The Catchment Management Authorities (CMAs) were set up on July 1st 1997 to oversee the management of Victoria’s river catchments. It’s been described as regionalising environment problems to let country people deal with them. It has since broadened its scope from the narrow ‘bed and banks’ focus to incorporate whole of catchment – from the …
In a process to tackle the impending water crisis and secure Victoria’s water for the future, the Bracks Government has adopted every suggestion from their own experts except one – that logging be phased out of water catchments! A discussion paper was released for public comment. It was based on another document called the Water …
The Victorian Association of Forest Industries (VAFI) has suddenly become concerned for water catchments. It tells us that fast growing eucalypts that come back after a fire, suck up precious water and need to be cut down (all that loverly ash forest in particular). They quote science and figures that we’ve been using for years. …
An EEG investigation into the auditing of a tiny percent of logging coupes for adherence to environmental logging regulations has shown there to be huge abuse of the system by DSE foresters and overseers (or gross incompetence). This is not shown in the publicly available audit findings. DSE has released the results of another audit …
The long battle by locals to obtain a 28% release of water from the Jindabyne dam for the Snowy River could be partly or wholly negated by clearfelling its major sub-catchments, scientists have warned. Two reports from the early 90s indicated that logging would cause reduced water yields. They were dully ignored by government, but …
For several years, NRE has been making available to the public a summary of its audit of the Code of Forest Practices (environmental guidelines to adhere to while ripping down ancient forests). NRE must hope that people will be left with the feeling that our forests are in the best possible hands – and that …
