https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-02-07/nsw-forestry-corporation-logging-data-error-revised/104908728

In short:

The Forestry Corporation of NSW says it misreported the volume of timber harvested from native forests due to a data error.

The amendments were made after the North East Forest Alliance found discrepancies.

What’s next?

Greens MP Sue Higginson has asked the NSW Auditor General to investigate the corporation for maladministration.

The embattled Forestry Corporation of NSW (FCNSW) is under fire for overstating logging data by almost 30 per cent over the past three years.

Public data shows amendments to sustainability reports that drastically reduced the reported yield from native forest logging since 2021. 

The data shows FCNSW, which recorded a loss of $29 million in the 2022-23 financial year, retrospectively reduced yields from public native forests in NSW by 28 per cent.

The misreporting of yields was discovered by members of the North East Forest Alliance (NEFA) and South East Forest Rescue in 2024. 

Corporation in ‘dire’ trouble

NEFA spokesman Dailan Pugh said he “could not fathom or comprehend how they got it so wrong”.

“Comparisons with other data didn’t match up,” he said.

“For each logging operation, they’ve dramatically changed the volumes of products they’ve claimed to [have] obtained in the past.

“It shows the situation is far more dire than what’s been admitted in the past. It shows they’re in far bigger trouble than what they’ve been saying.”

Late last year FCNSW released its annual report, which revealed a $29 million loss in its native logging division in the 2022-2023 financial year.

In a statement to the ABC, the Forestry Corporation said it recently reviewed its biomaterial report and found the volume of some product categories in the document was wrong.

It blamed the mistake on a “data extraction error from the sales database”.

It said the error was confined to the biomaterials report and there was “no change to the revenue reported in financial statements in annual reports, which have been externally audited”.

Greens question consequences of wrong data

Greens MP and spokesperson for the environment, Sue Higginson, said the inconsistencies called into question justifications for continued native forest logging.

“It’s now data that the Forestry Corporation has corrected (and they have) provided no plausible explanation or no real understanding for the errors and for the consequences and the flow-on effects of having such wrong data,” she said.

“This is a really, really concerning situation that we’re in.”

Ms Higginson has asked the NSW Auditor General to investigate the Forestry Corporation for maladministration.

“This is data about timber yields, it’s about the sustainability requirements that are required under law … and other agencies rely on that data,” she said.

Mr Pugh has backed the call for an independent review.

“We need checks on whether these new figures are correct as well as correcting the rest of their past data,” he said.

“It is also now apparent that assessments of the economic and employment impacts of the proposed Great Koala National Park have been based on grossly inflated claims.”

In December 2024, the NSW Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal (IPART) deemed the New South Wales’s native logging industry was not “economically viable”.

IPART also recommended the state government should consider shutting it down after 2028 if its prospects did not improve.

The NSW government redirected the ABC’s questions to Forestry Corporation.