That is according to Pulse Tasmania, which reports the rig is designed to replicate the planned venue’s fixed-roof structure and will assess whether a treated version of the stadium’s ETFE roof material can eliminate the shadow problem that has dogged the project since early 2025.

Shadows have plagued the design from the beginning.

Last year, Wood Central reported that Cricket Australia and Cricket Tasmania wrote to the Tasmanian government demanding architects redesign or remove the roof entirely, saying the fixed-dome design made the venue “unlikely to be conducive to hosting Test matches” — and potentially unworkable for one-day and T20 fixtures too.

At the time, Anne Beach, the CEO of the Macquarie Point Development Corporation, told a parliamentary inquiry that the transparent covering created contrast on clear days — and that the timber and steel beams, engineered as small as possible, would still cast shadows.

However, in November, a Gold Coast company identified a potential fix: Cricket Tasmania CEO Dom Baker proposed a matte treatment that, when applied to one side of the ETFE material, would disperse light rather than pass straight through —  killing the sharp contrasts on the pitch.

Until this week, it had never been physically tested. Now, the rig will run assessments on shadow intensity, ball visibility, and playing conditions. It will also capture data on how roof treatments affect turf growth beneath — a secondary concern for groundskeepers at an indoor venue.

It comes after both houses of the Tasmanian Parliament approved the $1.13 billion project in December — the Upper House voting 9–5 after two days of debate. The 23,000-seat venue will be the permanent home of the Tasmania Devils AFL team. Its fixed dome, framed in Tasmanian-sourced glulam, would be the largest timber roof on any stadium in the world.

What the roof actually looks like

Late last year, Wood Central reported that the current design documents detail a hybrid timber roof lined with Tasmanian-sourced glulam, paired with metal deck cladding, steel rod bracing, and translucent ETFE pillows. The clearspan structure carries an internal clearance of 49 metres — enough headroom for Test-level cricket as well as AFL, soccer, and rugby.

The Macquarie Point Summary Report specifies lightweight ETFE pillows, a 20-millimetre timber laminate, a secondary glulam system, and Aramax metal deck cladding, all supported by steel rod bracing. The timber form is designed to reduce perceived bulk from street level and preserve harbour sightlines — a tough ask for a structure sitting on the edge of Hobart’s CBD.

Automated Architecture, or AUAR, makes portable micro-factories that produce the full wooden framing of a house — walls, floors and roofs — in 24 hours. Co-founder Mollie Claypool told CNN the system produces timber panels more quickly, more cheaply, and more precisely than a conventional framing crew, freeing carpenters to focus on construction rather than component manufacturing.

It’s a claim the building and construction supply chain wants to stress-test — but the underlying model is sound.

Architects send building plans to AUAR’s AI-powered software, the Master Builder, which calculates how many panels are needed and exactly how much timber a developer needs to purchase.

The micro-factory — which fits inside a standard shipping container — is dispatched directly to the building site with an operator, who uses a robotic arm to measure, cut, and nail timber into panels, leaving precise openings for windows, doors, wiring, and plumbing. Contractors fit the panels by hand.

One micro-factory, Claypool says, can produce the framing for a typical house in about a day — a process she says would take a conventional timber-framing crew four weeks. On cost, AUAR claims its service runs 30% cheaper than a standard framing crew and up to 15% cheaper than ordering prefabricated panels from a large off-site factory and transporting them to the site.

The system can build parts for buildings up to seven storeys high.

AUAR can also respond to timber’s natural variations. It accounts for knots, bends, and warps — calculating the most efficient cutting pattern from available stock to reduce waste. “The precision of the finished panels produces a tighter building envelope,” Claypool adds, “lowering heat loss and improving the energy efficiency of the finished home.”

AUAR currently operates three micro-factories across the US and EU, with five more scheduled for delivery this year. So far, it has raised £7.7 million, with 600,000 square metres of panels in production — enough to build hundreds of homes. But Claypool’s ambition is to grow that to 1,000 micro-factories on sites by 2030, producing 200,000 homes every year.

