Author: Peter Lock
The sustainable management of natural resources is important to policy makers around the world; Australia’s forest resources are no different. The Forest Resource Use Model (FoRUM) was developed to inform this debate by evaluating the economic impacts of changes in the Australian forestry sector.
FoRUM has been used extensively over the past three decades to inform both state and national forestry policy development. Initially FoRUM was used to estimate the economic impacts of closing native forests to harvesting to inform the establishment of the 10 Commonwealth and State Regional Forest Agreements (Dann et al. 1997).
More recently Burns et al. (2015) used FoRUM to model the potential long-term outlook for Australia’s forest and wood product sectors. Since 2015, FoRUM has been used in both published reports and to inform government policy. Examples include:
- estimating potential plantation investment (Whittle, Lock and Hug 2019),
- evaluating options for utilising forest and sawmill residues (Lock and Whittle 2018), and
- estimating the importance of sawmill size on plantation establishment (Whittle and Downham 2019).
FoRUM makes decisions such as which plantations to establish or which processors to upgrade, across space and time, subject to physical and economic constraints, to maximise national forest industry profits.
This paper presents an overview of current state of FoRUM, the datasets, modelled equations, and the general structure of the model. Work will continue to refine and update the data sources and modelling approach in line with future research projects.