen partners, the value chain that starts with forest residues and ends with jet fuel on the tarmac is no longer just a pitch deck.

• For more on the push to convert Green Triangle forest waste into sustainable aviation fuel, click here for Wood Central’s coverage of Qantas Backs Plan to Turn Green Triangle Forest Waste into Jet Fuel.

“It will take the government a bit of time to properly explain the changes,” Senator Watt told the Week in Cattle podcast. “What these changes do is bring agriculture (and forestry) in line with all other industries. This is a change, but it doesn’t mean the end.”

Wood Central understands that the Commonwealth is working on three separate pathways for businesses that operate under RFAs to continue working in forests after the exemptions sunset on 1 July 2027. However, according to Stuart Coppock, one of the few legal practitioners with a deep working knowledge of how the RFA framework operates, there has been no material evidence of progress in these pathways.

“The clock is ticking much faster than the bureaucrats realise. It’s crucial that we hear from the state governments on these pathways as they are a joint signature to any future arrangements.”

Appearing before the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee, Coppock said the newly minted changes to the EPBC Act have opened a constitutional fault line between state and federal jurisdiction that nobody has resolved — and nobody appears to be resolving.

“None of these pathways seems to be operational at the moment,” he said. “And with less than 16 months until the exemption expires, not one has been finalised for any of the ten RFAs across New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia and Tasmania”

“As soon as the legislation kicks in, the RFAs will go, and there is nothing left to replace them,” according to Coppock, in response to Senator Susan McDonald, who asked whether the bill alters the practical operation of the NSW and other state RFAs. “We are heading into a maelstrom of legal nonsense … literally no man’s land.”

‘The state controls the land’

Coppock laid out the constitutional problem in terms that cut through the legalese. “The state controls the land. All the Commonwealth have is protected species,” he said. “There is a mismatch.”

And that mismatch goes to the heart of what happens when the RFA exemption disappears. The agreements were designed precisely to resolve the tension between state land management powers and Commonwealth environmental protections — a framework painstakingly negotiated over a decade from 1990 through to the early 2000s across four states and ten separate agreements. Remove them, and the question of who has authority becomes legally unclear.

He told Senators the existing system is legally robust and has been tested at the highest levels of the court system. “There is in place a very good system under the RFAs. They weren’t invented yesterday; they’ve been around for a very long time. The Full Federal Court has a very solid judgment which sets out the precedent on why they work,” he said.

“The only comment you might make is that they only cover select areas and not all areas.”

Contestable science and inevitable lawfare

But it was Coppock’s analysis of the decision-making framework — or lack of one — that may prove the most consequential warning for the industry.

The way the legislation is drafted, he explained, the process is built around decision-making: start with legislation, then work to standards. But it does not deal with the commercial and economic realities of forestry. And in the area of timber, the environmental science that underpins those decisions is highly contestable.

“What is data and information in terms of environmental legislation? It’s about science,” Coppock said, speaking on behalf of Timber NSW. “And where you land in the area of timber is in a highly contestable area of science. And that’s where you end up in lawfare — where you have arguments over scientific papers.”

In other words, the reforms risk turning every harvesting decision into a courtroom battle.

Coppock pointed the committee to established legislative models that could offer a way through — frameworks already proven in Australian law. The first was work health and safety legislation, which uses the concept of “reasonably practicable” to set a compliance threshold. The second was the business judgment rule in corporate law.

Both provide a defence structure and a compliance standard that allows a decision-maker to demonstrate they worked diligently through the material before them. “If you do the best job you can in front of you, at least you can say you did the best you can,” he said.

The sweet spot, he said, lies in embedding a high-performance compliance standard within the decision-making framework. It would give operators a defensible pathway through the regulatory thicket — something, in his view, the current legislation simply fails to provide.

‘An act of vandalism’

Coppock’s testimony comes mere days after Rob de Fégely AM — the former Chair of the advisory committee that counselled multiple Agriculture Ministers on forestry matters — slammed the review used to justify the EPBC reforms.

Speaking to Wood Central last week, de Fégely described the 2020 Samuel Review of the EPBC Act as “deficient and underwhelming,” challenged the government’s ability to measure “net gain” without baseline data from national parks and reserves, and invited the Prime Minister to visit Tasmania to see sustainable forest management in action.

Today, de Fégely went further, arguing that the Samuel Review’s consultation process excluded the very people who manage forests — the practitioners of the RFAs — and that, without their input, Professor Samuel could not have understood the depth of planning, expertise, and biodiversity knowledge embedded within forest management agencies.

“RFAs can be improved, but abolishing them not only destroys 35 years of dedicated work — it is an act of social, environmental and economic vandalism, simply because the Commonwealth government does not have a better system to replace them with.”

Where de Fégely has attacked the quality of the review and the absence of practitioner input, Coppock has now laid bare the legal consequence: a framework that is constitutionally uncertain, operationally unworkable and, in the contested world of forest science, a guaranteed pipeline to the courts.

What comes next?

Wood Central understands that the Environment and Communications Legislation Committee is due to hand down its report on the Environment Protection Reform Bill by 24 March. The existing exemption for RFA forestry activities will formally end on 1 July 2027, at which point forestry operations with a potential significant impact on matters of national environmental significance will require EPBC assessment, approval and compliance with National Environmental Standards that are yet to be finalised.

• To find out more about the EPBC Act and its implications for Australia’s forests and forest products value chain, click here for Wood Central’s special feature.