Wood Central understands the company is in active discussions with several new US partners as part of what it describes as a growth phase, following its 2024 partnership with construction investment firm Rival Holdings. That makes sense, given 94 per cent of single-family homes built in 2024 were timber-framed, and Goldman Sachs has identified the country’s housing shortfall — estimated at between 1.5 and 5.5 million homes — as the root of its affordability crisis.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. As Wood Central reported in December, Europe’s most advanced robotic prefab plants are already showing what zero-labour panel production looks like at scale — floor and wall assemblies delivered flat-pack to site with, as Timber Development Association CEO Andrew Dunn put it after touring those facilities, “not a single Allen key in sight.”

The question is whether those models can be adapted to local conditions, supply chains and building standards — and how quickly.

That urgency is reflected in where research dollars are flowing. Australian Forest & Wood Innovations (AFWI) — a $200 million research and development fund backed by $100 million in federal funding by the Australian government — has already committed to projects targeting exactly this gap, including the Automated Design for Prefabrication in Timber Construction and The Precinct, a large-scale centre to process wood fibre into frames, trusses, wall panels and flooring at manufacturing scale.

Back in the UK, David Philp — chair of the Chartered Institute of Building’s digital and innovation advisory panel, and not involved with AUAR — told CNN the window for treating this technology as optional had closed.

“These innovations were an opportunity a few years ago, but now they’re a necessity. They’re not a nice-to-have anymore — they’re key to any construction business model.”

But the remaining barriers are not technical, he said. It’s cultural — particularly in England, where just 9% of homes built in 2019 were timber-framed, compared to 92% in Scotland. “The technology and standards are there — the real barrier is culture. We’ve got deeply ingrained traditional ways of working, so the challenge now is people and change, not tools and processes.”

AUAR is not alone. London-based Facit Technologies produces on-site micro-factories for wooden components, while US-based Cuby Technologies uses modular production units that combine to handle various construction elements. What distinguishes AUAR’s portable, container-delivered model is its flexibility — particularly relevant for regional and remote sites where logistics costs make centralised prefabrication plants impractical.

As for the broader picture, Claypool isn’t shy about what’s at stake. “Good homes are not just a construction problem,” she told CNN. “It’s a social problem. When homes are scarce, and we’re slow to build them, everything else suffers.”

• To learn why the UK’s largest contractors are looking to modern methods of construction – like prefabrication using mass timber parts – to meet the country’s target of 300,000 new dwellings each year, click here for Wood Central’s special feature from August 2025.

Slated to open later this year, the $1.45 billion, 39-storey ‘plyscraper’ will eventually contain more than 30,000 cubic metres of timber — shipped by European giants Stora Enso and Wiehag — across 21 storeys of the tower, with seven four-storey’ timber habitats’ sandwiched between steel-and-concrete mega floor plates above a seven-storey concrete podium.

And the glass panels going up are anything but conventional.

Spanish BIPV manufacturer Onyx Solar — working through Australian building products supplier Metz — is installing 1,794 crystalline silicon solar louvres across the tower’s active facade as part of a bespoke 247 kWp system. Speaking to PV Magazine Australia earlier this month, Onyx Solar revealed that each unit carries 28 mono-crystalline cells in a 4+4 mm glass configuration and produces 138 Wp at peak output. “The louvres also form a self-shading system that cuts direct solar heat gain internally,” Onya Solar said, turning the tower’s skin into a “vertical power source.”

Designed by BVN and New York-based SHoP, each ‘habitat’ comprises four floors of timbered space stacked inside a steel exoskeleton, eliminating the need for internal columns. “The timber floors are connected to the concrete floors via drag straps,” said Tim Allen, timber structural lead for TTW, who spoke at Timber Construct — Australia’s only timber construction conference — in late 2024. “Why build a 39-storey building partly out of timber?” Allen said. “Because it comes down to using the right timber for the right application.”

Whilst in October last year, Peter Morley, the Dexus project director overseeing the build, said the team had “broken the back on the most technical, structural phase of the project,” with the hybrid timber approach allowing the developers “to bring the building up quicker and get the façade on quicker than a more traditional build.”

“That’s because we’re jumping up five levels every time, and while we’re going up, we’re coming back and infilling with the timber within each of those five-storey zones,” Morley said. Atlassian Central is co-owned by Dexus and Atlassian, with Built and Japanese construction giant Obayashi appointed as builders, confirming the building remains “on schedule” for a 2026 opening, with the tech giant expected to take over five of the seven habitats in late 2028 following a full fit-out.

