Plantations and sustainability science: The environmental and political settings

In this paper we aim to convey the importance of understanding the prospects for plantations within the physical, cultural and political context of contemporary Australia. Prospects for Australian plantations will depend on how well forestry as anindustry and a profession handles a series of critical relationships including: relationships between vegetation management at alandscape scale, catchment hydrology, streamflows and water quality relationships between forest and plantation design and management and the delivery of environmental services (habitat, carbon, runoff, recharge) at a landscape scale relationships between plantation design and management, industry structures and regional development (planning, demography, rating, roads, schools and services, etc.) and relationships between sources and modes of investment in plantations, and community engagement in and acceptance of large-scale plantation developments. The emerging context for plantations will require greater engagement between the forestry profession and forest industries and other sectors of society than even the environmental debates of the last three decades have demanded. Drawing on R and D funded by Land and Water Australia, RIRDC and other investors through the Joint Venture Agroforestry Program (JVAP) and other initiatives over the past decade, we argue that the prospects for plantations will be abundantly improved if plantation-related policies support landscape restoration through multifunctional forestry. We seek to improve Australia’s capacity to develop plantations that produce more than wood fibre — notably, landscape sustainability.But much more needs to be done.