The planting of around 70 million trees this winter has started with the official launch of National Forestry Planting Day to mark the start of the planting season for Australia’s forestry plantations. Source: Timberbiz
The Australian Forest Products Association (AFPA) launched the inaugural day to highlight the mammoth and unheralded task that the plantation industry undertakes every year of planting enough seedlings every winter to cover an area equivalent to 136,000 football fields, or more than two seedlings for every Australian.
Co-convenors of the Parliamentary Friends of Forestry and Forest Products – Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Forestry Joel Fitzgibbon MP and Member for Barker Tony Pasin MP – marked the launch with pine seedlings in front of Parliament House.
AFPA Chairman Greg McCormack said the annual event will be celebrated on 1 June every year to mark the start of the seedling planting season across Australia’s plantation estates.
“Australia’s plantations provide more than 80% of the wood fibre and timber for our national forest product industries, which provides 120,000 direct jobs along the whole supply chain – many of them in regional Australia,” Mr McCormack said.
“Every year, our plantation estates grow enough timber to build the equivalent of 60,000 new houses, and that’s only possible because of the massive re-planting exercise they undertake every winter.”
Australia’s forest industries are recognised internationally as truly sustainable and managed to world-class standards. The forest products industry is based on a renewable biological resource that contributes to long-term carbon emissions abatement.