At street level, crews are also well advanced on a new pedestrian connection from Railway Colonnade Drive to the Devonshire Street Tunnel entrance — the heritage passage running beneath Central Station between Lee Street and Devonshire Street — which will, for the first time, allow pedestrians to access the tunnel directly from the colonnade as part of Central’s broader Third Square redevelopment.

It comes after Iran’s Revolutionary Guard issued a warning on February 28 to every vessel in the Strait of Hormuz: the waterway was closing, and any ship attempting to pass would be set “ablaze.” By the following morning, traffic was down 80%…with the strait closed to all vessels on Monday.

As it stands, 170 containerships carrying 450,000 TEU, 1.4% of the global container fleet, are stranded inside the strait with no clear path out, according to Linerlytica co-founder Hua Joo Tan.

All four of the world’s largest container shipping operators have suspended operations. Maersk has formally invoked Clause 20 of its Bill of Lading — a force majeure provision — implementing an Emergency Freight Increase across all cargo to and from the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, and Oman.

The current crisis is structurally different from anything the world has faced before. When Houthi attacks forced vessels off the Suez route in 2024, the Cape of Good Hope was painful but passable. However, a Hormuz closure removes the destination, leaving no available detour.

What is at stake in the Gulf

The MENA region has, in recent years, become one of the most important and consequential growth markets for timber exporters. Last year, Wood Central reported that Russia shipped 1.7 million cubic metres of lumber there in 2024, whilst the American Hardwood Export Council has successfully grown trade in the United Arab Emirates (up 27%), Saudi Arabia (up 8%) and Egypt (up 15%) on the back of major projects in the region.

However, that pipeline is now stalled at the port gate.

“The Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz and adjacent waters are the most dangerous place right now for commercial shipping,” according to Jakob Larsen, BIMCO’s Chief Safety and Security Officer, who spoke to Fox News on Sunday. “Ships in the Persian Gulf are under threat from Iranian attacks — they’re trying to depart to get away from the threat zone.”

It is a pattern that timber exporters have felt before.

During last June’s 12-day Israel-Iran war, Mike Cardin, of Tennessee-based Cardin Forest Products, was one of scores of traders who had rerouted Gulf-bound hardwood shipments. “If it keeps escalating, there won’t be any orders coming in for the next, who knows how long,” he told Fox Business at the time. Whilst his brother Jarrod was more blunt: “Right now, no one knows what’s going to happen. It’s shut down that export market pretty much. It’s a little painful — we’re stuck with warehouses full.”

That conflict passed within two weeks…but this one could drag on much longer.

Finland, Russia, and the wider exposure

The current disruption reaches beyond Gulf-facing exporters. “Approximately 20% of the forest industry’s exports go to Asia, and the majority of those shipments pass through the Suez Canal,” said Maarit Lindström, Director and Chief Economist at the Finnish Forest Industries Federation. If vessels are forced to reroute around southern Africa, journeys extend by thousands of kilometres — delays of several weeks are possible.

“If the situation continues, it will affect freight prices and competition for containers,” Lindström warned. Of Finland’s Asian exports, roughly half is pulp, with wood products accounting for 26%, cartonboard 15%, and paper 8% — all product lines now facing extended transit times and tightening container availability. Finland exports approximately €3 million worth of forest products to Qatar alone each year.

Until last week, freight markets were recovering after two years of major instability in the region. A Red Sea return in late 2026 had been one of the few tailwinds analysts were counting on — lower rates, shorter transit times, freed-up capacity. “The repercussions of the joint military operation will see the further weaponisation of trade and shatter hopes of a large-scale return of container shipping to the Red Sea in 2026,” said Peter Sand, chief analyst at Xeneta.

And there is a second cost that the mainstream has largely missed. QatarEnergy halted production following attacks on its facilities, sending gas prices up 50% in two days. With the Strait carrying 22% of global LNG, Asian based sawmills running on gas could face an energy cost spike on top of the freight hit.

That is according to the latest ABARES Agricultural Commodities Report, published yesterday, which revealed that the gross value of forestry (GVP) production is expected to reach $2.23 billion in 2026-27 — a 3 per cent nominal increase or a 1 per cent real increase. And over the medium term, the GVP is projected to drop back $2.1 billion, with no material growth expected until at least 2030-31.

By the numbers, total gross value production in forests has dropped by 36 per cent over the past eight years — from about $3.4 billion in 2017-18 — with softwood relatively steady at about $1.5 billion, hardwood plantations flatlining at $0.5 billion and native forest continuing what is now a 20-year decline.

