New research published in the leading international journal Nature Communications has added to the growing evidence that native forest logging in Australia is exacerbating wildfire risks.

The work, led by scientists at the University of Cambridge, examined the flammability of logged and regenerated native forests and plantations globally (Bousfield et al. 2025). While in most countries, tree plantations were more flammable than logged and regenerated native forests, Australia strongly bucks that trend. In fact, in Australia, logged and regenerated native forests are four times more likely to burn than plantations.

These findings support earlier research that logged and regenerated forests consistently burn at higher severity than intact native forests in multiple parts of eastern Australia – including central Victoria (Taylor et al. 2014; Lindenmayer et al. 2022a) and across the vast footprint of the 2019-2020 Black Summer fires from north-eastern Victoria to northern New South Wales (Lindenmayer et al. 2022c). Similar findings for logging-induced increased forest flammability are now being reported by other researchers working independently of our laboratory including those in Tasmania (Furlaud et al. 2021) and New South Wales (Wilson et al. 2022).

In short, multiple lines of evidence are converging: native forest logging increases flammability in multiple Australian landscapes. Critically, these elevated fire risks persist for between 40 years (Taylor et al. 2014) and up to 70 years after logging and regeneration........

© Pearls and Irritations