THE forestry situation in Fiji has worsened over the past decade, according to academics Annette Lees and Suliana Siwatibau.
Their findings are in a report on the review and analysis of Fiji's conservation sector wrapped up at the start of the year.
It is conservatively estimated that 70,000 hectares of forest in Fiji has been lost in the past 15 years and forest loss continues.
"This is very serious for a small nation such as Fiji which depends on healthy forest cover to protect its water catchments as well as other economic benefits that forests return," said Ms Lees.
The Austral Foundation-based academics report highlighted that forest degradation in Fiji was through agricultural clearance, plantation establishment and destructive and unsustainable logging in large areas of the remaining tropical rainforests of Fiji.
"The forests contain the remaining stocks of native terrestrial biodiversity in a country that was once totally covered in tropical forests.
"Destructive logging has implications for the sustainable development of Fiji. It is depriving Fijian resource owners of long-term forestry assets and income with the degradation of productive forests and soil," said Ms Lees. Forest clearing for agriculture was said to have resulted in major loss of forests in smaller islands and the drier and lowland rainforests of the higher islands.
A report on sustainable forest management in Fiji by International Tropical Organisation four years ago concluded that much of the damage was done by the timber harvesting in indigenous forests in the mahogany plantations and to a lesser degree in the pine plantations.
Ms Lees said Fiji's forestry situation was of concern for species and habitat conservation causing ecosystem degradation, erosion, sedimentation and predator and weed invasion.
The report also pointed out that the total remaining forest area in Fiji is being diminished by fore, conservation to agriculture and by land degradation from logging.