According to Diana Hallam, CEO of the Australian Forest Products Association, whilst the topline figures point to the vital role of sustainable forestry in producing essential products, the report also identified serious challenges and headwinds for the sector.

“Some of these challenges and risks include high manufacturing and energy costs, greater use of structural steel in residential and mid-rise construction, as well as a growing amount of imported timber products of varying quality flooding the Australian marketplace, including from China,” she said.

Hallam said the new estimates also reaffirmed the importance of aligning the government’s policy with Australia’s Timber Fibre Strategy, which outlines opportunities for the industry to make a greater contribution to national goals in carbon, innovation, and housing construction.

Softwood up, hardwood down, native at historic lows

The value of softwood plantation production is forecast to increase slightly in 2026-27, driven by short-term movements in detached housing demand. But ABARES warns that a gradual shift toward higher-density dwellings is expected to temper timber demand over the medium term, whilst projected increases in softwood log availability will ease unit prices.

Hardwood plantation production, however, is heading the other way.

And that’s because ongoing shifts in global paper markets are placing downward pressure on woodchip demand, whilst Vietnam’s growing share of global trade — combined with projected exchange rate changes — is continuing to erode Australia’s competitiveness overseas. ABARES expects Australian hardwood woodchip exports to settle at similar volumes but lower unit prices, with Australia holding a smaller, more specialised role in the market.

And then there is native forestry, where production has now fallen to historically low levels following 20 years of contraction driven by the transfer of multiple-use public native forests to nature conservation reserves and increased harvest restrictions.

A $570 million downward revision

ABARES has slashed its forestry forecast by more than $570 million — a 21 per cent revision from its December report — with exports the major driver of the writedown, down more than $619 million amid weaker production and prices.

It comes days after this masthead reported on a new white paper from the Rozetta Institute arguing that Australia needs a national roadmap to boost forest productivity and encourage new capital into the market.

On Friday, Wood Central spoke to the white paper’s lead author, Steve Walker, Principal of Terrafolia Advisory, and co-author Dr Lyndall Bull, who revealed that Australian plantations produce just 15 to 18 cubic metres per hectare per year against international benchmarks of 30 to 50.

And on Monday, Walker went further, telling Wood Central the sector’s decades-long focus on cost discipline had come at the expense of genuine value creation. “Lifting productivity on the land already planted is the fastest and most scalable opportunity,” Walker said. “International benchmarks in Brazil, India, Vietnam and China demonstrate that 30 to 50 cubic metres per hectare per year is achievable using proven technologies already available.”

“If we can do this, we can ultimately strengthen our capacity to produce more competitive engineered wood products like LVL and other EWPs,” he said, adding that the downstream benefits could add tens of millions of dollars to regional communities.

• For more information, including the ABARES full March 2026 Agricultural Commodities Report, visit the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences.

“Keruing timber is low maintenance, hardwearing and ideal for outdoor furniture use,” according to WoodSolutions – Australia’s go-to resource for technical information, with the strong and durable wood used in various applications.

“Common uses include internal flooring, protected framing and boards, internal joinery and mouldings, lining, panelling and framework. (Whilst) preservative-treated material is (also) used for poles, piles, sleepers and cross-arms. It is often used as a cheaper alternative to oak for heavy construction, decking, vehicle building and sleepers, and in plywood.”

Keruing is a hardwood native to South East Asia and used in a wide variety of internal and external applications – according to WoodSolutions.

Used by the US Military in floorboards, tanks, and vehicles, the Malaysian supply chain is concerned that the United States (and the European Union) are behind a renewed push to add the timbers to the CITES Appendix II list.

It comes as Wood Central last year reported that the US Hardwood Federation has lobbied the Trump administration to replace Keruing (and Apitong) with American Red oak, arguing that new prototypes last five times longer than tropical timbers.

“As part of this shift, the National Defense Authorization Act has now classified Apitong as endangered and calls for a transition to domestically sourced Red Oak for trailer beds and vehicle floorboards. Congress (has already) emphasised that Apitong, sourced from tropical rainforests, is unsustainable. A bipartisan group of senators has urged the Department of Defence to accelerate the switch, citing Red Oak’s environmental benefits,” according to a US Hardwood Federation letter to the US Fish and Wildlife Service last year.

