The 2019-20 fires were the worst fires NSW has experienced in living memory, and the public assets managed by Forestry Corporation on behalf of the NSW Government have sustained significant damage. Forestry Corporation is making significant ongoing investments from its own revenue and borrowings to restore public assets, replant the burnt plantation estate and repair the infrastructure impacted by fire, supported by some Government investment.

Forestry Corporation is a State Owned Corporation that has been appointed to manage tourism and recreation, roads, pests and weeds, conservation and fire across approximately two million hectares of public land on behalf of the NSW Government, the cost of which is largely offset by revenue from timber production.

Forestry Corporation does receive an annual Community Services Obligation grant, which is a fee-for-service that covers some of the cost of providing community facilities such as free visitor areas, community roads, management of one million hectares that are permanently set aside for conservation and other services that a private commercial forest manager would not deliver. In recent years, this grant has been more than offset by the annual dividend paid back to the NSW Government.

The NSW Government  has provided Forestry Corporation with a $46 million equity injection as part of the COVID-19 stimulus package designed to directly stimulate economies in regional NSW. This has contributed to the repair of roads and bridges, which are used for firefighting and as alternative access routes between regional towns, as well as the expansion of production nurseries and early replanting works to regrow the State’s pine plantation assets. Other land managers including the National Parks and Wildlife Service have also received government funding to support the repair and restoration of public assets.

Firefighting expenditure is reimbursed to statutory firefighting agencies when they are deployed to section 44 fires, because in these natural disasters all firefighting staff are under the direction of the NSW Rural Fire Services Commissioner and are directly engaged in frontline property protection, incident management and other community firefighting tasks.

Forestry Corporation's audited financial statements are published in its Annual Report. The Annual Report includes a breakdown of the financial performance of each operating division. The Softwood Plantations Division, which manages around 230,000 hectares of exotic pine plantations, has written down its biological assets by $346 million due to the impact on pine trees, which generally do not withstand fire and must be salvaged within around 12 months before the timber deteriorates. Reported revenue decline and replanting costs are associated with the Softwood Plantations Division.

The Hardwood Forests Division manages native forests and hardwood timber plantations. Around one per cent of the native forest estate is harvested for renewable timber each year and the entire estate is managed for multiple uses including community access, recreation, tourism, conservation, primary production including apiary and a range of other uses. Many native trees are well adapted to fire and Forestry Corporation has not carried out salvage operations in native forests.

Find out more about fire management, the impact of the 2019-20 fires and Forestry Corporation's fire recovery.

Media contact: 0408 779 903