According to the EU, more than 5.3 million tonnes of Meranti timber products –sold as mouldings by Australian merchants – have been sold in the world over the decade to 2023 – with overharvesting to meet high demand the primary reason that 65% of species are threatened, and 86% have seen declining numbers: “This raises serious questions about the future availability of these species and the need for stronger trade controls,” according to a spokesperson who spoke of the push to add the species to the CITES listing last year.

Last year, Wood Central today spoke to an expert connected to the supply chain who said the push to add Keruing (and Apitong) to the CITES list could have major implications for the Australian supply of much-needed construction materials – given the push by the Victorian, WA and (now) NSW state governments to lock up supply of hardwood timbers:

“At a time when the United States is freeing up production of its forests, Australia is locking ourselves out of our resource. This leaves our supply of plywood, mouldings, sleepers and other timber products vulnerable and almost entirely reliant on tropical timber from Asia.”

A timber expert, who spoke to Wood Central about the impact of the CITES decision on Australia’s supply of timbers used in plywood, mouldings and sleepers.

• To read more about the impact of the CITES ruling on the global supply of tropical timbers, click here for Wood Central’s feature.

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.

That is according to Steve Walker, Principal of Terrafolia Advisory and lead author of the Rozetta Institute’s new white paper, A National Pathway for High-Productivity Forestry and Renewable Carbon Supply, who told Wood Central that the value chain had built a culture of cost discipline that, whilst producing stable and resilient assets, had come at the expense of genuine value creation.

“For most of the past century, foresters have been trained exceptionally well to manage cost,” Walker said. “We are taught to protect the estate, control establishment and harvesting costs, deliver predictable yield, minimise risk, avoid catastrophic loss and maintain certification and compliance.”

Whilst this discipline has produced stable and resilient assets, stability is not the same as optimisation: “And in a capital-constrained world, that distinction matters.”

That’s why Dr Paul Dalby, CEO of the Rozetta Institute, is backing the development of a new roadmap to address the barriers to productivity across the country’s forest-based value chain.

On Friday, Wood Central spoke to Walker and co-author Dr Lyndall Bull, who revealed that Australia could dramatically improve the productivity of its forest assets by using modern genetics, clonal propagation and precision silviculture, all without planting new estates. Today, Walker went further, arguing the productivity gap is a symptom of a deeper structural problem rooted in how the industry thinks about returns.

Managing cost vs creating value

Walker said cost management focuses on reducing expenditure per hectare, improving harvesting efficiency, and avoiding volatility. Value optimisation asks different questions — how to lift yield per hectare, improve log mix and recovery, and monetise carbon and residue streams.

“One mindset protects margin,” Walker said. “The other expands it.”

Walker said Australia’s plantation estate had shed more than 300,000 hectares over the past decade, whilst demand for structural timber, engineered wood, renewable carbon and industrial biomass continued to grow, a divergence he said was too often framed as a land-use or policy issue.

“It is more accurately a portfolio performance issue,” he said. “If forestry consistently delivered compelling, risk-adjusted returns relative to other asset classes, capital would scale it.”

“Capital flows toward productivity. It does not flow toward hectares alone.”

Dr Bull, Director and Principal Consultant at Lynea Advisory, who has worked on forest product market development across Asia-Pacific and global supply chain policy, agreed, telling Wood Central the investment case for productivity-led forestry was well understood internationally, but that Australia had lacked a clear framework for acting on it until now.

Where forestry fits right now

Walker said the industry had evolved as a biological science, a land stewardship profession and a long-cycle asset management model — but not as a vertically integrated industrial platform, an energy transition asset or a capital markets optimisation product.

“The industry often debates expansion before optimisation,” he said. “But expansion without productivity gains simply scales mediocre returns.”

“Capital discipline requires a different sequence — optimise the existing estate, lift biological productivity materially, integrate downstream processing and carbon strategy, secure offtake, and only then expand.”

Walker said forestry was increasingly part of energy transition portfolios, industrial decarbonisation strategies, and sovereign manufacturing, and that this demanded integrated thinking across biology, logistics, processing, and capital.

“It requires foresters who understand finance and financiers who understand forestry,” he said. “The next phase of the industry will be defined not by cost containment, but by value creation. And value creation begins with productivity.”

Please note: Wood Central will have further coverage of the Rozetta Institute white paper in the coming weeks.